Traveling

As you know, if you read this blog, I am traveling in the US right now to visit family. I was with Janessa, my youngest daughter from Dec. 16 to the 23rd. Real early on the 24th, I left and went to Pierre, SD on a 15 hour bus trip, arriving there at 5:10am. We celebrated Christmas eve dinner with family and then Christmas day and had a wonderful time. On the 26th, I traveled to Rapid City, SD and stayed with a cousin, who the next morning took me to the airport and I flew out to Seatle, WA to be with my oldest son Butch, Erin and graddaughters Hannah and Ella. I have now been here a little over 1 day and it has been very good so far! We also celebrated Christmas last night. So, I have had 3 Christmas celebrations and will have 2 more to go! I will explain more later. Make your life a great day!

Here's a quote for you that I just read: “Even with language training, Russian is so difficult,” he said. “There’s a local saying, ‘Russian will be the only language spoken in heaven because it takes an eternity to understand it.’”

New Pictures with new stories

Nicoli and Ksusha at the church building on Dec. 10th.













The first 6 or 7 rows at the church services are nearly always taken up by these sisters in Christ.






















Artem, Oksana, Jared, Kelli and Ksusha Lunch at my house Sunday after services.

I am away from my Ukrainian family right now to be with my physical family for about 3 weeks in the US. But I am never really away from either my family or Ukrainian Christian family at any time! They are always in my heart!!!

Set backs can lead to further growth we don't expect!

When I think about all the great things that have happened in this ministry over the last 4 1/3 years, it seems strange to talk about set backs. But starting back in October they began to hit us. First James Vaughan's mother passed away in mid October and James has left to be with his family until mid-January. About the first of Dec. I heard that we would not receive a M.A.P. team from the East Hill Church of Christ in York, NE and York College for the first time in maybe 12 years! On Dec. 9, I heard that my daughter had miscarried her baby at 16 weeks and I decided that I would need to go and be with her, Brandon and Gavin. (I am writing this from her computer in the USA.) Then Frankie and Jared departed from us on Dec. 12, to move back to the US after 19 months of service. On the 14th, I left for the US. On the 16th, we got word that we would not be receiving another AIM team! This was a shocker, for we were so sure we would! Well, I don't want to ask what else can happen!

Then I realized that God is in control. That God will bring blessings out of our weaknesses. I just finished talking with 13 of my young Christian friends back in Kremenchuk by internet Skype phone and that was so good and encouraging!!! They are such a great group of Christian young people and I am so proud of them! As I have recently read 2 Cor. 1:8-10 and of course Romans 8:28 ff I know that God is in control and that Satan has no lasting power over us. I pray, "Please help me trust in You, Lord, knowing that You will work Your will in our lives to Your great glory!" I can't see, but God can. That is faith - I want more of it in much greater detail. If God is for me, who can be against me? NO ONE! We look forward to better and greater things through these set backs for it causes us to let go and trust God more!

Make it a great day, for God is working His will in your life!

Doug's Journal for December 1-13, 2006

Before I give you my journal I would let you know that my family has suffered a tragedy. My duaghter Janessa has had a miscarriage after her 16 week of pregnacy. So I have been quiet here for awhile. I am going to the states to be with her and other family on the 14th of Dec. and returning to Kremenchuk on January 5th, Lord willing. Please pray for all of my family. Here now is my journal.

