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Month 1 Cambodia… Month 2 Thailand… Month 3 Malaysia… Month 4 Philippines… Month 5 Zimbabwe… Month 6 Zambia… Month 7 Malawi…

It’s month 8, we are in Europe, and specifically our ministry is in a village an hour outside of Kyiv, Ukraine.

We worked with an American family this month, but I really enjoyed the heart of our ministry host’s wife, Jenny.

We had the opportunity to speak to her World Cultures class about our time on the World Race. The class wasn’t until 12:30 pm and Bliz and I had planned our adventure day in the city, so at 8:30 am we travelled into the city to do our registration for the Hillsong Colour Conference that we found out was in town.

When we came back to the school we immediately jumped into the class and Jenny introduced us. She asked us to speak about our experiences as minorities. Racism is a topic that Jenny breached with her class and offered that we speak about our experiences on the topic since it would affect both of us differently than the other team members that had already spoke with the class.

Bliz started by asking them to tell us their names. It was enough to break the ice with such a taboo topic. And so we jumped right in. We spoke about the instances we’ve seen and shared our views on what fuels it…

“Assumption and the way you act based on an assumption fuels a lot, if not all, discrimination by race. But we can fight against racism. Take the time to get to know the person. Don’t assume they are one way or another. Stand with the person when you see it happening; no one wants to go through that alone. And when it happens in front of you, stand up for the person. It’s seen as aggressive and defensive when a person who is being treated that way stands up for them self. But when someone who would not be treated that way has the courage to stand in the gap and point out how the behavior is wrong it is so much more likely to be heard and received.”

As Jenny recapped this to her class I couldn’t hold back the tears that salted my eyes. One of the girls saw and brought me some tissues. All I could say was “it matters” nodding in agreement to what Jenny was saying. My heart was so warmed that she listened us, that she didn’t take offense, that she wanted her students to know how to take action.

Later this weekend we went to the Hillsong Colour conference. The premise of the conference was to inspire, encourage, and challenge women to do something big. I sat there and thought to myself, what would it look like to make a conference like this around the world that does the same as what Jenny did in her class? What does it look like to present and have this conversation on large scale? What does it look like to inspire racial reconciliation around the world? How could I encourage all people to participate? How can I get people to choose reconciliation?

I don’t have the answer, but it’s something I will be brainstorming in my dream journal.

Here are some pictures from the rest of that weekend!

After we finished the talk with the class they had more questions and things to talk about so we went to their study hall and continued. It was awesome to see their interest in being an active and positive answer to this issue.

The class did partner presentations about Racism and its affects. These young ladies showed us their awesome presentation!

Later that day, Bliz and I went to Kyiv searching for food and found the Euro Vision competition.

These were given out at the Hillsong Colour Conference. It means “Dream” in Russian. Lord, thank you for giving me dreams to bring glory to your kingdom!