Welcome to the new year 2010. We started our new year with the visit of Pastor Alexander Gross, a pastor from the Odesa region who is also responsible for youth ministry in the whole German Lutheran denomination (DELKU) in Ukraine. Pastor Gross came to Lviv with his family — his wife and two daughters. We spent time discussing ministry, planning year 2010 and also in fellowship. On January 6th we celebrated Ukrainian Christmas together. 
In this picture you see us tasting kutia three times (Ukrainian tradition)
Kutia is a typical Ukrainian Christmas food. Kutia is often the first dish in the traditional twelve-dish Christmas Eve supper (we did not make twelve dishes with the Gross’s).
It is rarely served at other times of the year but everybody is making it for Christmas. Kutia is sweet -- traditionally made of wheat berries, honey, various nuts, raisins, milk or cream, etc.
Anna-Maria is wishing you a Merry Christmas, which in Ukrainian literally says “With the Birth of Christ”
One of our greatest joys this year is seeing our students growing in the Lord. It’s hard to describe in words. We wish you too could experience it with us. But one of the areas where we see a huge change is prayer. When we first started working with this group (September 2008) it was hard to even have a student pray. When I would give the opportunity for anyone to pray, everybody was usually just quiet and then in the end I prayed. Or when I asked someone to pray, they all usually said something like, “Thank you God for bringing us here, let us learn something, bring more people next time.” How different it was this year when we spoke about the three magi and their gifts and about how we should be living our lives for God. After that we stood in a circle for our prayer time and all students except for one prayed out loud. And how different their prayers were compared to how they used to be about a year and a half ago!!! The students prayed that God would use them to tell others about Him, one of the boys prayed that he would not be doing what he wants but what God wants, one of the little girls thanked God for making her His child... Yes, we are working with teenagers and their spiritual lives and behavior have their ups and downs (as ours do too) but listening to them pray like this brings tears of joy! We love these students and our prayer for them is the same as we pray for our little Hannah -- above everything else we would like to see them become adults who love God with all their hearts, who serve Him in any way possible, who make life choices that honor Him, who find spouses and raise children in a way that brings glory to their Savior... Oh, what a joy it would be to watch that happen!
One of our students who seems to be the most responsive is Kostya (picture below). You remember Kostya, right? He is the boy who was trying to get into the art college in the summer and many of you were praying for him. Many of you wrote your prayers and you were praying 
not that he would make it into that college, but that God’s will would be done in his life and that Kostya would grow in getting to know God more. We believe your prayers are being answered. It is again hard to describe in words what we see in Kostya but we were for example really excited about how he lead devotions for our youth group recently. Or after my challenging the students to be bolder about their faith, he listed the Bible among his favorite books on his Facebook. Those might seem like little things, but we rejoice over each of them as we know it’s God working in the lives of these students!
Recently there have also been some new opportunities for ministry. We would very much appreciate your prayers for these areas:
1) Pastor Bendus asked me to be in charge of confirmation preparation this year. In the past I was in charge of the Sunday service for youth and children and the teaching for the Youth Bible Study during the week while Pastor Bendus still taught the confirmation class. Now he wants me to also do the confirmation preparation with those who should be confirmed soon. I will also be working with some of the students who will soon be 18 years old and will be preparing to become voting members of the congregation (here you do not become a voting church member through confirmation but only after you are 18 and you apply for membership).
2) We are preparing for a Day camp here in Lviv in July (July 19-23). There will be an AFLC Student missions team coming to help with the camp. We are praying that it would be a good outreach opportunity as well as a time for our church youth and children to grow. Since I do not have any teammates or volunteers to help with all the preparations, I talked to the youth a while ago and told them that we can either do the camp, in which case I will need THEIR help, or we can cancel the camp. They decided to have the camp but so far it feels like I am spending more time reminding them of what they should be doing than I would spend if I did those things myself. People not being very dependable has always been a problem in our youth group (and church) but I wanted to give our students a chance to take ownership of this camp (plus I need their help). So please pray that God would watch over the preparations. You can also pray for the US students that God would call those He wants in Ukraine this summer.
3) As we told you in our December update, we did a collection for two blind orphans who go to a Boarding School for the Blind here in Lviv. The thought behind this project was mainly to help our youth learn not only to receive but also to give. But when we visited the school last week it now looks like the door is wide open to a lot more ministry than just the Christmas gifts. The teachers were saying that if we have for example a program, we are welcome to come share it with the students, etc. Right now it seems impossible for me to take up another ministry when I am already in need of a helper. But at the same time it’s hard for me to see all these students who could hear the Gospel and not doing anything about it. So please pray that God would guide us in this.
In the picture you see some of our youth group students trying to read a history textbook written in Braille (Braille is a series of raised dots that can be read with the fingers by people who are blind or whose eyesight is not sufficient for reading printed material).
As we have shared above, God has recently blessed us with a lot of joy in our ministry. But there has also been some hard and sad things going on. A boy from our church, who has always been a little bit of a troublemaker, has recently got a lot worse. Ever since the fall, he has been talking about bad things, including Satanism, saying that he was reading the Satanic bible, he posted the Book of Lucifer on his Facebook, etc. Things got pretty bad and I (Tomasz) had to tell him and his mother -- who studies at a theological seminary in Russia :( -- that these are serious and dangerous things that I cannot take lightly. I told them that I still want to meet with this boy one-on-one but I do not want him coming to our youth group meetings until things change. So far there has not really been a change and he does not even want to meet with me. Please pray for this boy that God would take hold of him. And for his mom and for us... to have wisdom in a bad situation like this.
Another prayer request... You know that when we told you that our furlough was postponed we were in a way excited because it looked like we would now have some undisturbed time in Lviv with very little traveling. But our joy did not last very long. Last week we learned that Tomasz is expected to go to Odesa (12 hours on a train to get there and 12 hours to get back) almost every month this year. The thing is that Odesa is the headquarters of the German Lutheran Church in Ukraine and even though Tomasz does not have his own church, the German Lutheran church leadership requires him to go to all the Pastors’ meetings (yes, DELKU pastors from all over Ukraine travel to Odesa for their meetings). The trips to those Pastors’ meetings come on top of our traveling to some DELKU youth ministry conferences that we were already planning to go to and on top of the four border crossings, trips to Poland, that we, as foreigners, are required to make (every three months). So looking at the calendar, we are sad to see that we (or at least Tomasz) will be gone from Lviv so much this year. Right now it looks like there is nothing we can do about this but we would still very much appreciate your prayers for this area of our lives and ministry. All together it’s something like 13-15 trips away from Lviv not counting our furlough and our vacation time.
And one last prayer request... The Ukrainian Presidential Elections. The first round of the Ukrainian election, which was held on the 17th of January, was inconclusive making a runoff, scheduled for February 7th, necessary. Please pray that whoever is the winner would guide Ukraine in the right direction. If you’d like to read more, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_presidential_election,_2010
Thank you SO MUCH for standing behind us in prayer!
Tomasz, Miriam and Hannah Chmiel
