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Dear co-workers, April
7, 2000 I’m yawning. But it’s not because I’m bored. Far from it!
God is doing so much it’s wearing me out. It was another 6-hour night last
night. Early to bed, early to rise may make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,
but getting to bed late just seems to make me sleepy. And it’s your prayers
that are responsible for what God is doing. I’m so glad to know that you are
praying. Not only do you have an
effect on my life and who I am becoming, but you are also changing the lives
of some people who really need the Lord. On Wednesday I
got up and had an efficient plan for the day all carefully laid out. Then,
when I’d just gotten started on my work, the doorbell rang, in walked a
representative of the department of sanitation, and my plan went out the
window. She was one of these really pleasant people who lives like a
Christian does without believing in God. And boy was she talkative! She
actually came to ask me some questions, but out of the two hours we
spent talking, I spoke for maybe 10 minutes, not more. I would start to
answer a question, and then she would be off again, so full of energy and
thoughts that she couldn’t hold it in. She represents
a typical citizen of Kagarlyk: All her life communism has taught her that
there is no God. Now over the past few years countless cults and
denominations tell her there is. She believes them, but which one of them is
right: the Orthodox, the Baptists, the Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses,
the Charismatics, the Christians? So in the end she doesn’t really read the
Bible because she can’t understand it, she doesn’t find a group that can
explain it, and she takes on various traditions from the Orthodox Church
without understanding what they mean, yet believing that they somehow give
protection or luck. It is more superstition than religion. This problem
of seeing a glimmering of truth but not spending any time or effort to find
out more about it is something that really gets to me, and it’s something
that keeps a lot of people here from the Lord. Gareth and I
had an intriguing time passing out the money to the families that are being
sponsored by EEO. We don’t have a map of Kagarlyk and aren’t even sure that
there is an official one, so we ended up having to drive down nearly every
street looking for the ones we needed. You can imagine how much that slowed
things down! Once we found the right street it wasn’t always too easy to find
the actual house we were looking for. One time the numbers went like this: 7,
11, 17, 11. Don’t ask me what happened to the other odd numbers or why there
are two 11s or why there is an eleven after the seventeen. It still makes me
smile. Another time we were looking for numbers on the odd side of the
street, and they were all there, except the one we needed. It turns out that
for some strange reason they put that one odd number on the even side of the
street. Despite those little adventures (and others) we did eventually find
everybody. You wouldn’t believe how poor some of them are. One family is
living in a clay-and-wood house without wallpaper. Another family of seven is
living in a one-room apartment. At
many of the homes we joked that the child was earning more than the parents.
Sometimes the child being sponsored is the only one making money. At US$30 a
month you can imagine what their needs are like. There are two major problems
that these families face: unemployment and the fact that, even if you have a
job, you often just aren’t given your salary. Thievery still
continues, but it’s not really a big problem. I do admit to smiling wryly
when I heard that the motion detector we’d set up had been stolen. Talk about
cheekiness! Fortunately we didn’t need it there any more. Actually, our eyes
and ears in the community (and we have good reason to trust them) seem to
have found a couple of the thieves, so it will be interesting to see what
comes of that in the near future. Did I mention
that good things are happening here? Wayne and I can’t talk to each other
about the ministry for more than about half an hour because we get so pumped
up with adrenaline we can’t sit still. God is so desperate to do something
here that He is even using me. Last week our
home group met at Gareth’s and my place and 20 came. Three came to the Lord that night. This week home group
was held in a different home, and there were 24 people. The poor hostess
didn’t have enough cups or chairs for everyone, so she had to go around to
all the neighbours and ask them to lend theirs for an evening. It was hot and
stuffy and uncomfortable with no space to manoeuvre. If anyone else had come
everyone would have had to stand to make room. I love having these kinds of
problems! We are really concerned about each new person that comes to the Lord, and we don’t want them to end up slipping through the cracks. We want each new Christian to be discipled one-on-one. That takes a lot of time, especially with so many people getting saved. We are having to reschedule our lives. You can probably imagine that if people keep getting saved at this rate, it will soon become physically impossible for us to disciple each person. That’s the beauty of the whole plan! We can’t effectively minister to everyone, and we don’t want to. Soon the people that we are discipling will be able to disciple other people who have just come to the Lord. Every believer is a minister. A problem in many churches is that it has become tradition to expect the pastor and his staff to do the “real” ministry, and what ends up happening is that the only ministry that takes place is exactly as much as those few people can manage and no more. What is supposed to happen is that they are not the ones doing ministry as much as helping others be successful in different ministries. Everybody should be playing their part. And that is what we want to happen here. Wayne and Olya
have decided to increase church growth by having their own children. On March
8 two healthy boys, Mark and Matthew, were added to their family. Remember the
80 Christians and the church building. Thanks for praying! Goodbye, for now,
from one tired and happy missionary, Sam |
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