Our first Valentine’s Day together was in 1999. We made each other cds. It was all the rage, since tapes were out. We even decorated the cases and cds themselves. Great memories.

Fast forward to today. I’m playing the role of stay-at-home mom while Ben is in Czech at an “Advance” Josiah Venture conference for church planters. Though we are not church planters per se, there are two pastors (Ruslan, Edik) in our UA ministry who have reproduced new churches over the past few years. We are eager to get them this training; Syava, Ben, and Tomasz went along for more training in this arena, as well as for fellowship. We pray that these men will form bonds in Christ, in life, and in ministry, and that God will use us all to change Ukraine.

We actually celebrated Valentines Day on the 15th, since our 2 sitters are either recently married or in a serious relationship. (We went for dinner, coffee, and to the movies – pickings were slim, so we saw Jack and Jill in Ukrainian, which helped build our passing gas vocab…)

We forgot to take a pic of ourselves; instead there is one of the kids w/ my roses. The other pictures in this post are from our 9th wedding anniversary on 1/4/12. We spent the day downtown Chicago, had a great dinner where the weirdest thing happened (a drunk dad and his 30-something yr. old daughter offered to pay for our meal b/c they could tell we were newlyweds…needless to say, they left the restaurant and we still had to pay our bill), and went up to the top of the John Hancock bldg. Awesome views, by the way. Worth it!

Congratulations to Lena and Andriy, who officially got engaged on Valentine’s Day! It was a shock for some, simply because Christian Ukrainian youth seem to keep relationships to themselves and do things a bit different here, but once the official announcement is made in front of the church, which was today, it’s a big deal!

Pray for us as we lead them through 14 lessons of “Before You Say I Do” premarital counseling. Yulia and I worked on the translation last spring, and it is officially complete! So exciting to be used in this way!

Pray for our youth group! We really need some jr. high and high school kids! Pray for our involvement in School 51, where Ben used to teach English and from where Syava graduated. So many of our existing youth are in their 20s and getting ready to get married in the somewhat near future! It will be interesting to see how many “Before You Say I Do” sessions we’ll do in 2012! Of course, we don’t want to awaken love before it is necessary, but you never know! Engagements in Ukraine are typically very short and to the point…

We had the privilege of having a long lunch visit with Edik and Lena Kurat, who are Ukrainian missionaries in Ternopil. This is their leadership team. We talked about 3 different visits from Americans from our Blanchard Alliance Church in IL upcoming in 2012, about winter retreat and camps, about outreach in a particular school and neighborhood near them, and about support for more missionaries and for their various projects.

It’s a pleasure to be in relationship w/ such dedicated servants of God. Join us in continued prayer for:

• their English club, outreach parties, dorm outreach, youth group, and Sunday service.
• Edik’s time next week with Ben, Syava, Tomas, and Ruslan at the JV Advance conference for people looking to birth new, healthy churches in Eastern Europe
• for financial needs. Many of the kids they work with are poor and don’t have the money for camps and conferences. Also, they have 3 other workers who need minimal financial support for rent, food, and utilities in order to continue to serve the Lord in a full-time capacity.

It is so exciting to see God raise up nationals to reach their own people. Edik and Lena ARE DOING missional church, and God is blessing it.

On the 3rd, Marissa turned a year-and-a-half; on the 9th, Dylan hit the 3-month mark. This is what they’ve been up to. I’ll start with Marissa.

She is at that age where she has a tiny attention span and goes from toy to toy to toy. Her role playing is with her baby dolls and all the neat mini-stroller, mini-crib, mini-bouncy-seat accessories she got for Christmas. She is into coloring (and occasionally bites the crayons) but gets mad that she isn’t allowed to do it anywhere but in her highchair…(at Thursday morning prayer, she drew in Ben’s Bible.)

