Quotes from Paul Tripp

A while ago I started following Paul Tripp on twitter because I like his books. Recently he has been posting quotes from his books on his twitter feed and these from his book "What Did You Expect?" came up today:

Confession is not so much a duty, but a grace - no cross, no confession/forgiveness - no confession/forgiveness-no hope of change.

Confession: It is a grace to know right from wrong. Accurate diagnosis always precedes effective cure.

Confession: It is a grace to understand the concept of indwelling sin. Only grace enables you to say your biggest problem is you.

Confession: It is a grace to have a properly functioning conscience. It is grace when your heart is grieved/dissatisfied/restless.

Confession: Only grace protects us from self-righteousness. It is easy to neither desire change nor the help that can make it happen.

Remembering the war at the senior citizens' evening

Ukraine celebrates Memorial Day on the 9th of May (it is called Victory Day here). So this month for our senior citizens' evening we decided to have Memorial Day be the theme of the evening.

We asked a couple members of our church who attend the evenings to share about their wartime memories.
Alexandra Ivanovna, who was born a month before the Soviets began fighting, told of her experiences as a child in wartime. She remembered the first time she saw sugar at 4 years old and didn't know what to do with it. She remembered her mom only had one dress that she wore day after day, washing it at night so it would be clean for work the next morning. She grew up in the generation that they call "children of the war". She talked about the mentality of her generation who even today save everything that they have and can't bring themselves to throw bread away.

Petro Palipovich was 11 years old when the war started. He talked about the year that the German army was advancing through this region and local authorities ordered the tractors to plow up the fields so that the German's wouldn't be able to reap the wheat harvest. All the women of the area (all the men were fighting) went out to the fields and stood in front of the tractors to stop them from destroying their livelihood. The tractor drivers backed down and the Germans came and went without touching the wheat harvest. There were many more stories and Wayne finally had to thank him and move on so that we could serve dessert and others could talk.

Liese and I worked in the kitchen and I learned how to make Ukrainian kotlety, which are a cross between a fried hamburger and meatloaf. In the picture above the "second wave" of kitchen helpers are serving ice cream for dessert and washing up the dishes.

Global Mission Mondays: Brunei

This week at our church's prayer meeting we are praying for the country of Brunei.

Brunei is an Islamic state whose sultan is both head of state and head of religion. It has second highest Human Development Index among the South East Asia nations, after Singapore. Brunei is ranked 4th in the world by gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity due to crude oil and natural gas production.

The population of Brunei is 388,190. The official language of the nation is Malay, and Malays make up the largest ethnic group in Brunei. Other faiths practised are Buddhism (13 %, mainly by the several Chinese ethnic groups) and Christianity (11% mainly among the non Malay ethnic groups). Freedom of religion is a constitutional right however Brunei is a very conservative Islamic nation. It is estimated that Brunei has more mosques per square kilometer than any other country in the world. Many of the ethnic groups have no bible or portions of scripture translated into their languages.

[information from wikipedia and the Joshua Project]

A wedding

Yesterday our friend Anya got married in the park. The rain finally stopped, the sun came out and the wedding was nearly without a hitch (the generator decided to stop working exactly at the time when the ceremony was supposed to start, so that was fun. Luckly someone had a power inverter and we got things up and running before the bride showed up her usual 40 minutes late). It was a beautiful wedding.

Liese and I were in charge of the music. I handled the sound equipment and pressed play for the Bridal Chorus, and Liese put a band together and practiced 3 times a week for the last six weeks. They rocked. Best wedding music I've heard. At least that I can remember. I'm pretty sure Katie did a good job at our wedding, but it is kind of blurry.


Anya and Matthew Bible will be living in Oregon while he finishes up his degree. She will be missed here in Kaharlyk.

Fence project at the church

This is how the fence around our church building has looked for about the past. . .20 years (we've only owned the building for 10 years though). In Ukraine a fence is a symbol of ownership. It says that what is beyond the fence belongs to somebody and the state of the fence reflects the person who build/owns/maintains the fence. So when people walk past our church building (which is right in the center of town) and see this:

. . . it communicates to them that the people who own this building/land do not take care of things, are not respectable, and do not value owning the land. So they cut through our lot and throw trash along the fence. The local government is not happy with us for not making the downtown area look nicer, and our goal of being examples in the community is thwarted every time someone looks at our church's fence.

This year we decided that it was finally time we did something about it and so we used the money our church had been saving for the last year to begin construction on a new fence. One of the members of our church sent his tractor out to dig out the old fence posts as well as a trench. Another man in our church asked if he could lead the construction project and do all the work for cheap to save the church money. The fence will have a concrete foundation that will be raised to the level of the road. We'll lay cement blocks for the first three feet of the fence and then the last 2 feet will be wood boards laid horizontally.

