Coaching at RashidatO.com | Social Activism at Whereveryougolove.com
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Ministry in Ukraine seemed more like a 9-5 or a day of works rather than sharing the love of Christ, but only if you are looking through the wrong lens.
Our month 8 in Ukraine, after leaving Africa, felt a lot like coming back to America. We had only been out of an industrialized culture for three month, but it had been 7 months since we were in a Western culture. We went from dirt roads to concrete jungle. But one thing did not change, there is still poverty. The poverty in Malawi looked very different than in Ukraine.
Day 1 – Cleaning cabins
Day 2 – Shoveling Manure
Day 3 – Sorting Beads
Day 4 – Planting corn while the babushkas screamed at you in Ukrainian or Russian
Day 5 – Building Ropes Courses
Day 6 – Sweeping Sand off the pathways
Day 7 – Scraping, sanding, and re painting benches
Our time in Ukraine gave us the opportunity to work with and prepare a camp for gypsy children that are orphaned. In the Ukraine, children are orphaned not necessarily because their parents have died. A lot of parents in the Ukraine have been stripped of their parental rights because they struggle with addiction and alcoholism. Due to negligence many children are left to fend for themselves.
We worked with a ministry that builds relationships with the children and then opens their homes for the children to be adopted and raised in their family.
This ministry built those relationships by sponsoring camps that the children attended every school break. It opened opportunity to bond with the kids and allowed them to start to build a trust filled loving relationship that most children have never received and therefore don’t understand. Our job was to prepare the grounds for these camps that would be given during the summer.
Our schedule included a lot of manual work and no time talking to people. We didn’t do kids ministry. We didn’t work with the kids that lived at the shelter. We didn’t talk to the babushkas and we couldn’t leave the village on our own because we were so far outside of the city of Kiev.
But we did prepare the way for relationships to be built. We encouraged the people who would lead the camp and did chores in hours that would have taken them weeks to accomplish. And we prepared the way for hearts to be saved by the Gospel.
We did a month of works in Ukraine with a couple other opportunities sprinkled in. We are were far from excited about what we did and we did not get to see the fruit. But I refuse to rob God of His glory because He still will do amazing things through the work that we did for this ministry.
“Then Jesus said, “God’s kingdom is like seed thrown on a field by a man who then goes to bed and forgets about it. The seed sprouts and grows—he has no idea how it happens. The earth does it all without his help: first a green stem of grass, then a bud, then the ripened grain. When the grain is fully formed, he reaps—harvest time!”
Mark 4:26-29 MSG
We will probably never see the harvest. But that was not our job to see it. Our job was to prepare the way and we give Him glory in that. We give you glory for the opportunity to be used by you even if its “menial labor”. We glorify you, Lord, in the opportunity and praise you for the harvest that is coming. Let it be a full and ripe harvest of the children of Ukraine.
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