She loves baths, which works out for us b/c of all the reading for seminary – I sit on the toilet seat and read, while Marissa plays with stacking bowls and wash cloths, imitating dish washing. We’re working on colors, but everything has been turned upside-down since Ukrainian language came back into play. She definitely regressed in her 2nd language while we were in the States during crucial development months, but it is far from hopeless. We are doing better with Marissa’s picky eating. She’s currently very into pepperoni and raisins (they kept her quiet ALL church service) and is strongly resisting mashed potatoes. She is very funny, and we are having a blast with her.

“Dylan Buddy” (I sing that stupid 80s t.v. jingle from the “My Buddy” doll all the time) is all smiles and laughs. He loves the dangling mobiles and toys in his bouncy. He only cries when he is 5 min. from falling asleep. He has been sleeping through the night for almost 2 months, but he goes to bed close to midnight every night, which can be tough on intense homework nights for us. (We had over 250 pages of reading this week, and it was all good stuff!) He was introduced to New Life Church this Sunday as the newest member. You can pray for his clogged tear ducts to clear up. They’re pretty bad, although there has never been any trace of an infection.

When Dylan woke up last Sunday morning with the same cough that Marissa and Ben had for a week, we knew that we had to find a pediatrician. Ben remembered that our prenatal clinic was going to start offering pediatric services some time soon, so it seemed like an appropriate time to call.

We love this clinic because they gave me (Kristy) awesome care throughout the pregnancies. It’s private, which means it is not part of the broken medical system bureaucracy here that has been giving Ben a run for his money (more on that later), and the docs are trained in other parts of Europe. Plus it is on the same street as New Life Church, so it’s ideal.

So the four of us went by taxi to see the pediatrician at this private clinic, Intersono. The full exams of both kids were great, the price was a steal compared to the US, and Marissa was on her way to a bronchitis, but Dylan is ok. We got some meds (no need for antibiotics) and some old-school remedies like iodine on the back and chamomile tea on the eye lids…hey, when in Rome…at least listen and be respectful… (even if we almost died when a nurse at a different clinic told Ben that there was no such thing as an immunization against Hepatitis A…)

READY FOR SOME RED TAPE??

Ben’s journey has been a bit wilder. It all started when Ben got invited to go to India with Josiah Venture leadership for an international gathering of youth leaders. This entails studying the details of the ministry of Christ, and seeing ministry in action on site. The site this year is Calcutta. So cool. He’ll go in March. But he needs to be vaccinated against Hepatitis A and take malaria prevention meds while there. That began a big search for the Hep A vaccination and the tablets…

Ben and Yulia started out at the specific hospital in our city of a million that does vaccinations. That doc can inject the vaccine, but he can’t dispense it. So they went to the one apteka (pharmacy) in L’viv that can order Hep A. Well, although there is no FDA here, there are still some rules. (I thought you could get anything at a pharmacy outside of the US.) Ben needs an RX to purchase the shot. So they went to the “church dr.”, but it turns out that he is does not have the government stamp needed to write prescriptions. So they went to our neighborhood dr. (Every region has its own public clinic where you are assigned.) He saw a dr., who said that he wouldn’t write an RX b/c he doesn’t know Ben. “Where is your medical card?” (A trickle down from Soviet times and socialized medicine. An equivalent of our medical records. Kind of.) Ben said, “I don’t have one. I am an American. I just need this shot to go to India.” Ok, so he sent Ben to Medis (It’s like Quest Diagnostics, and we’ve been there for our interns who had serious conditions that required constant blood tests) where he got a full blood work up. Meanwhile, when we took the kids to Intersono clinic, he asked the pediatrician if she could help to get Ben into a dr. who would write the RX. After waiting over an hour, Ben got an appt. at the same hospital he started in, but with who we think was a pediatrician there(!) Then he had to go back to the pharmacy to buy the vial, and he was required to buy more and leave them at the pharmacy b/c he got a Hep-A/B-in-one series. Then he returned back to the very same doctor who saw him at the beginning. Since he had the RX, that doctor could inject it. The End. I’m tired just writing about it. But I’m thankful. It is one more Ukrainian “system” that we are familiar with. You never know when these contacts might come in handy. It’s ALL about who you know.

