A Day of Rest and Recovery

January 27: I was feeling much better when we woke up about 8:00am on Sunday morning so we decided that we would go to church even though we weren’t sure how much we would be able to understand. Although our taxi was a little late, we were still able to get to the service before it started. We were able to meet Ernie, Don’s friend who heads up the ministry here in Berdyansk before praise and worship began. We were glad that they repeated some of the songs that we had sung in December so that we were able to partially join in singing “Esoos” and other familiar words as they appeared on the overhead projector. When it came time for the sermon, we were surprised to see Ernie get up and start talking in English. As it turned out, he was preaching and Sergey was interpreting so we were probably able to understand the message better than the rest of congregation. He spoke on John 6 and in general how we should daily try to be more like Jesus. He challenged everyone to read the whole book of John and write down every attribute that we could find of Jesus and then pick our top 5 to work on in our own lives. He also used several good illustrations to get his point across. When the sermon was over, we participated in the offering march where everyone takes their offering to the front of the church before having a time for testimonies. One older man went to the front of the church and spoke for a few minutes and then broke into singing several hymns as the congregation joined in. He had a beautiful tenor operatic voice and obviously loved God with all of his heart. Another very short little woman came to the front and shared a poem about God. When the service ended, this little woman came up to Tamara and gave her a beautiful handmade placemat out of a bag she was carrying. It touched our hearts that one so obviously poor in a monetary sense was so obedient to give what she had to strangers like us. We looked in the church bookstore before catching a taxi back to the hotel where we ate lunch and then went back to our room to rest since the boys had an activity that they wanted to participate in all day.

After about a two hour nap, I went to the store to get us some groceries and then got on the Internet to upload several days of blogs and check email. When I got back to the room, Ginger called and talked to us for quite a while about a condo that she is very interested in before we finally went back to bed for the night.