Good-bye Chely, We'll Be Back

What a special last day (and a very full one) we had in Chely. We worshipped with the Church of God in the morning for a few hours. I was amazed that I could actually read about 50% of the hymn words flashing on the screens -- but, of course, am still not sure what 90% of them mean, but God knows. Even though I couldn't understand, I was still moved to tears. After worship and a sermon on the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, the prayer leader sent a spool of thread around the congregation and then we prayed our prayer requests as we were connected by the thread. After this, Scott and I were asked to share some testimony about what God has done in our lives. Scott did a beautiful job of weaving in the "thread" into his talk about how the church around the world is connected and how we will remain connected through our son Alek and through God's son, Jesus. When it was my turn, I wanted to give an update to the many prayers that this church had prayed for Alek and let them know that Alek did in fact pray to receive Jesus into his heart in November 2010. I also shared with them that much as Mary and Martha could not understand why Jesus waited 2 days to come to aid their brother Lazarus, at the time we could not understand why God made us wait 2 years for our son and why we were in Chelyabinsk for 10 weeks. I explained and shared some of the fruits of waiting for him including how we were given the privilege of seeing God answer some of our daily prayers for Alek. Now as we have waited 2 years for Yasha, we also are seeing answers to our prayers during our time of waiting. Here are some photos at the church and with many of the church members. It was awesome and I was full of Joy!

This theme on times of waiting continued when we met with Tatiana (Alek's adoption facilitator) and Larissa (our translator). They came to our hotel and we visited for about 2 hours. The first thing they did was apologize and try to explain why our adoption took 10 weeks to complete. It is a very long story, but aparently the woman in charge of documents at the ministry and court was doing some unethical things. She was fired for this just recently. We tried to explain to Tatiana and Larissa that it just doesn't matter to us. That is in the past and besides, our waiting was for God's good purposes and for His glory. We basically got to share the same testimony with them that we shared at the church earlier in the day. They then both were very interested in this church...where does it meet? what kind of church? who attends (in other words, is it just Americans or are their Russians there too)? We got to share a lot with them. We can pray that these were seeds planted in the hearts of people who we hold dear.

After meeting with them, we met Lena, Igor, Pastor Andrei, Olga and Tolya one more time for dinner....this time our treat! Unfortunately, we couldn't make anything home-made, so we settled for going out to dinner at the Titanic restaurant. It was a novelty with nautical themes and Titanic memorabilia everwhere. We had a wonderful dinner--good food, but the friends and conversation were the highlight!Hugs for Lena and Olga...

Special post for Goldman's (I know you are reading this!)...how did you ever leave these wonderful people?? I know it was hard and they miss you all so much. Blessings from Chely!

We are now in the Moscow airport heading back to Ukraine. We will land in Donetsk, Ukraine late this afternoon and will drive the 2 1/2 hours back to Severodonetsk. It will be a long travel day that started at 6am this morning. The 10-day court decree waiting period is over today and tomorrow starting early in the morning, we will be off on a foot-race for 2 days to finish paperwork to get Yasha's new birth certificate and other papers so that he can leave the country. I will blog tomorrow if time permits. We are missing Yasha so much and will see him tomorrow OFFICIALLY as our son.

p.s. I am VERY tired of my light-blue T-shirt, striped shirt and black pants outfit!!!