Easter Greetings, at a Russian soccer match

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Interfax Reports:

Fans greeted each other on Easter at a Sunday evening soccer match at Moscow Lokomotiv stadium.

At the beginning of the second half of the match thousands of fans of Dynamo team started chanting “Christ is Risen!”, an Interfax correspondent reports.

Thousands of fans of Lokomotiv teeam on the opposite side of the stadium responded by chanting “Truly He is Risen!”

The exchange took place several times.

The correspondent who has attended soccer matches for almost 50 years says it was the first occurrence of this kind in the history of Russian soccer.

At Koppero

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koppero_snow_fin-13

We are in Finland for just a few days. Olga needs to be in Finland because of some visa restrictions, and I need do a little work with a friend in Helsinki.

We return to Russia on Thursday and then go to the States on Monday the 12th.

We’re staying at the cabin, Koppero, we’ve mentioned before.  The snow is about 6 inches deep and the lake is still frozen solid. It will take several hours to get the cabin warmed up, but we have a nice hot fire going.

Ken Rundell made it possible for us to stay here.  This was his summer home when he was married to a Finnish lady named Pirkko.  He welcomed us here years ago, and we’ve returned many times.

Pirkko’s nephew, Juhani, is now the owner, and he’s very happy for us to visit here and help keep the place up.

We are very thankful for this blessing, one of many Finnish blessings we’ve received.

Tromping Snow at Elama

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Sergei Tovstopyat, John Bull and I went to Camp Elama today to look things over and make a few decisions about the upcoming work.

Sergei is building brick stoves in cabins 2 and 3, so we took at look at that work.  We also were deciding how to upgrade the water storage system, where to install the new(ish) water heater, where the work teams will sleep, what to do on an upcoming work day, and how best to start building a fence.  It was a good day.  It’s always great to have fellowship with those men.

The snow was chest high a few days ago, and now it’s down quite a bit and really melting quickly.

Spring is here!

Luba Timofeyeva

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This was recently posted by friends of our, Charlie and Miki Chastain.  I’ve known Luba for many years.  She faithfully serves women in prison in Ryazan (in picture below).

I was a schoolteacher of history and a strong atheist.

I taught my students that the religion had been a deception and that exploiters had devised it in order to wield power over poor people.

I thought only about my family welfare and my work at school. I was sure that my lifestyle was good and virtuous and didn’t understand that I was a great sinner.

Life was not easy and was unpredictable.

My mom died from cancer at the age of 49. My brother was killed in Afghanistan at the age of 31. Even having my own family (a husband and two daughters) I often felt myself lonely and unhappy and started to think that there had to be more to life.

When the Soviet regime collapsed and many people rushed to Orthodox churches (we were not allowed to go to a church earlier), my younger daughter and I went there too. Later I had a desire to know about the real faith and wished to have the Bible.

It was in 1996 when I first heard about Jesus Christ and His gift of forgiveness and salvation. Two American ladies, believers, came to our school and had a meeting with the staff.  They showed us the Jesus Film, told us about the love of God and suggested to have a Bible study with us.

I and four more teachers started to visit the Bible study and at last could hold the Bible in our hands and read it. I was really interested in reading the Bible and later my knowledge of the Lord reached my heart and for the first time I felt the reverence for Him.

I repented and received Jesus into my heart. In 1998 at the age of 49 I was baptized.

The former atheist had become a Christian!

I am now a child of God inseparable from Him. Praise be to God!

And I am always very grateful to my American brothers and sisters in Christ that they’ve helped me to come to know God, that they helped us, Russian believers, to plant a church in Ryazan. And of course I understand that it is God who has made those amazing things possible.

God has blessed me abundantly with wonderful brothers and sisters in Christ, as well as with a wonderful family.

Charlie Chastain continues, “one of my fondest memories of Luba is one of the times she worked with us in St. Petersburg. Our team was staying at a guest flat owned by a ministry partner here in town – but the unique thing was that it had a large bookshelf full of Christian books: anything from novels to C.S. Lewis to deep theology. Luba was in heaven!