Friday, December 1, 2006 – Monday, December 4
In the morning I got ready to take my first days off since August – literally. About 11am, I left for Kiev to spend 3 days there. I rested. I read. I ate at TGI Fridays twice – very expensive, but very good and very American! I went to my first Russian speaking movie without a translator. I worshipped with a church of Christ there, had a late afternoon dinner with friends and visited with them until 9pm. On Monday morning I got up early and traveled back to Kremenchuk – about 4 hours. Then I turned around and went to the village for my afternoon class at 3pm where we had our 5 regular girls. By the time the day was done, I was pretty tired. However it was good to get away and get a break!
Tuesday, December 5
We had our last AIM meeting with Jared and Frankie as they will leave next Monday to move back to the States. Classes and all went well today. We had 27 for singing and then we celebrated Sasha’s birthday, preacher from Komsomolsk. We had our last singing night with Jared and Frankie. a lot of lasts this week.
Wednesday, December 6
Again we had a good day of classes. We had 9 girls in our younger classes. They want to have more classes a week. Then at the private school we had maybe 30 kids all together in our classes there.
Thursday, December 7
We went to the village today instead of Friday for our younger class because they couldn’t have in on Friday. We had 17 kids in class! This is such a great class!
Friday, December 8
Today was a day of lesson preparations, shopping, etc. that I haven’t done in a long time. We had our Fun Night with 15 people and good evening.
Saturday, December 9
Tragedy struck! I checked my email about 6am and there was a message from my oldest daughter Jenise telling me that my youngest daughter Janessa’s baby had died within her for unknown reasons, except that the heart stopped beating. I called both daughters and talked to them. They will use medication to induce labor. Janessa is in the hospital and in shock, even more than the rest of us. I broke down. I sent out some messages by cell phone and several responded to me and came to me and helped me through the day. I was in contact with Janessa and BJ several times through the day – but because of the time difference, I couldn’t be a lot until after 5pm our time – 9am, central time. Janessa will probably be in the hospital for 2 days. All Bible Clubs were canceled today – I couldn’t have taught anything. I couldn’t even think straight.
Sunday, December 10
When I called BJ in their evening, my early morning, he said that Janessa and he really wanted me to come to them, so I began to make flight arrangements and plans to come. When I called again around 5pm, Janessa was delivering the baby in great mental as well as physical pain. I have my flight plans together to leave on Thursday, December 15 and arrive in Omaha, NE at 11:30pm where BJ will pick me up. We had 37 at our evening worship and afterwards we had our good by for Frankie and Jared. It was very hard for all of us. Many tears were shed. They have really become a strong part of our lives and now they are leaving. They have blessed us greatly and we will miss them beyond measure! We love you guys!
Monday, December 11
I loaded up Frankie and Jared at 7:30am and headed for our hotel at Borispil, where the Kiev airport is. Kelli, Olya, Yulya and Alina took the train up. We spent the afternoon and evening together in Kiev. I went to bed about 8pm.
Tuesday, December 12
I got up at 2am to get Frankie off and to the airport where his flight left at 4am. The girls stayed with friends in Kiev and met us at the airport at 3:30am. Actually his flight didn’t leave until 4:40am, so we had more time together. HARD time! It was so hard to say good by! Then we all went back to the hotel for an hour and then returned to see Jared off at 7am. This was really hard too, maybe harder because it was the last one and it was all really final. Then we flew back to Kremenchuk – in my car – to get Alina back in time to take a 10:40am exam. We also got word today that Igor’s grandfather died. This was another hard blow for our family here. I got a haircut, did some errands, got an hour sleep, taught my class at School 9 with 7 kids and one new boy! Then to the bank, home again and people waiting for me. So I had no rest and no alone time. I had to finish preparing for the evening devotional and my talk. We had 19 this evening. Afterwards we went to the boys flat and finished clearing it out of a LOT of stuff they left. I got about 10:30 and went to bed!
Wednesday, December 13
This morning I caught up on this journal, made more travel plans on the internet and will email it out to you. I don’t know when I will write in it again, as I will leave early tomorrow morning and come back on January 5th. Please pray for my safe travels. It is really hard to leave my Christian family here with they having just had the trauma of having Jared and Frankie leave and not being able to celebrate the New Year with them – the biggest holiday of the year. But I am needed more in the States right now. I will travel much. Thank you for your love, prayers and support.

Frustrated!

Have you ever been frustrated with physical things, like computers!? Computers are the most useful tools but can be so very frustrating! Like today, I am trying to add pictures to my blog, but I keep getting a “run time error” that asks to debug. When I go to the debug site, I have no real idea of what I am doing there! So, I click on no, I don’t want to debug and hope it keeps working. Sometimes it keeps working and sometimes it doesn’t. Well I am trying to get you more pictures on this site. Please pray for my success and for the better working of my computer!

I'm Back!