When you return home after four months away, there is catching up to do in every sense.

• Catching up on sleep. We’ve been staying up until 2-3am as part of jet-lag.
• Catching up on paying bills. Our gas bill for this -27 C weather is going to kill us!
• Catching up on grocery shopping. Our car is still dead for the 2nd week in a row, so that requires taxi-ing home from the grocery store, which I’m just not that into. So we’re living on tea, cereal, rice dishes, lunch meat, scrambled eggs, and french toast until we can get to the store…we’ve even resorted to cardboard brown toilet paper because none of the mini-marts around here have the cotton, white 2-ply.
• Catching up on cleaning. The dust was a centimeter thick in places where our house sitter, Syava, didn’t know to clean! And our shower stall door busted before we left, so finding a specialist to fix that is next to impossible.

Most importantly, though, is catching up on relationships. For example, a typical discipleship meeting, one-on-one with a student or leader, lasts about 1.5-2 hours (for us girls, sometimes longer), but after being gone for a 3rd of the year (ouch, that sounds so long), I need days to get all my questions answered and to catch up on their lives, which is taking many, many hours and lots and lots of coffee.

I didn’t realize how much I’d miss my relationships here. The boys at the prison are doing fine, and their caregiver told me that they’ve been asking about my return for months(!). And my girls… L’viv girls are a constant in my life. The scary thing was how quickly we re-enter into life in the US, and how hard it was to faithfully keep up with each of them.

In order to remind six of them how much I would miss them (the last time we were all together was 9/1 for my b-day in the pics), I wrote 8 personal letters to them, all in separate envelopes with dates on each, indicating when they could open a particular letter and reflect on what was enclosed. They could open one every two weeks. The themes were chosen with spiritual growth in mind.

1. Telling people you love them (1 Thes. 1, Phil. 1)
2. Jesus as the center (Hebrews 12, John 15)
3. The Holy Spirit’s power (The book of Acts, John 14)
4. Work Ethic (Colossians 3, Philippians 3))
5. Discipleship (2 Tim. 2:2)
6. A Heart for the Lost (people who don’t know Jesus) (The Gospel of Mark)
7. God knows your needs (Matthew 6)
8. See to it that a bitter root does not grow up (lack of forgiveness) (Hebr. 12)

Now I am in the catch-up mode to find out how the Lord has been working in the lives of our friends while we were away. It is fascinating to hear stories of how God has used these letters to grow the girls. Or how God used our absence to raise up new leadership. Or how we have returned to new pregnancies, new engagements, new jobs, new ministries.

I am praying for spiritual revival for 2012, and from the way the girls are talking, God is moving in big ways.

We have been back in Ukraine for exactly a week. I can count the times I’ve been out on two hands, including to go to McDonalds, to get formula, then again to get wipes, to get to the Horodok boys prison, to go to Sunday service, to Monday night youth group, and to go to our prayer breakfast. Ben, too, has been out a handful of times as well, for diapers, milk, a leaders’ meeting, a dinner with Syava, an evangelism training, and for a visit to the “homeowners’ association.”
11) I can’t find a snowsuit for less than $100 at the toy store…and to think last year I complained when buying Marissa’s winter hat for $20.
10) The thermometer shows -4 degrees here; it is +58 in Philly. This is weather where you are wearing 4 pairs of pants, including long underwear and tights, and still can’t stay warm when walking the 15min. to the bus stop.
9) Full-length furs, very tall mink hats, and H-I-G-H-heeled boots are all the rage on the street.
8 ) We’ve lost weight. Our fridge is bare except for Marissa’s bizarre variety of “meals”. (We aren’t staying with people who cook us lovely meals anymore.)
7) There is up to 3 inches of ice on many of the streets we have to walk on each day. Lawsuits and car accidents are waiting to happen around every corner, not to mention broken bones (see #9).
6) Our van hasn’t started since Peter “charged it” to pick us up from the airport. Gotta love diesel engines.
5) Ben saw a man blow his nose into his hand.
4) Marissa is running around the apartment like a crazy girl, babbling in funny sounds as she tries to mimic Ukrainian (and is thrilled to see Yulia (see pic) and Ira, her main sitters).
3) In the first 3 days of being home, we were without water for hours at a time.
2) We have been accused of tampering with our gas meter and stealing gas for up to the past 15 years(!).
1) I saw a man accidentally light his pants on fire around 6:30 in the morning at a bus stop.

