Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! 

We celebrate Christmas today, January 7, here in Russia. So let us share our joy with you and invite you to praise God one more time for His amazing love that He showed us through the birth of Jesus!

We also wish you a very happy new year filled with God’s blessings and life lessons through which He is going to keep working in each of our hearts to make us more like Him.

The beginning of a new year is always a good time to stop and remember the previous year and everything it was filled with – and to analyze what the Lord has taught us through both sad and joyful events. We encourage you to do that too, so that you could start the new year full of hope and faith that whatever the Lord has prepared for you in 2016 will draw you nearer to Him and help you get to know and love Him more and keep growing.

As for us, the Lord has been teaching us a lot during the past year and changing our views on some important things. Probably the biggest lesson our family has been learning is that you can serve the Lord not only through “doing ministry” the way people usually regard it in churches today – but also through just living with the Lord and giving Him every sphere of your life. God clearly showed us that our hearts and the way we walk with Him in everyday life is much more important for Him than all the outreaches and ministry events we could organize. Even though it was not easy for us to learn this lesson, we are grateful for it! The Lord made us take a break in “ministry”, even though we struggled with Him at first, trying to keep going. But as soon as we realized that we will please Him more if we stop and search our hearts, we obeyed.

So, that is what has been going on in our life during the past 6 months. Right after I got back home from the Summer Project in Moscow and the English camp at the Black Sea, we went to my hometown to help my family at the flower farm, as we do every year. There we had time to rest from doing student ministry, to serve our family by helping them in their work and to think and to pray about God’s will for our future. I realized that the Lord wants me to search my heart before making any decisions, so as soon as we got back to Krasnodar, I started to go through Biblical counseling with the help of one of the ministers of our church. I decided not to take on any responsibilities in ministry before I go through this process. Of course I keep meeting with my friends, studying the Bible with some of them, sharing the Gospel with people God sends my way. As for Nika, she has been working on her third Christian fairy tale. It is already written, and right now she is drawing the illustrations for it. If the Lord provides, we are hoping to publish it! Nika is enjoying her work on the book, and it is also a time of rest and peace for her at the same time.

Where will the Lord lead us in the new year? We don’t know yet We feel that we are standing at the crossroad and waiting for Him to show us which way He wants us to go. We love God and want to glorify Him in our lives. So we want to obey Him – and we are waiting to hear from Him. As soon as He speaks to us, we’ll hopefully be able to make some big decisions. We need to decide whether we will keep “doing ministry” here in Krasnodar - and if yes, what exactly to focus on, since we see so many needs around us! – or maybe move to my hometown Slavyansk and work with my family full time (we believe that we can glorify God through it too). Or maybe God will show us some other way He wants us to go! Please pray for us! We would really appreciate if you pray that God would keep working in our hearts, and that we would hear Him and obey Him.

There is another joy and another prayer request we want to share with you! We are expecting a baby. Supposedly, a baby-girl Evangelina will join our family in the beginning of February. Please pray that everything goes well and that the Lord would guide us and give us wisdom in bringing up this little person He decided to entrust us.

Thank you so much for your prayers! Thank you for remembering us!

May the Lord bless you! Merry Christmas!