“She explained that access to this kind of literature in her town was next to nothing.  But because these books were only for the flat, she knew her opportunities were limited to dive in.

“So what did she do? At night, after all of our work was done, Luba would COPY these books by hand so that she’d have an opportunity to read them later.

“Ever since witnessing that, this has been one of the clearest examples to me of what desiring God looks like.”

A Postcard from Russia — Camp Elama

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Camp Elama is slowly thawing out; Spring is here, yet the snows remain and our work preparing for the summer has begun. We have a good leadership team in place and exciting plans for the summer.

Back in December, Sergei and John laid foundations for two new buildings, and in May and June we’ll have teams from Georgia and Mississippi building on those foundations and doing other prep work.

We’ve purchased a riding mower/lawn tractor which will allow us to clear much more land and create hiking trails. Unfortunately, some items were stolen this winter so we’re having to replace parts of the water system and a few tools.

Sergei Tovstapyat, our camp administrator and general handyman, has begun building wood stoves in the cabins so we can heat them and use the camp for more of the year.

This summer, in addition to hosting several churches at Elama, we’ll run our own camp for the first time. We plan to have 20 children, and we’re also hoping that some young ladies from the Minsk Family Home will come up from Belarus to help. Anya Kazak and Natasha Pavlova will be leading that camp.

It’s going to be a good summer, and we look forward Elama being filled with life once again.

Zhenya Kopushu

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Zhenya Kopushu is one of the young ladies who lives with us in Russia. She’s working in a hospital for abandoned children.  She is praying about being one of the counselors when we build Immanuel Children’s Home (more about that later).

Below is some news from her from our church’s website.

NEW MINISTRY – TO ABANDONED CHILDREN IN THE HOSPITAL

Zhenya Kopushu graduated from the StreetCry School of Ministry in 2004. Since then she worked as the Russian language and literature teacher in the Harvest Christian School, served as children’s pastor in our church and is currently heading intercession.

This year the Lord opened doors for Zhenya to minister in Tsimbalina hospital for abandoned children. Here are some of the most recent testimonies from her work there:

“For several months we prayed for doors to open. The Lord touched the hearts of the doctors to receive us favorably, even though it is a rare case in Russia that hospitals would be open to Christian workers coming to help with the sick, to pray and preach the Gospel.

Children are taken to this hospital from the streets and from broken homes of drug addicts, alcoholics, etc… Their parents do not care for them.

Every child’s story is heartbreaking. It still takes a lot of effort on my part to hold back the tears while I am in the hospital – I do weep though a lot, as I intercede for the children later at home. Every child has experienced malnutrition, severe beatings, often times even rape.

In addition to many sicknesses, they suffer from loneliness, rejection and fear of the future, which for most of them is uncertain.

At best, it’s a Russian orphanage with very little true concern from the heart, for these children…

They are hungry for love. When I come, they run to me, take me by the hands, call me Mom and do not let me go. At the end of every visit, they ask me to take them home with me and I just wish I could – I want to take them all.”

Here is just one of many stories:

Masha Orehova, 10 years old  was brought to the hospital from a home where both mother and father are alcoholics. I first met her a couple months ago.

She crawled to me on the floor, called me Auntie – her look was so miserable, and voice so faint that everything inside of me crumbled with pain. The same evening the doctors described her background.

When she was 5 years old, her father being drunk threw her out of a 5th storey window. She survived but her backbone was badly damaged.

She was bed-ridden for a long time and eventually lost her ability to walk. Nevertheless, she was given back to the same parents again. Both mother and father kept regularly beating her up and father even raping her.

Finally, the authorities started the process of taking parental rights away from them, and Masha was placed in Tsimbalina hospital. Her first several nights in this hospital she refused to sleep in a bed but crawled under it to hide herself and slept there – she was bound by fear of everyone.

In the doctors and nurses, she saw a threat rather than people trying to help her. She looked at them as if she were a small wolf, hungry and fierce, ready to bite.