And the final way I know we are back in Ukraine is because of the super warm welcome we received from our pastor and the church on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, Ben and the kids have all been sick, so they all stayed at home, and I represented the OO-EEL-YOM-SEEV (our last name in the accusative case in Ukrainian). Pastor Misha read from the Bible, where Paul is writing to one of his beloved churches in Thessalonica. “And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia—your faith in God has become known everywhere. 1 Thessalonians 1:7-8  It was such a warm greeting to hear how we were missed and the example that we’ve been to them. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been attending there longer than we attended FAC in NJ! We love these people, and it is great to partner with them to share God’s love for the world.

On Thursday morning, I re-entered youth ministry activities by attending the first 7am youth prayer breakfast of 2012. A few impressions struck me – first, it is hard to get your rear in gear and out the door by 6:30am. I am used to hosting these breakfasts, and it is easier in your own home because you avoid transportation and the streets in the cold of the morning. My good friend Nadya is doing a great job of leading the ministry; it is so nice to be able to step out and then back in and see God working and raising up strong leaders.

We read John 15 aloud, and I was blown away by the way that God’s Word never grows old. I’ve read these verses many times, but they took on new meaning that morning. I sat there, soaking in the Ukrainian language and fellowship that I’d been missing for 4 months, and it struck me that in all the chaos of packing and planning and NJ and IL, I had taken no time to reflect on the close of ’11 and the start of ’12, which is something I love doing.

“Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. John 15:4-5

Every New Years, I always have these visions of grandeur on improving myself and “being better” because I want to please God. In these verses, Jesus gives us the clear “formula” for “being better”, which is really just bearing fruit from a changed life in Christ. He tells us to remain/abide in Christ. Jesus yearns to be my top priority. God the Father wants me to put nothing before Him. The Holy Spirit wants me to be connected to Him so that I can have the power to overcome sin and bad habits. REMAIN IN ME! SPEND TIME WITH ME! PRAY TO ME! KNOW MY WORD!

How often do we instead abide in stupid things like the internet, or television, or office work, and put time with God aside? And then we wonder why we still struggle with the same bad attitudes/behaviors and brokenness? Why do we still repeat the same mistakes? Why isn’t my life changing? Because unless I am connected to Jesus, I cannot produce any fruit in line with Him. I can do nothing in my own strength, nor do I want to this year. (And I definitely need help, because life with two little “babies” can be really interesting! I just bought “Loving the Little Years“…we’ll see how that helps. I also have been playing with an awesome app for Bible memorization, which is great for waiting in long lines and taking long bus rides.)

You know that cheesy song by Daughtry? “I’m coming home, to the place where I belong…no I don’t regret this life I chose for me”… the lyrics keep running through my head. Maybe it’s because it is 1:30am, we’ve been back in Ukraine for about 36 hours, and I don’t feel an ounce of tiredness. Instead, I’m thrilled and energized to be back in L’viv. But Daughtry got it wrong when writing “these places and these faces are getting old, so I’m coming home.” When saying we’re glad to be back, it does not discredit the 4 great months in the States, mostly w/ family and friends, both in IL and NJ.
We’ve come back on good terms. My dad is recovering well; life went back to normal for our families. Our 2-wk. stay in NJ was spiritually and relationally refreshing. The kids are healthy and adaptable (as you can see from our picture, 2 minutes after our arrival).

