December 6&7, 2006

Several important things happened on the sixth. We
met up with another Pastor Sasha in a nearby
city…We were supposed to do two programs but we
did 4 instead. I was absolutely beat. Not
sore… just tired. Yoora…our host here in
Nazarova had his 54th Birthday! We had a big meal and
lots of celebrating. He’s a great musician and
singer and has dreamed of making a cd of sorts of
songs for his friends and family for after he’s
gone. I gave him some money for the celebration and
for his dream. I hope it turns out well. He has been
a huge blessing in the last few days. He is so
incredibly on fire for God it is humbling. He’s
been an incredible encouragement to our team…
and as he’s been used by God to help
us…God’s been using us to help him. He
said that though he’s really enjoyed having
other teams come in the past… this is the first
team where we’ve felt like we were brothers.
Connected…in some mysterious way through
God’s Spirit.
While we’ve been here we’ve been able to
go into some schools where when previous teams came
through, they had claimed there was no hall in the
school at all where a program could be done…we
did programs in these halls that weren’t there.
Wow hey?!
One school director this year told Pastor Sasha that
he would rather the students all addicted to hard
drugs than to be exposed to Christianity… pray
for Russia…it’s not near as free as some
of us would like to think.
This morning I was awoken by roosters that live
underneath the floor… that was strange. We had
a few programs today… Pretty typical
stuff… except for this evening… After our
program in an orphanage, they asked if we would like
to stay for part of their Christmas program practice.
Most of it consisted of girls singing and swaying to a
tape on the stereo. There were some boys who must
have been around 11 years old who were trying out
breakdancing moves…. Wow… you need a lot
of muscle to do that…I still think the boys in
China who did backflips off their forehead still
topped them… but it was still amazing. What
made it really ‘interesting’ was that
after this exceptionally flexible gymnastic routine, I
was mentioning to Rhys that it felt a lot like those
characters you see in movies who are invited by some
prince in some exotic place in Arabia or India and
they call out those dancers… that was just the
feel of it…
Right in the middle of that statement, in came 4 of
the teen girls dressed up in very exotic
Arabian/Indian garb, and they started dancing…in
typical exotic style of course… All us guys
could think of was… ‘eye contact…
EYE CONTACT!’…
I think all us guys were surprised to run across
dancing and dress of that kind in the middle of a
smaller town, in the middle of winter… in
Siberia! Weird.
Pray that us guys continue to be strong in resisting
the ‘eye candy’ that tends to be quite
frequent.
It has been a truly amazing time here in the mornings
and evenings with Yoora. God has used him to refocus
our team on what is really important. I hope I can
learn a lot of lessons from just the way he lives his
life. It’s evident that he wants to be like
Jesus.
I want to be like Jesus…

It has been truly amazing to see how one who has so
little can have so much. Joy truly lives here in this
man and his family. You can see it in his
eyes…and he knows it. It’s strange how
often we want to have all these amazing and abundant
things. To have merely enough seems out of the
question… we need a lot. Yoora sang us a song
that basically says: ‘I don’t want an easy
life… make it full of hardships and struggles
that I might be counted worthy of you. All I need is
you with me Jesus. You are enough.’ Truly it
was humbling to hear it… and even Yoora was
telling us that that particular song is a tough bite
to chew… We shouldn’t ask for the
privilege to suffer should we?
Perhaps there is more to life than having a good
job… a great house… a loving family…
a clean bathroom… good hair… food in the
fridge… a fridge at all for that matter…
perhaps all the things that we
‘need’…aren’t….
Maybe all we need is Jesus.
Merely Jesus.