It is scary for me just to try to imagine the emotional and physical torment she has been going through all these years – I understood that only God could touch and restore her broken heart and broken body, giving her hope and a future.

I began regularly praying for Masha and telling her about Jesus. I told her that Jesus loves her and wants the best for her.

Slowly she started changing, fear was gone, and she began smiling as she saw me come. Every time I came, she asked me to tell her more about Jesus.

Faith was birthing in her heart.

Toys and games were not so important – all she wanted to do was lay there and listen to me speaking about Jesus. During Christmas, we brought presents to Masha as well as all the other children in the hospital. She was so happy – thanking God for all!

She wanted me to read her the story of how Jesus was born over and over again until she was able to repeat it herself.

Very recently, Masha received Jesus into her heart – I prayed together with her. Please join me in prayer for Masha’s complete restoration and for her future, for God’s will and plan to be done in her life rather than the devil’s plan for destruction.

Zhenya is seriously considering and praying through the idea of opening a small family type Christian orphanage where she and several other girls from our church, driven by the similar concerns and currently involved in different capacities in ministering to suffering children, could live and take such children in who have nowhere else to go, providing them with the atmosphere of God’s love, salvation, restoration, healing, hope and a future.

KOSMAČ

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I went for a drive yesterday, in the mountains of Montenegro near the Adriatic coast.

For the past few years I’ve noticed an old fortress on top of a mountain, overlooking the old town of Budva.  I’ve wanted to see it, so I decided to stop and check it out.

It’s off the main road, and I wasn’t sure how to get there.  I just followed what I thought might be the road to it and got lucky.

The road is quite treacherous.  It has never been upgraded or improved; it’s just as it was 170 years ago.  Several times I was concerned that I might cut a tire on the rocks (not to mention fall off the mountain), and that is not a place I’d want to have a flat tire (or fall off a mountain).

After some quick research online, I’ve discovered that the fortress is named Kosmac (pronounced koss-match) and was built in the 1840s by the Austro-Hungarian empire marking the border between the empire and Montenegro. It was one of a string of fortresses along the border.

Now it’s falling apart.  A remnant of a long-lost empire.

Here’s a video I made; you can see how it protected the Budva riviera.

The hands of a man

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A dear friend passed away earlier this week.

Ken Rundell was born in England in 1919. He lived a full and blessed life: he helped liberate concentration camps in WWII; he was a missionary for over 60 years living in Africa, England, Switzerland, Finland and Russia; he was a true servant; he was a gifted writer; he was a very humble, loving man.

Ken was a real inspiration to me and many others.

Michael Simpson, a mutual friend, took the picture above just a few days before Ken died; here is what he said about Ken:

You see a picture of the hands of a man who lived a full life, measured more in the impact on people than years accumulated. These hands prayed for so many people I know, and so many I will not know until heaven.

These hands welcomed everyone, encouraged the best out of every person, gave until his pockets were empty and pulled significant amounts of money from the pockets of others for the benefit of the less fortunate, penned more sonnets than Shakespeare, received whatever God chose to give, cared for two wives until their passing, and folded in the end to rest.

The first time I met Ken was about ten years ago at a prayer meeting. He was 80 years old. He prayed, ‘Lord, I give the next ten years of my life to bring the gospel light to Russia’.

After the meeting, I asked why he gave just 10 years. He smiled and replied, ‘by the time I’m 90, I won’t be good for much of anything’.

He gave those ten years happily.

During that decade, with him I traveled to Finland and around Russian Karelia, visited his home in Cornwall, and had great discussions over tea in St. Petersburg.

My last visit with him was just before he left Russia for treatment in England, a few weeks ago. His health was declining and he could no longer use his hands.

I was able to give him a shave, which he hadn’t had for a week. I remember, as I shaved him leaning close to his face, how he smiled boyishly and said ‘oh, that feels so good’.

As we said goodbye, he expressed how he hoped to return to Russia. He was always looking ahead. Now he is in his eternal home.

Ken Rundell, we rejoice in your life.

Below are a couple of notes from friends, received just today. The first is from Titus Hannum, missionary in Russia. Continue reading →