Ukraine Update

It really is. It's funny how God brings people together as believers and brings us together to meet each other. I was talking to brother JP the other night and we were just talking about how amazing it is that there's different believers in the same town. We all kind of live right here together. We never meet each other and we learn about each other. We learn that these two believe the same thing I believe, you know, and they live right around the corner from me and it's just such a blessing that God has brought us together. It's been a blessing. So much thanks for your support for us as we continue to work in Ukraine. It's kind of amazing how God brings support, how God brings people into our life and brings things together and brings support and at the end of the year it was just enough, you know. You're like, we didn't throw any away, you know, we didn't waste any. But it really is good to be here today and I don't know if this thing is going to work or not. I sure hope it does. I need my notes. I had a thought on my mind today. I want to share a little bit about ministry today, about where we are in Ukraine. Yesterday was hard for me. It was hard on my heart to see our president make an oil deal with Putin. That hurt. It's personal to me. I heard a Clarence Sexton from Temple College in Tennessee preaching a message. I bet it was 40 years ago he preached that message and I'll never forget it. And nothing is real until it's personal. You know, when you hear about somebody in another state, their mother maybe got cancer and passed away, we feel bad.

But when it's our mother with cancer, it became a different reality, you know. So anyway, that's how it is with Ukraine. You know, we hear about stuff on the other side of the world. It's horrible. It's tragic. But when we actually are somebody who lives there in the middle of it, we bury one to three people we know a week. And we deal with the tragedy of this war and, you know, we're not used to in this day and age. We're used to war. We used to hear about war. But the actual killing of civilians, civilians being under attack, schools being bombed and grocery stores and everything, it becomes a reality. For me, it's personal, and I'm still trying to get caught up in politics, but I think the biggest thing is keeping our eyes on the main thing, right? Keeping our eyes on Jesus, keeping our eyes on the gospel. And that's kind of what I want to talk a little bit about today, where my mind's been a little bit lately, when it comes to ministry from the Word of God and share a little bit about ministry from this year in Ukraine. If I pull on my ear, I apologize. I landed 12 days ago and I still got an ear that's clogged up, for some reason. Well I flew down to Madrid and then I flew to, I told my sister, I said, "I'm coming home. I always stay with my sister." She said, "When are you going to be here?" I said, "The 20th." I don't know what day I was told her I'd be here, but she said, "I'm not going to be there. I'm going to be in El Salvador." Every time they build a house on sale, one, they give a house away down in South America.

And then she said, "I'm going to be in El Salvador or build in the house. Why don't you meet me there?" Okay. So I flew to El Salvador and helped them build a house and flew home and somewhere along the way, that ear decided to get clogged up and stuck. But we better get on with it because I'm going to be here, I'll be talking all day. I want to read one verse out of Philippians chapter 1 and verse 9. I shared some of these thoughts with the FCA group over there. Philippians 1 and verse 9, "When you go somewhere like a community college and you see a dozen kids that voluntarily come to open the Word of God together," that was really special. It was really special. We have the same thing, I'll talk about it more later, but in Ukraine how God is building our youth center and so many of those kids come together just to see when kids come together voluntarily to learn more about the Word of God is very, very, very special. But Philippians 1 and 9 is a simple verse that says, "And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment." Before we go any further, I'd like to just pray real quick. Dear Heavenly Father, we just thank you that we are in your house this morning. We're thank you that we're with your people. Father, we've had some beautiful music this morning by the choir and by the well with our soul father. It is good that we're here with you and that we can come into your presence corporately. Father pray that you would just bring your word to us. May your Holy Spirit speak to us. Pray you keep my mind on track and on the things that you've given me to say. May this time be a blessing, Father. May we just draw closer to you in this time. We love you, Father. In Jesus' name. Amen. So here, Paul, I love this, but I've been in Philippians for about a month and this verse right here, I was studying on this verse a little bit and you know this Paul would come into Philippi and this story we find back in Acts 16 where Paul was trying to go one direction. He had a dream, a guy in Macedonia and his dream calls him to come to the other side

