Dan and I are off to Chelyabinsk tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon and will be gone for about 10 days, probably. The bulk of that time we'll actually be far off in the countryside at a church camp. The camp will focus on the theme of discipleship and mentoring - preparing the church for the primary focus of the fall. Dan will give 5 or 6 talks (I'm unsure - and it may change anyway, depending on weather & such!) on this theme. He's pretty excited about what he's prepared - talks focused on the Gospels and Epistles revealing mentoring "moments" from the lives of Jesus, his disciples, and Paul. Based on the outlines I've heard, I'm excited too :) I am also glad for the chance to spend some quality time with this church, a group of people that includes many close friends of Dan. On the other hand, I will admit that I'm a little skeptical about how well I'm going to be able to handle the elements. 6 days of going to the bathroom in the woods, bathing in the river, sleeping on the ground, eating camp food, braving mosquitoes and the heat... you can pray that I will find it all easier than I am anticipating so that I can concentrate on relationship building. Dan and I are also supposed to come up with some community-building afternoon activities - which we haven't really done yet! We may just play a version of baseball. We shall see. I will have Dan write a list of prayer requests later today or before we leave tomorrow - but just wanted to give you a "heads' up" about our silence for the next 10 days.
I also promised apartment pictures - so I have included a few below. This is our humble home in Ekaterinburg - and you're all invited to visit!
This is our main room. A standard question in Russia is "how many rooms do you have". When counting rooms, you don't include the kitchen, shower or toilet - all of which are normally quite small anyway. So we have a 2-room apartment.
Our main room is also our bedroom - as you can see below. This bed is NOT very comfortable - the sofa is old and needs a lot of extra padding - which we do by layering whatever soft we have in the apartment on top of it!
Here is our second room. If we cleared out all the stuff in it, we could just about fit a bed in there I think. But as is it serves as a storage and reading room. There's a big closest/shelving unit, a couple of big plants which Dan got as housewarming gifts (and which he likes to have out-of-the-way!) and we moved a chair in there so someone could retreat and read when they wanted to.
Just to keep you in suspense (and because we need to go out now) - I will save part 2 of the apartment - the non-rooms parts! - for tomorrow morning.
Many blessings - keep commenting!
Lucy
1 comment:
Ahh, the difference between Russia and USA... our parsonage standards require that a pastor's house include 3 bedrooms plus a home office, plus other rooms... and many US pastors are unhappy with what we end up in.
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