Sorry for being gone for a week - my internet has been giving me problems, but hopefully all is going to be well. You are going to be hearing from me again real soon. Hopefully with some great pictures as well! Thank you for your patience!
In Christ,
Doug

About My Journal

I started writing my journal when I came here to Ukraine as a daily record of my life and the ministry that goes on here. Some of my family, friends and supporters like to get this "extra" information. If you don't want to read it you can just "skip it!" I will put it on here about every 2 weeks. I will try to add some pictures from time to time so you can see some of the things that I am talking about, too. Again, one of the reasons that I am writing this blog is so that you can comment on what is being done here in Ukraine - so we can be in better communications together. Have a great December!

Doug's Journal for November 16-30, 2006

Thursday, November 16 – My 54th birthday

I made the mistake of leaving my cell phone on and I received 2 sms (text messages on the cell phone) around midnight! Everyone wants to be first to send birthday wishes. Through out the day, I received a total of 20 sms good wishes for my birthday. My real morning started at 1:15am when I woke up from going to bed so early. I was up for a couple of hours, checked email and went back to bed. I woke again at 4:40am. Jenise called me on the internet at 5am – internet phone. Janessa at 5:30 and we had a conference call with the 3 of us until 6:30am and then Butch, my oldest son, called at 7am by regular phone! I made myself Mexican egg/breakfast tortias for breakfast and that was really tasty. At 9am a guy came and said that my electricity hadn’t been paid for several months and they were getting ready to cut off my electricity! With Zhenya’s help, I got that paid before they shut it off. My owner of my apartment had been paying it and then I was paying her. I guess she just decided she didn’t want to do it like that anymore, but failed to tell me! I had to pay for 4 months back utilities!! It was pretty shocking! So my living expenses have just jumped another $45 a month or so. We will see what winter utility costs will be. When I first started renting this flat 3+ years ago, it was costing me about $50 a month for rent and utilities. Now it is about $145 a month – nearly tripled! I know by American standard that isn’t much, but the $45 a month increase is about 1/10th of the work fund and the $145 is more than ¼ of my work fund. We had a great personal study with the twins family today, mother Inna, and 3 teenage kids. However they are going out of town for a month, so we probably won’t be starting up again until after the first of the year. We had 25 for our Bible Study tonight and 30 for Nadya’s (Nadya is a mother and wife of 30 who has been coming to our lessons and activities for almost 4 years. Her husband refuses to allow her to become a Christian, but is a little more open than he used to be. Her sister Lyuba is a Christian because of her!) and my birthday party afterwards. Both of us received many wonderful and useful presents. We had some good salads, cakes (any idea how much cake and salads that takes for each to get just a little?) and juices. I took a carload of females home (guys think that the girls should have rides and the girls think so, too!) across the river and got home about 10pm. A really good day!
Friday, November 17
The day after! The days have continued to be pretty warm for this time of year – around 50 during the day. I had a lot study catch up to do, so I did that. At 1:45, Jared, Oksana, Artem and I went to Bugkivka. We normally go on Fridays for class, but today we went to see a concert of sorts. They were actually going to have a fall disco and this concert was for the 5th-7th grades. But to start this, they had a contest between 3 boys from each class to see who would be the king of the fall disco. This is were the concert came in and several of our kids participated in this, especially since we have about 20 of these kids actively involved in our classes and many more that have at some time come to our classes. It was very enjoyable. We returned to Kremenchuk about 5:30pm after a fun day. Then we had our fun night with 10 people – eventually – they kind of came in piece by piece. We did have a good time until after 10pm.
Saturday, November 18