to help them. They go over there and the first town they come to was Philippi and they came into this town. There were a couple of days and they decided they wanted to pray and get together and they went down by the seashore and they met Lydia who was a fashionista. She made clothes of purple and stuff and met her and her family and the first few days they were there. This little demon possessed girl followed them around mocking them. Of course, she made money for these other guys or they wanted they made money off of her as she was telling fortunes. She had these powers and they cast the demon out of this girl and the men were mad about it. They took they took the Paul and Silas before the town and they got beaten and thrown into jail. This jailer said they said keep these guys going to let these guys get out. He puts them in the inner jail, ties up their hands and their feet, midnight comes. They're singing praises and hymns and earthquake comes and they y'all know the story. This was the first members of Church of Philippi. I mean, sometimes we don't put all the pieces together, but when I start thinking about a fashionista and the demon possessed girl and a hardened prison guard, it's not exactly who I would think was the perfect union with which love would abound more and more. And the truth is they didn't have anything special that made loving easy for them. They just had the gospel. They had met Jesus and they let Jesus through the gospel transform their heart and they were very different people, but their church was a gospel culture. I want to talk about that a little bit this morning that gospel culture and what is the gospel culture and the gospel culture is a culture of deeply shared love created by and centered on Jesus. And remember how Jesus said people would know how we were in disciples in John 1335 he said by this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another. He didn't say if you're at church every Sunday or if you eat the right foods or if you carry yourself just right he said if you have love one for another. As I travel the world I find sometimes churches I don't agree with all their doctrine. It's really interesting how Christians are around the world. You might run into somebody and say man I don't agree on some of y'all's doctrine making me nervous with the loveless people you ever met in your life. They haven't figured it all out yet maybe or maybe I hadn't figured it out you know sometimes we all don't see the same way and I think God has it that way because the one thing that you can see that unites Christians is love a deep love a deep love for people a deep love for God a deep love for people. We want to talk a little bit about that. So when Jesus sweeps the

church in his arms and his gospel becomes everything to all that they are and they do together that church abounds love more and more. And the people the people of Philippi already loved this this Ashanista and this prison guard and probably this demon possessed girl they already had love and Paul didn't say y'all need to start loving. Now he said I pray that your love abounds more and more. And the church that abounds and love more and more is a church that becomes a place where people of all backgrounds can come and find Jesus. A place where he isn't hard to find because barriers aren't built but destroyed. A place where everyone is so low before Jesus that he's really easy to see. Where there's no competitive spirit other than that than outdoing one another in honor. Where there's no reason to not confess sin because no sin is shocking and no sin is unforgivable and Jesus is ready to cleanse us all. Where you don't find a retractive and "real help and prayer follows," a place where others weep with you and rejoice with you, a place where honesty is so common that it's shocking, where true friendships blossom and grow, sustained by the Spirit, where God's glory is the goal, and everyone is so happy in Him that they can barely stand it, and more and more people who are looking for Jesus are finding Him and being rejoiced over and rejoiced with. Well, who doesn't need that place? I know when I find a church like that, I find a little home, you know, I find a place where I can rest, and how is this place created? John 3.27 says, "The person cannot receive anything, even one thing, unless it's given Him from heaven," and I believe we have to pray this into existence. I believe it's something that we have to, we have to, it's something only God can give us. The Philippian church was a loving church, but Paul still prayed that their love would abound more and more, and that's interesting. Why would Paul pray that their love would abound more and more? I believe it's because for the Christian, there's no end to growth in love. Sometimes we feel like I'm a pretty loving person, but deep down there, there's no end to that growth in love, and Romans 3.18 says, "Oh, no one, anything except to love each other. Love is the debt will always owe, and the one cost will never regret paying." And it only makes sense that Christian love can constantly grow. Think about this, think of the love of God, the deep love of God, because deep in God's heart is the love so big that it can never be exhausted. It can never be fully plumbed, even as we spend all eternity with Him, we will never, ever have a day where we don't feel loved. We'll always find new oceans of His love that we've never noticed before. Every moment of our eternal existence with Him will be a new moment of such profound love that we will never not feel ever loved again. We'll never,

for one second, His presence think, "You know, I need more from you, God, because His love will feel all." We'll never say, "I don't feel loved today. I don't feel loved right now, because His love is covenantal. It's forever and ever. And when He joins us together, as He has joined us together, He infuses us with His sustaining love so that as we live together, outsiders look at our love and think, "Where in the world did that come from?" And I see that. I see that in this church. I see that in other church. I see that different places we go. Sometimes the one thing I said earlier, the one thing that jumps out is how those people love. Those people have a love. Those people love each other. Those people love their community. Those people love the Lord, and it's a love that jumps out. And we get to tell them the answer when they say, "Where does that love come from? How can you love somebody like that?" So I'm going to finish up this little part before I move on to some things about Ukraine and just say, "How does this love abound?" Well, we know this love doesn't abound by chance. How does it abound more and more? Verse 9 says, "That your love may abound in knowledge and discernment." So it's not just feelings. It's informed feelings. So this is an important thought here. The word knowledge means a personal knowledge of God. Well, he's saying here, "Once you grow in knowledge, a personal knowledge of God, a mature grasp of the gospel, seeing Jesus from cover to cover in his Word. And as we grow closer to God personally, as we each grow closer to God personally in our own personal life, that always has an impact corporately. You know, sometimes you can just tell when somebody's walking a little closer to the Lord in church. You just feel more love from that person. You can just feel God working in their life. You can tell when people are growing closer to the Lord and growing in knowledge in the Lord. And the more we know God, the more reason we find to love God. And that love pushes us closer to him, which in turn, pushes us closer to each other. And Jesus said, "The greatest commandment was to love God and love your neighbor." And I believe the degree to which you love God. We can't love our neighbor if we're not walking with the Lord. I mean we all know this. We know that love for somebody else and for their soul and for their well-being or for anything isn't natural. It's something that comes from God and the love for each other springs from the first, springs from the love for we have for God. Oh it's storming out there isn't it? So have you ever noticed that the most godly people in your life are also the most loving people in your life? Sometimes even you see somebody is the loving person. All you can think of, man that person,