But there is something to be said about flying into L’viv’s not-yet-finished-for-Euro2012 mini-airport terminal, being found by an airport employee, who said that Victoria (New Life’s admin) called to get us expedited out of the waiting area, to be greeted by Yulia (our sitter), Syava (Ben’s best friend), Andriy (who took over Boys Prison ministry) and Andriy (another great young preacher) – complete with Oreos and yellow flowers, to make a spectacle in the arrivals area with 4 checked bags, 5 carry-ons, 2 carseats, 2 little ones, Peter with our “trusty” white van (that was struggling to start that day…), and eager arms to help us carry everything through the snow and up the stairs.

Ben even overheard some US military talking about us, perplexed by who we were and the treatment we got! For the first time in a while, we were not paranoid about our visa status. Since we were out for over 90 days, our 90-day period starts over. So pray because we have 90 days to get a proper invite, which has been next-to-impossible to obtain. And that’s just the first step, before needing registration status and getting the visa.

The best part is that we are on the other side now. We left with the anticipation of Dylan’s arrival; we’ve returned with his 11-week-old, 14 lbs. of love in our arms, appropriately positioned under the painting of his namesake. I feel a completeness back in L’viv. Ben already attended a youth leaders’ meeting tonight, and there are great things on the horizon. February and March are starting to fill up; summer camps and interns are already in the works. 2012 holds many new things; to God be the glory for the past four months and new beginnings.

In the past two weeks, we certainly did a lot of eating, visiting, and catching up with old friends. Regarding family, only my (Kristy’s) Aunt Debbie lives in New Jersey, so we made sure to see her. Other than that, it was mostly visits with Fellowship Alliance Chapel attendees (including dinner at Pastor Marty and Laurie’s house! Thank you!). We didn’t take as many pictures as we should have, so no offenses should be taken if we don’t have pics up of your family! Know that we appreciated every conversation, every visit with our big “family” on the East Coast. Enjoy the photos. (See an earlier post for pics of our first week there.)

Ed and Nixie Laremore’s old mini-church, having one of many reunions that we try and set up when someone is in from out of town. Since 2006, our mini-church has scattered, but God faithfully brings us together, and we get to go deep and catch up in a short amount of time. We’re reminded how the Body of Christ needs our prayers and support. We love this group.

Again, the Body of Christ joined together. This is most of my old, all-girls Alpha group. We, too, try to do a reunion and hear about God at Work in each others’ lives. I pray Colossians 1/deep-rooted walks with Christ for these friends.

Here are the men of our mini-church. Pray for these guys as they lead their families, raise their kids, and make it their aim to please the Lord in all things. Even after 5 years in Ukraine, I would say that we lack this kind of group fellowship, characterized by love and a desire to grow in the Lord. Our one-on-ones are deep like this, but nothing in a group setting.

Here are Erik and Lauren, one of the families gracious enough to host us during this time. They got good practice. Lauren is due at the end of April. Together we’ve spent weeks in Czech, in Ukraine 3x, and have stayed in their home on multiple occasions. We love walking with these friends through life.

This is Kate, one of my bff’s from high school. We met on Student Council at 14. We love getting together, esp. since she moved to the East Coast (CT) just about the same time that we had one foot out of NJ. Despite the blistery snow storm that threatened the East, we were determined to see our plan through to meet in Manhattan. I LOVE NYC! Ben graciously offered to watch the kiddos (is this pic actually watching Dylan?) while we shopped (searching H&M for a b-day present for our UA youth pastor, Syava), and was treated to the Boathouse in Central Park (note the park in the reflection of the glass). Since I don’t have the means to live in Manhattan, it was time to get back to L’viv. Within 24 hrs., we were on a plane back to Europe. What a visit!