Reports of recent Trips and Work by Godspeed Missionary Care

• The depth of sadness in stories of past and recent pains:



• Words spoken by parents, "you will never amount to anything", "you are ugly", little pebbles of words that when dropped into the pond of a child's developing years can have ripple effects that reach tidal wave proportions on the shores of adulthood.



• A woman experiencing financial hardships has had to move back in with her family. She struggles with nightmares and physical symptoms triggered by having to sleep in the same bed where she was sexually assaulted by the pastor of her church soon after she became a Christian during her earlier years.



• The most frequently requested topic for us to lecture on here is child rearing: "How should we treat our children?" "Is it possible to hold them too much when they are small?" At least five of the couples have infant and toddler children with them, and every one of them is cuddled, held, nurtured not just by their parents but by any other adult in the vicinity. Most of these same adults tell of their own childhood experiences of disrupted and neglectful parenting, of abuse and abandonment. Although they want to know how to do it better with their own children, they already seem to know.



• The heights of joy in seeing God connect, provide, and protect:



• She is a doctor, a psychiatrist, from Kazakhstan. She had started the first Christian medical meetings in her home country, but has realized that she needs further training in her specialty unavailable in Kazakhstan. She needs to spend this next year in Kiev completing a year of fellowship but has no funds to do so. Her eyes well with tears as I give her a list of the members of the Christian Medical Association Psychiatry Section who have donated funds sufficient for her to complete her training. God has used the process of meeting her needs to connect fifteen physicians in prayer and participation in her current and future work, to reunite two Christian colleagues who had lost touch with each other for years, and to plant the seeds of opportunity for us to provide lectures on Christian psychiatry to professionals in Kiev.



• He is the Ukrainian pastor, ex-astrophysicist that I had written about months ago in one of our newsletters. He longed for a telescope that he could use to show people living near his church the wonders of creation and in doing so introduce them to the Creator. An amateur astronomer in America donated a superb telescope while several others of you gave financial help that allowed us to acquire accessories, carrying cases, and a power supply. The pastor was overwhelmed as we delivered all of this to him Friday. The process of how God worked will be outlined in a later letter, but suffice it to say that His plan involved and blessed a missionary in Hungary, individuals in Maryland and South Carolina, a somewhat puzzled Ukrainian customs agent, and us.



• We are hosted to a true Ukrainian meal at a small café in Kiev by a missionary couple just preparing to take an overnight train to visit her family in northern Ukraine. God not only provided great food and fellowship but also in this city of more than 3 million people brought an American missionary couple none of us had ever met to the table next to ours. They, too, were taking the same train that night, to initiate connections with a church in that region. It is the home church of our hostess, who will be able to provide introductions and interpretation.