I worked on my Sat. Bible club lessons in the morning, went and bought juices and cookies, got my house ready before 11. At 11, Alyona, a 5th year Univ. student came and we had our first personal Bible Study. We had a good study, but I can see she is going to be a real challenge. She says that she has no faith and that she is just made up of a collection of chemicals. She is very nice and is no means rude about it and is open to searching. We are reading the book of John together, besides answering her questions. At 12 we had 5 for our Adult/Univ. class, at 2 we had 5 for our Beginners club and at 6 we had 6. The numbers weren’t really great today, but it was a good day of study. Several of our older, regular Christians and young people no longer come to the clubs on a regular basis as the clubs are more designed to introduce God and English and they have accomplished this. So most of those that are still coming are not Christians yet or young Christians, so the clubs are still doing what we want them to do – reach out!
Sunday, November 19
The temps stayed down around 32 all day with a brisk wind. Today was Valery and Zoë’s last day of worship with the Central Church of Christ as they are moving to the USA – CA on a flight tomorrow! It was a very hard day for many of us to see them go as they have been a valuable part of our friendship and Christian family! Valery has been a very faithful minister and servant of the Lord and Word and he will be desperately missed! He plans to start a Russian speaking congregation of the church of Christ in CA among that large population in the area into which he is moving! We made sandwiches today and took them to Gregory. PLEASE pray for Gregory if you are not already! His infected foot is a result of his liver not working properly because of the medicine that he takes for his asthma!!! He needs our prayers VERY much! At 3, 4 of our kids went to the Orphans home and had a good afternoon with them. At 6:15 we had 21 for our evening worship service. Valery brought torts, drinks and tea and we had a good fellowship afterwards until about 8:30pm. After that, I went to a local restaurant and had some salad and then came home. I watched a Disney movie Jared had loaned me. I haven’t been able to use the internet the last 2 ½ days because all my money is used up on it and the company is not open until Monday, so I wait to use it. I miss the communication that I have from it!
Monday, November 20
I woke up at 5:15 and since I couldn’t get on the internet, I started working on this journal and have been writing now for about an hour. I began my plans for Thanksgiving. We went to the village for our older class today and had 4 girls in class – 2 girls have remained the same and 2 different. We had a good class and got home about 5:30. We were supposed to have a dinner at Kelli’s but that fell through.
Tuesday, November 21
I went to the market this morning to buy pumpkin and apples plus several other things. I shopped for turkeys to see if I could find any. I found 2, but it is too soon to buy them! My Thanksgiving cooking and preparations has started! We also had a 2 hour AIM meeting squeezed into my preparations! I prepared from scratch and cooked 2 large pumpkin pies! Fortunately my balcony is enclosed now and the temperature is cold enough outside for my balcony to be a 2nd refrigerator or I would not have enough places to put all the food. I had a good class of 8 kids at School #9. Veronika (17 years old and first year Univ. student who has been coming to us since the 9th grade) and I had a good personal Bible study. She is really growing a lot closer to the Lord and being obedient to His will for her life! Our singing/devo in the evening was well attended with 21 people. We found out tonight that we are expecting 42 for Thanksgiving dinner! I am a bit overwhelmed about the number!
Wednesday, November 22
Today Frankie left for France for an AIM retreat with AIM students in Europe that could come. My cooking continues with the cooking of 2 large apple pies – 6 large apples per pie, pealed, and thinly sliced with double crusts. Well that was very time consuming! I got my crusts a little thick, but they turned out okay! I also bought turkey today – but cut up Turkey. I bought 14 pounds of boneless turkey breast and 10 pounds of boneless dark meat cut from legs and thighs – so about 24 pounds of boneless turkey. Do you think that should feed 42 people??? Jared, Olya and Kelli helped prepare the dressing for the turkeys and making of a double batch of crescent roll doe. We got into a fun but messy flour fight afterwards! We had 1 girl in our English/Bible class for the older kids (9-11 grades) at School #9 today. The good thing is that she came, even though she knew she would probably be alone. We went to the private school and taught 3 classes of a total of 45 kids from the 4th – 7th grades. Afterwards we ate pizza together and then I went home and made a batch of cinnamon rolls for tomorrow’s breakfast. It was another good but exhausting day.