that person has a good walk with the Lord. And there's no accident because when Jesus changes the heart and grows and cultivates the heart by His Spirit, He creates a love that can't help but move toward others. And this is that gospel culture I'm talking about. And this is the gospel culture that shapes our platforms in Ukraine. God has allowed us to start many platforms in Ukraine. But you can go somewhere and do a whole lot of things just by doing them. But when God puts a special love in your heart for people, the love is for Him. And the love is to help people because of Him and to hopefully share the gospel. So it's funny how God intertwines all this love and the work that He has us to do. And I find myself praying for myself and for my teammates for one thing in particular. God give me your heart. Give me your heart because that's not a natural, it's not our natural heart. And God I want a heart like yours because we cannot reach the loss without having a heart of love for God that in turn creates a heart for people. So the war right now as we were saying earlier too, the war seems to be getting worse and worse. It's interesting how this thing started. It's supposed to be like a three day special operation by Russia. They said they'd be done in three to five days, maybe a week. Here we are four and a half years into it. One thing that surprises me is when I went to Ukraine and so many people said, "Why are you going to go over there? The war is going to be over soon. That's can't be what God has you to do." And oh I didn't know but who would have dreamed four and a half years later it's still be going. That we'd still be able to do what we're doing and that they'd be growing. What we're doing is actually growing. One of the big problems in Ukraine right now is the fact that as Russia continues to bomb I think Ukraine's about the size of Texas and we've had around 225,000 missiles, drones and rockets dropped on us over there. 225,000. That's a lot. And what that's done is destroyed a lot of homes and as they destroy, if you look at some of these cities sometimes I post some of this stuff with like different multiple cities that have been destroyed and they're just, they're just piles of rubble anymore. Well as those people have been pushed and had to evacuate and been pushed out and other people, we're talking about millions of people today more people are getting pushed. Today more people have to evacuate. So what we're having a hard time finding is housing and jobs for just a mom with children or just a simple family. So when you end up moving millions of people there's not millions of homes. For example if you, if you, we have just say, I don't know how many people in more county. Anybody

know? 100,000. Well let's just, we have a lot of people moving from Tennessee. Let's just bring another 20,000 into more county. Well we don't have the homes for 20,000 people. You sure don't have the jobs for 20,000 people. I mean you think, well my son or my family member can't even find a job right now. How are you going to find jobs for 20,000 more people? This is kind of one of the crises that we face in Ukraine and have for the last few years. So it's, that's one of our big, one of Ukraine's big issues. So when we think about bombs and explosions and schools getting blown up and they keep on regularly happening, it's, that's one part of the pain but the other part of the pain is survival. Just survival. I have families down in Kearsan that we work with and I don't know how much y'all are familiar with the geography over there but Kearsan is in the like the southeast corner of Ukraine and Russia had taken over Kearsan the, the area, the region of Kearsan and Ukraine pushed them back. But now Russia has set there and bombed and bombed and bombed and at any average day there's 200, 250 drones over the city, the main city of Kearsan. So it's hard to There's some people walking, they bomb the people. So they call it the human safari. And I have so many friends there that mothers with children who've left Kearsong, left the danger and gone to West Ukraine and you think, wow, that's good, that's great. Well, it's not long when they move back. You say, why in the world would a single mom and their children move back into a place like that? Because they can't survive in West Ukraine. The market around the world has gone up. As we see things in America-- I pay $8 a gallon for diesel. We pay $6 a gallon for milk. And people make an average of $500 a month, 20 bucks a day or so. So the economy is really upside down. So you take a mother and children who are poor, they come out of a bad place.