I've been project manager which means I have to count up how much everything is going to cost, decide on the design of the fence along with the materials, figure out where to buy all the materials, etc. So far things are going fairly smoothly. We've just about run out of money so we won't get too far this year, but we'll have the foundation poured and hopefully some of blocks laid along the wall.

Global Mission Mondays: East Timor

East Timor has a population of about 1 million people with 20 ethnic groups, and about 20 different languages. Portuguese is the official language though only about 25% of the population speaks it.
Most ethnic groups do not have the bible translated into their language. However, the bible has been translated into Indonesian, which is widely spoken.

East Timor is one of two Roman Catholic countries in Asia, making up 97% of the population. The rest are Buddhist, Muslim, and Protestant.

In 1975 East Timor became independent of Portugal and then in 1976 was invaded by Indonesia. In 1999 Indonesia relinquished control and in 2002 East Timor became an independent nation.

The years of struggle for independence took a toll on the economy of East Timor and the government is still trying to stabilize itself.

Rehab Center

Today at the rehab center we finished our bible study through the book of Galatians. We'd been studying Galatians for most of this year as it has only worked out for us to meet about twice a month instead of weekly like we had planned.

This group of guys has grown a lot in the nearly 9 months that they've been in the center. I always am encouraged as I see them grow in the grace of God, understanding the bible, and grow physically healthy. Quite a few of them are finishing up their time in the center and will soon move back to Kiev and or home. Returning back to their lives is always a hard time for these guys as they still are not sure if they are ready to live without the structure and accountability of the rehab program. Many of them don't make it, and quite a few end up coming back to the center.

(how tall are all these guys?)

Usually we take a break over the summer as they will be working their gardens (you can see one garden in the background of the picture) and we are busy, but we are thinking maybe this summer to get together in the evening so that everyone can be there and it won't be in the middle of anyone's work day. We'll see how that goes.

Global Mission Mondays: Indonesia

Indonesia is a group more than 17,000 islands and has a populations of more than 220 million people. There are around 300 distinct native ethnicities in Indonesia and 742 different languages and dialects. Even with its large population and densely populated regions, Indonesia has vast areas of wilderness that support the world's second highest level of biodiversity.

The majority of the population are Muslim (86%) making Indonesia world's most populous Muslim-majority nation. About 8% of the population are Christians.

Poverty is a major problem in Indonesia with more than 17% living below the poverty line and about half of the population living on less than $2 a day.

2010 all Ukraine Calvary Chapel Conference

We were at the annual all Ukraine Calvary Chapel conference yesterday and today. It was fun to see friends from all over Ukraine.

Liese with a some of our friends from Priluki.

They held the conference sessions in a bumper cart track that was converted into a meeting hall. Pretty awesome, but I was glad I wasn't doing sound this year.

Lada's are more amzing than you might think

There are only a few things that I've always figured couldn't be fit into a Lada*. The interweb proved me wrong about one of them.


*on top is a different story, you can fit pretty much anything on top of a Lada

Global Mission Mondays: Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea is one of the most diverse countries on Earth, with over 850 indigenous languages and at least as many traditional societies, out of a population of 6 million. It is also one of the most rural, with only 15% of its people living in urban centers. The country is one of the world's least explored, culturally and geographically.

Papua New Guinea has several thousand separate communities, most with only a few hundred people; divided by language, customs, and tradition, some of these communities have engaged in low-scale tribal conflict with their neighbors for millennia. The advent of modern weapons and modern migrants into urban areas has greatly magnified the impact of this lawlessness.

The majority of the population lives in traditional societies and practise subsistence-based agriculture. Many people live in extreme poverty, with about one third of the population living on less than US$1.25 per day.

Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country and makes up twelve percent of the world's languages.

96% of the population are members of a Christian church. However many people groups still do not have a bible translated into their language. A large proportion of the population are illiterate and much of the education in the country is provided by church institutions.

Check out the blog of missionaries Nate and Elizabeth Claasen for a glimpse of what life is like in PNG.

[Information from wikipedia, the joshua project, and the CIA world fact book]

Don't Waste Your Life study group

On Sunday afternoons I've been meeting with three of the college age guys in our church to discuss John Piper's book "Don't Waste Your Life" which In Lumine published last year. It is a great book and if you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it.

Today we discussed the chapter on how to glorify Christ at our work (I think it is one of the best chapters in the book). Here are a few quotes that I thought were interesting:

"...we should be busy understanding and shaping and designing and using God’s creation in a way that calls attention to his worth and wakens worship."

"...the essence of our work as humans must be that it is done in conscious reliance on God’s power, and in conscious quest of God’s pattern of excellence, and in deliberate aim to reflect God’s glory."

"You can steal to have. Or you can work to have. Or you can work to have to give. When the third option comes from joy in God’s goodness, it makes him look great in the world."