Thursday, November 23 – Thanksgiving Day!
Happy Thanksgiving! I know you will get this later than Thanksgiving, but I want to give you good wishes again! I started my cooking at 8:30 with the cinnamon rolls. While they were cooking I got my first of 3 batches of turkey and stuffing ready to cook. So when the rolls came out at 9am, three pans of turkey and stuffing went in! I have a good meat thermometer that does a good job of telling me when the turkey is done. It took about 2 ½ hours to cook. Kelli and Jared were supposed to come over for rolls at 9, but Kelli had a migraine headache and couldn’t come. But Olya did. We had a big pan, so we had plenty for Kelli and others later in the day. I rolled out the crescent roll doe and made 3 pans of rolls. I cooked, cleaned and prepared all day long! About 4pm, people began to arrive to help finish the cooking. People brought more deserts, lots of wonderful salads and different kinds of pickles, fresh fruit – we had 2 large fruit salads and tons of food! We used 2 and ½ folding tables (1 table is a ½ because the supports for the wings of the table broke a long time ago, but we supported 1 end of the table by stacking 2 foot stools together and putting a pillow on top of that!) end to end. We actually were able to get 42 medium sized plastic plates around this table. We sat down close to 6:30pm to eat with 37 people (10 more than last year and several didn’t come that said they would)! I was NOT disappointed that we didn’t have 42! We had a wonderful meal and fellowship together! Everyone helped out so much at the end and I am so thankful because I had completely run out of steam! Everyone left about 10:30pm.
Friday, November 24
The morning after! Wow, I slept a lot more than my usual 5 or 6 hours – thankfully!!! People came at 11am to see me, but I had turn them away as I was cleaning up. I usually don’t turn people away for any reason! Our village class in the afternoon had 14 – the school had let out early and still we had that many! We had just 5th and 7th graders. No 6th graders at all – very unusual as they are usually the ones that are always there, but still we had a good class. This class has been running about 20 kids each week. When we got back home at 4:30, I was going to rest before our fun night at 6, but no doing as I was interrupted 4 times by 5pm and gave up the rest idea! We had 14 people come and share our leftovers and play games together. We had good evening.
Saturday, November 25
As usual I was busy preparing lessons, shopping and food preparations in the morning. We had 6 for our Adult Bible club, 4 for our Beginners at 2pm and 6 for our Teen Club. At the church discussion at 4pm, 2 of my kids went with me and we had some good Bible discussions.
Sunday, November 26
Service was good and I preached today. There were 5 of us that went shopping at our big department store at Prostor and then we ate together. At 3pm, 7 of us went to the Orphanage. At 6pm we had 23 for our evening services. This is the most we have ever had for this service, I believe! Afterwards we went to my house and then at 9pm we went to the train station to pick up Kelli and some friends who had been in Kiev for the weekend and got home about 10pm.
Monday, November 27 – Kelli’s 25th Birthday!
I worked a lot on my next weekly newsletter: “Living For Christ.” I have taken on several new “writing” tools that take time. If you were to read all of them, then you would of course get some overlap. What I am trying to do is to reach more people with the Gospel of Christ and to keep my friends, family and supporters better informed about my life. In the afternoon, we went to the village and had a class with 5 10th graders. It was a good class I believe – the girls are very active and are doing a good job of participating. I have invited them to our Christmas party on Dec. 25th. I hope they come! When we got back in the evening, we went to Kelli’s for supper that Jared did most of the cooking. That was great and a lot of fun. Kelli had invited some friends from Kiev down that are staying in Kremenchuk for a few days. It was good to have them here, too. I went home about 9:30pm.
Tuesday, November 28 – Anya D’s Birthday!
A normal day of study, classes, lessons, etc. We had 6 delightful 6th grade girls from school #9 today in class. In the evening we had a really good devo/singing night with 24 people there. Yura, one of our young men led the devotional tonight and did a great job! Afterwards we celebrated Kelli’s birthday. She received a lot of kitchen things that she needed and wanted and really seemed to enjoy her party! Kelli made chicken enchiladas for everyone that was REALLY good! Plus there were great torts for everyone to have some of, too!
Wednesday, November 29 – Olya’s Birthday!
I would like to just make mention that we celebrate birthday 2 different ways. We celebrate spiritual birthdays – the date when someone becomes a Christian and then physical birthdays as well. Jenise, my oldest daughter, called this morning on the Skype internet phone and we had a nice visit. She is encouraging me to get the Pimsler (sp?) language CDs to help me improve my language skills – which I want to do and need to do! I think that I am going to call them and ask them about shipping costs, etc. It could be a bit expensive, but I really do want to get much better if I am going to stay here and I am going to stay here! In the afternoon, we had 2 girls from the 9th form (grade) in class at school 9. They really do seem to enjoy our Bible/language class – I just wish more would come! At 5, we went to our private, live in school and taught 2 classes to about 30 kids.
Thursday, November 30
I have almost decided to take most of this weekend off while I still have Jared and Frankie to teach the weekend classes for me. After this, it may be a long time until I can do this again. I don’t know where I will go or what I will do yet. But I really need to get away for a little while. I will either leave on Friday night or Saturday morning. I may leave by train or I may drive. The only 2 places I know to go are to Kiev or Hartakov. I studied all morning from the time I got up at 3:50am till 10am. Then I cleaned up, etc. At a little after 10, Anya, a Christian translator called for Buddy Baker and asked us to meet. Buddy had 3 other Americans with him and we ate lunch together. Buddy and others now work with 8 orphanages in and around Kremenchuk – probably a 30 mile radius. They do a lot of tremendous work in these homes and for reaching them for Christ. They have recently spent $400.00 on puppets and puppet books. They want us to develop a puppet team and have a portable puppet stage built so we can go and teach with puppets at the orphanages. We can and will also use this in teaching at the schools – I have always felt that it would be a tremendous tool to use here. We then went to a show at the orphanage that we work at each Sunday. These Americans had hired a song and dance troop to perform at the different homes. Then they gave out Christmas presents to everyone of the kids! (They gave these gifts to every child in all 8 orphan homes – over 1,200 children!) We were able to assist in giving out these gifts. It was a lot of fun. At 6, we had our evening Bible Class with 17 present and then we celebrated Olya’s birthday afterwards. All was done about 10pm.

