An Odd Week

It's been an odd week here in Kyiv. Lena has been sick all week with a terrible cough, probably bronchitis. She hasn't left the apartment. And of course, I got a cold too. Fortunately, God has blessed me with being able to keep it from getting worse (which often happens) and I have been able to take care of Lena a little. We usually take turns nursing each other in the winter. Our scheduled dinner with Bogdan and his fiance had to be scheduled and we didn't get to see them much. I was out of it for about two days but was able to keep most of my ministry meetings, but not all of them. I had a good meeting with Vitaly and have been corresponding with him about his work in full-time ministry. He is doing some fundraising now and we ask you to pray about that.

We had a very good Soup Group this week. Even though finals have begun, more students came than ever before and our meeting lasted almost 3 hours. We had some great discussion about Christian liberty, what friendship is, and other asundry topics. The first English class also is making some progress through the story of the Bible and this week showed more interest in that than the English grammar we have been studying. Of course, what isn't more interesting than English ESL grammar? At moments it is so tedious. How does anyone ever learn a foreign language? I think a miracle just takes place in the brain. It seems that's how it works with my Russian. Sometimes things come out of my mouth that I have never studied and I don't even know how I knew that. I then ask someone and they say it was correct!

We have been doing a lot of work at the UEC this week--on several fronts. Friday we came to believe that people are stealing the CDs and have had to pull them from circulation until we can do inventory and secure them better. So far, only 20 out of about 1,000 are missing but we do wonder where the 20 are. We also have declared December C. S. Lewis month and have put up posters about the upcoming film, are holding a book give away, and I am doing a seminar on Dec. 10 about his life and work. We hope it will attract some of our non-believing patrons. And Sergiy and I went to the Bureau of Technical Inventory on Wednesday and got one of those elusive and illusive documents that we have been trying to get for more than 2 years. It's only by a miracle that we got this piece of paper. Of course, we still have to take it to two more offices and hope that they will approve it. Bureaucracy is endless in Ukraine.

I've also been cooking with pumpkin. I bought 5 pounds of pumpkin off the sidewalk as we tend to do and we have pumpkin bread coming out our ears. I also made a pie according to my aunt's old recipe. It's amazing--it tastes very much like the pie we often ate on Saturdays at her house.