The train comes to a stop as I am gathering my last bag. That last one brings my total luggage to one-too-many. I step onto the platform and my team makes an uneducated guess on where our contact might be meeting us. Turns out we’re right. By foot we
travel to our new home for the month, and when my legs can’t take any more of the drafty concrete stairwell, we arrive at our apartment and crash in our cozy new beds for a morning nap.
Later in the day, we’re supplied guides to get our bearings on the city. Our YWAM handlers Oksana and Meike arrive and we gather our things to head out the door. We head into a town of mystery, to begin a month of mystery.
We search the unknown and soon find ourselves comfortable with our surroundings and grateful for our guides. As we say our goodbyes and head our own ways I have an intentional feeling that these two girls are going to be meaningful this month.
Even though my days have been short here in Lutsk, that intentional feeling has become a burning passion. A passion to know these women of God like my heavenly father knows them. To know what brings them joy, to know what brings them pain, to know their deepest darkest secrets, and to distinguish all that from what sits on the surface
.
Oksana, a Godly soon-to-be 29-year-old woman, was raised by her parents but her spiritual rearing came from the Orthodox faith of her grandmother. That stated to me “Even though I was raised differently then how I live now I have never doubted that I didn’t know the Lord as my savior because of how my grandmother raised me.” She is a woman loved by the Lord and you can see that in her radiant smile, spunky conversation and passion to know that we’re provided for.
Meike, a shining young 19-year-old woman, is not only in love with the Lord but is full of life. She burns with an unusual passion for doing the Lord’s work. She only graduated from high school in the last year, and has now leapt into God’s heart for Ukraine, committing to YWAM-Lutsk for 2 years.
I share this with you because it has only been a couple days that I have known these women of God but my passion burns deep for them. I want to know and love them like Jesus would while I am in Lutsk. So please pray with them as I begin a relationship with my sisters in Christ.
