Snow in Spring

This is how I felt the other day when it started to snow.

Thank you Orison Piper for putting words to my feelings.

Our week

A whole week has blown past and nothing new on our blog. That's more from lack of inspiration than lack of activities as we've had a full plate this last week. Liese lead worship, I taught Sunday morning and we both had multiple music practices and bible studies. We went to Kiev to apply for new passports and try to find car parts. A group of guys from the rehab center came and helped us load our huge pile of construction trash into a huge trailer. We went to Rzhyshchiv to help Cheryl prune and chop down some of her trees. We started premarital counseling with Sasha and Oksana. There were a couple migraines and a cold (I finally made it to the store to buy some zhyvchik* so the cold should be defeated soon). I went to a pastors meeting in Kiev.

So that is what is going on in our life. This week will be a little less crazy.

*zhyvchik is Ukrainian sparkling apple juice with echinacea and sugar and I'm pretty sure it is the best thing ever for colds.

Road trip

This week we took a road trip to visit Chernigov and Priluki. We spent a couple days in Chernigov getting some In Lumine stuff straightened out, hanging out, visiting the church.

Then we headed down to Priluki for a whirlwind tour. We had tea with our former Russian language teacher (we were late thanks to the roads being so bad we had to drive about 40 mph most of the way from Chernigov), went to the mid-week church service, stayed up most of the night talking with Vlad, Zhana and Tanya Chmil, managed to get stuck in the mud for almost an hour, visited Lyena Vinogradova and met Vanya, then raced home to barely make it to band practice at 4 pm.

This is Lyena and Vanya. Lyena and Slava adopted Vanya two weeks ago, and we were very excited to meet the little guy. Too bad we only had a few mintues to spend (thanks to getting stuck in the mud).

Liese with Tanya and Sveta after the church service. It was great to see everyone and hopefully it won't be a year before we get back to visit them again.

Why Facebook can be good

I've made up my mind. Facebook is not a waste of time. I've been on the fence for about a year now but now I've decided Facebook is okay because it allows someone to write something like this when you casually mention in your status that you are studying:

Jaime Foote at 6:57pm March 13

ya need the Truth to grab you in its teeth and drag you around the yard a bit. And the people who listen to you preach need to know that this has happened...
keep doing the right thing, keep sticking your neck out. Make the take-home part of the message so piping hot they have to blow on it. Preach with such care and passion and fulness so you'll have no regrets later. love u guys.

That is the kind of thing everyone needs to be reminded of as they prepare a sermon.

Book Cover Design

by tom gauld

This week I've been working with Jake Knotts doing a cover for the Russian translation of John Piper's Don't Waste Your Life which will be going to print soon.

I wish I'd had this handy diagram before we started the whole process, would have made things go a whole lot easier.

Although I'm not too sure which of those categories Don't Waste Your Life would fit into....

New Calvary Chapel Kaharlyk website

For about the last year I've been working on a new website for our church. Our remodel put the project on the back burner and then not having real internet until late January further contributed the lack of progress on the site. Then somebody took down our old site so I tinkered around a bit and got the thing in somewhat of a working order.

www.calvarychapelkaharlyk.org

There is not much new on the site yet, mostly just the same info that was on the old one, but over the next month our church should get into the swing of updating it.

On a side note — from now on I am going to start spelling Kagarlyk with the Ukrainian pronunciation as Kaharlyk. Spelling it with a "g" is the Russian pronunciation which I held onto because it was in the url of our old website.

Harold Best on Words and Worship

I've been listening to some lectures by Harold Best at SBTS and liked the way he expresses the following:

"God's not awesome anymore because pizza and baseball are awesome. What words do we have left to talk about God? All of our superlatives are given over to the description of ordinary things. Nothing is ordinary anymore; everything is extraordinary (ie: children graduating from kindergarten)."

We've bastardized our language to the extent that we are now held captive by our own hyperbolism. Singing "How Great is our God" means as little to me as answering "great" to the question "how are you today?" When in reality it's been a long time since I've felt great and answering "fine" would suffice.

My synopsis though is not without holes because, on the other hand, saying fine when I feel well, tolerable, satisfactory, acceptable, without complaint . . . also seems to dilute meaning. What it seems to come down to is the way we've borrowed the few words that can only be applied to God and used them in an idolatrous way.

Which brings me to another quote by Best:
"Absolutizing the relative is called idolatry. Relativizing the absolute is also idolatry. There's no escape from idolatry."

So the seemingly innocent Californian way of describing an article of clothing as rad or the weather as awesome is, in actuality, a barrier to worship, unwitting idolatry that robs God of that which belongs only to him. But there hasn't been much temptation for that kind of idolatry in the clothing or the weather department lately. The pizza we had for dinner last night, however, was above par.

A great quote from J.I. Packer

"If our theology does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both;

If it does not encourage the commitment of faith, it reinforces the detachment of unbelief;

If it fails to promote humility, it inevitably feeds pride."


From A Quest for Godliness

(HT Between Two Worlds)

The Puppet Show

The Christmas Puppet Show Extravaganza was a roaring success. We gave out personal invitations to 140 kids for the two performances and around 170 showed up. Even though that is less than half as many as we had hoped for when we starting planning this event last year it is still, numerically, the biggest thing that our church has ever done.

The kids loved the puppet show (and their parents thought that "Final Countdown" was a really funny song to come on every time an angel appeared— so did I, which is why I played it) and were really excited about the gifts. We served the kids and their parents chocolate cakes that Liese, Christy Claycamp, Olya Zschech, and Tanya Rubachuk made. The cakes were awesome in the old sense of the word.

Aside from all the kids that showed up (usually it doesn't matter how many we invite only about 50 show up) I was glad to see our church work together to make this happen. From building the puppet stage, to making cakes, to writing the script for the puppet show, to cleaning up afterward, pretty much everyone in our church helped out and everything went really smoothly. It is great to see our church working together.

Below is a slideshow of a few pictures I took. They Claycamps put up a short video on their blog if you want to watch it, it has better pictures.




Now we are recovering from a crazy weekend that involved two puppet shows, sitting on a "panel of experts" to talk about marriage at an event in Rzhyshchiv, leading worship, preaching, and teaching part two of "Battling lust is manly" at the men's bible study Sunday evening.