News from Kagarlyk

Hi everyone!

A couple days ago Liese and I had a conversation about the line "always winter and never Christmas" from C.S. Lewis' book The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe. See, I always thought of Christmas as the beginning of winter and once Christmas was over, winter hit. So I missed what Lewis was getting at - Christmas is the one spark of warm goodness in the middle of the cold bleakness that we call winter.

So anyway that is where we are now - the cold bleakness of winter is upon us and Christmas is coming soon.

Here is a quick update on what we've been doing and our plans for the next couple months.

A couple weeks ago I went out to the city of Rokitno to offer my AV skills (and our church’s AV equipment) at a youth AIDS awareness rally. A church in Rokitno that our church has been working with for for a about 5 years now organized the rally and they asked us to help out. It was great to be able to help and I was encouraged by the church's desire to be driving force for change in their community.

Our church has been going through a series of teachings on what it means to fulfill the mission that God has given us. It has been really encouraging for everyone and the Sunday School workers asked if I could meet with them and go through the series because they miss so many of the teachings. So we've been getting together each week to study one of the topics. I've also been meeting with Micah Claycamp and a couple of the young men in our church for a kind of "discipleship" group. I'm the translator. Kind of weird, but it is cool to spend time with these guys in the word and encouraging them. All this has reminded me more of the need for small group bible studies. We have been praying for a while about starting home-group bible studies. Please pray with us that God would lead us in the how, when, and where of this.

This Wednesday night we are having another of our nights for senior citizens. They are thinking about calling the nights "Golden Age" because it sounds pretty good in Ukrainian, kind of like "Golden Oldies" sounds in English. This month marks a full year that we've been doing these evenings. Our goal in doing them is simple: love the elderly in our city. After a year of doing these evenings we have about 20 people each time, a few have started coming to our Sunday services, and the city has noticed that we are doing something that they want to do but lack the resources so they are happy with us. We are praying about how to expand the ministry to be a stable monthly event and find more ways to invite and bring people to it. Please pray that this ministry would grow, be fruitful, and that the senior citizens in Kagarlyk would know the love of their Maker.

This week we are flying to North Carolina to spend Christmas and New Years with Danny's family at his sister's place. We'll be back in Ukraine on the 5th of January. After that we are planning on spending a couple weeks up in the city of Chernigov helping the church there. Jake Knott's who is the pastor of the church in Chernigov found out while he was in America that he has problems with his kidneys. So he is staying in America for treatment. Jake was supposed to be back in Ukraine in early December so that the McNamee family could go to the States for Christmas, but since he is not coming back we offered to fill in for him so that the McNamee's could take their trip and not waste the tickets they had already purchased.

Please pray for Jake, pray for the church in Chernigov during this time, pray for us as we go up there to help out. We need your prayers and are thankful that you pray for us,

Daniel and Annaliese Foote