Growth Over the Years!

51 months ago (4 years and 3 months!) when we started this compared today is truly like black and white. 1 Church compared to working with 4 Churches now. Our Church attendance has grown from maybe 60 to around 85. I alone and working now with 3 native preachers and 4 AIM workers (reduced by 2 soon, but will probably get another team in May of 2007). Started working in 1 school with 2 classes a week compared to today working in 6 schools and 23 classes a week. Started with nothing in my home and now we have 9 classes every week in my home and in the church building. There very few youth in the church and now we have had 28 baptisms, 24 of which are still active and faithful (86%). We are studying with several others right now.
Many of our young people are of course growing up. We have 7 that are in other cities going to Universities. We have 12 of our young people (not all Christians yet) that are going to Universities, Institutes and Technical Schools here in Kremenchuk. We also now have 4 Christian couples (all are Christians!) that are dating and 1 couple that have just announced their engagement to be married!
Yet with all that are away from us in other cities, we continue to grow. We had 24 for singing last Tuesday night and have averaged around 20 all fall. Now we do definitely have our ups and downs. Some classes are stronger than others. We have things that we have to work on all the time. That is a part of growth! But God is truly working among us. Thank you for being a part of this work. With you, we can continue to grow!

Mission Website - More updated information

Celebrating birthdays in Oct. and Nov. in the village!

I want to send you to my website for this work. It will give you more information and the background for what we are doing here. Then from now on, I can hopefully just give you updates.

It is: www.ukrainemission.com.

Have a God blessed day!

MORE ABOUT OUR WORK

For those of you who are reading about our mission work for the first time, it is a bit daunting to try to tell you about everything that has happened over the last 4 years. We started from scratch. I was worshipping and working with one Church - the Central Church of Christ. We started this mission work to reach out to children as we taught the Bible in 1 school in the city of Kremenchuk, Ukraine. We are now teaching the Bible before or after school time in 6 schools in Kremenchuk and surrounding towns and villages. We are presently teaching 23 classes each week in these schools. We are working in 2 orphanages and one boy's prison on a regular basis. We are working with 5 churches of Christ in 4 towns. We presently have 3 native preachers working with me in this work. We also have 10 classes and activities in my home and at the church building of the Central Church of Christ each week. I have had 2 AIM - Adventures in Missions - teams of young people working with me the last 19 months. We have also had 2 campaign teams come from the West Fayetteville Church of Christ in Fayetteville, TN and one come from Lubbock, TX as well. We each summer have a summer workers come from York, NE and the Easthill Church of Christ. These workers work under the guidance of the MAP program - Master Apprentice Program. We have had many baptisms in our youth work, in the churches and in the prison ministry. God is truly blessing this work. It is through His love and power that we continue this work.

How do I know how to put God first in my life?

There are so many promises that go along with Jesus telling us to put God first in our life. In Matthew 7:33 for example: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” Take your Bible and read from Matthew 7:19-32 and see all that God promises us! Every time that Jesus tells us to put God first or to deny ourselves, He gives us such awesome promises!!

God has done His part in sending Jesus to us. He will do His future part by fulfilling all of His promises to us. The first answer to how we put God first is simple. We put our faith in Him. We trust Him. Do we believe that God is true and that He cannot lie? So let us let go, trust God and do what He says. God will not fail us or let us down. We may have (probably will have) trials from people in the world when we do this, but Jesus will never forsake us! Let us let go of our worries and fears and let us completely put God, His Church, His people, and His works being done in our city and beyond first in our lives!

Next comes the choices that we will make to put God first. Remember that faith includes both believing God is true and ACTING on those beliefs! Trust is the action of faith. Can we say that we are putting God first in our lives if we are letting other things have priority in our lives? Take a piece of paper right now and write down a list of all the things that you are doing in your life. Think about your time and how you are doing these things. How does God, His Church, Bible study, prayer and His works fit into that list? Do we need to make some changes in our lives? God will bless us greatly when we do!
Doug Berry

Is Love Enough to get us to Heaven?

There is a movement in the Christian religious world today that says if we love God and others enough that is all we need to do to get to heaven.

I want you to get your Bible and carefully look at the three passages that Jesus deals with this subject. These Bible verses are: Matthew 22:37-40; Mark 12:28-34; and Luke 10:25-28. First, Jesus never says that the only thing you have to do to get to heaven is to love God and others. Second, Jesus says that all the Law and Prophets hang on these 2 commands and that these are the most important commands. We get the idea from these passages that if we love God enough and correctly (the way He wants us to love Him) we will go to Heaven. Also we see that loving God means that we love each other. We realize that if we love each other properly (the way that God teaches us how to love each other), we will not do anything bad to them in any way but only seek the good of others.

How can we know how to love God the way that He wants us to love Him? Some more scriptures for you to read: John 14:13-15; 15:9,10; 1 John 4:3-6; 5:1-5. If we love God and Jesus, we will keep God’s commands. We will do everything that He tells us to do. Jesus even said in John 14:31 “…the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me.” If Jesus’ attitude about following the commands of God His Father is to do exactly what God said, then our attitude can be no less! According to 1 John 2, to follow God we must obey God’s commands, which means to obey His Word, which we know is the Bible, specifically the New Testament, which is for Christians today. This is how love is made complete. 1 John 5 tells us that we know we love God and His Children (fellow Christians) by carrying out His commands.

The choice is not ours to obey God the way we want to or the way that pleases us. Matthew 7:21-23 says, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” Throughout all of the Bible and History, people have tried to follow God the way that they want to, not the way that God wants them to. We cannot get to Heaven our own way, but only the way that God tells to, by following His will!!

Jesus said in Matt 7:13-14 "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

So how do we get to Heaven? We do this by the grace of God through Jesus that saves us and as Christians by following all of God’s commands, including the 2 most important of loving God and others!

by Doug Berry

Welcome to Kremenchuk!

This blog is going to be a combination of information about the work of the Lord in Kremenchuk and teaching lessons that I write and borrow to write a Christian Newsletter in Kremenchuk, Ukraine called: "Living For Jesus." I will add to this blog regularly either personal things about me and the work here or articles for your growth and encouragement. I welcome your comments as it is a good way to communicate with those that I am writing to. I am glad that you have come to this blog sight and I hope that you will come back often! May God bless your day and life as you strive to walk with Him!