They think they're going to go somewhere and hope to find help. And it's hard to find help. That the help has kind of been exhausted. And we find we can't fix all these problems. I can't go over there and fix all these things. But God has given us the ability to help a lot of people in a lot of ways. And the first way that He allowed us to start helping people, as I've talked to you before, was humanitarian aid. And I don't know if I told you this story. If I did, bear with me. I'll tell you again. Because for me, it's such an amazing God story. There's so many amazing God stories that one day I hope to write a book, maybe name it God stories. You know, but we've been holding humanitarian aid now for four and a half years. And it was a year and a half ago I was driving up the road and I was going out to the Donbass area. It was the last money we had for diesel. We had been giving money maybe for camps or for our youth center. But nobody else was really giving any money for humanitarian aid for to support our diesel. So I was just driving along thinking about that. And I said, God, you know, it's maybe the time for holding humanitarian aids over. It's-- this is the last thing I feel. I don't have any more money. I don't see any more money in the future.

So if you want me to park this truck and you don't want me to do humanitarian aid anymore, it's OK. I'm OK with that. Maybe you want me to do more ministering in other ways. But you can have to show me what you want me to do. Maybe you'll send me home. No, we're kind of in the dark, you know? And I went 30 minutes and a buddy of mine called me. They have a different organization and they said-- Eric, can you-- I need you to take 150 generators down to Kearsong. I said, sure. I said, y'all always pay for your fuel, but I need you to pay for your fuel upfront because I don't have any more money for fuel. He said, really, what's going on? I shared with him what I just said. And he said, oh, now these people bring in these big container ships full of medical supplies. And I carry this stuff to the front lines. The crematores is at Parisia, down to Kearsong, these places that nobody else will go. And so I'm moving a lot of stuff for them and they pay for all their fuel. But I said, I don't have any more money for fuel. And he said, well, I'm going to call you back. 30 minutes later, he didn't call me back. The founder of that organization called me back. Eric, what's going on?

Well, if I shared the story again, I shared it with God, I shared it with Alexi, now I'm sharing it with Jared. So anyway, he said, well, who's going to take this stuff, where we need it to go? I said, well, I don't know, that's not my problem. If God shuts the door, I can't open that door. And he was quiet for a few minutes. And he said, well, who's going to take the food that you take? I said, well, I don't know, that's not my problem either. He got quiet for another minute. And he said, we're just going to pay all your diesel from now on. He said, how much is your diesel a month? I said, now he's going to change his mind. I said, it costs around $3,000 a month for the diesel that I run this truck. And he said, all right, we're going to pay it. They faithfully paid that diesel every month. And when I left Ukraine, he said, you're going home for good. I said, no, I'm just going home for a month or so. He said, all right. He said, because you're the biggest thing that we're supporting right now in Ukraine. Because a lot of the other things that they were doing have fallen off. He said, but he said, we're going to stand with you. We're going to stand with you. We want to see this keep going. So that's a God's story. I don't know how you look at it. But for me, that was just the bank coming in.

You can't make that stuff up. You can't do that. You can't talk to God about something with an hour have all your diesel paid for the future. So anyway, so our humanitarian aid continues. To be honest with you, in August, I went into Donbass. And as you drive in there, the main road going in there, sometimes. But they still drop bombs and drones and stuff into the nets and they still get through and this road is a very dangerous road. It's been dangerous for a long time but the last time I went down there, there were so many blown up trucks and cars along the road and in the road. Went into Slaviansk and I think we had about 10 cabs, 10 glad bombs come in the city that day and I just felt it was time to not go there anymore. You know sometimes wisdom speaks. Sometimes wisdom says okay that's enough, not just for our safety but for the people. As long as you enable people to stay home they're not going to evacuate and we have a very cold winter coming and our electrical system, our whole electrical grid is on a thread right now. We're already trying to buy electric from other European countries around so they're calling for a very hard winter, a cold winter, a dark winter with no power. So to help these people, to show them love is to stop giving, to stop enabling them to be in a place that's not good for them. So this forces them to say okay nobody's bringing this food. We're not getting aid, it's getting worse here. They come up with the idea they need to go. So we're praying for these people. We were feeding 1000 families with children in that area. We got down to about 200 so that shows us that people are moving, people are evacuating. So that's actually comforting for us. Where they're going, I don't know, it's not our job to fix everybody's, all their problems. But anyway that's our humanitarian aid. The resources that we have, the Mennonites make a lot of these food boxes and at the beginning of the war they were, there was a family over there, they're Americans but they've been over their 20 years and this family, the children are now in their 20s and they've been there, they know the language, they said at the beginning of the war they said we're gonna make 500 or 1000 food packets. We'll raise the money and make 500,000 food packets and take somebody on the front line, take five some villages, find some people who need some help and their dad challenged them and said why don't you make 5,000? Let's do 5,000. Just step it up a little bit. They just passed 3 million.

We don't know what we're doing when we start something. So if we got put something on your heart to start something, start it in faith. We sometimes, we don't want to start it till we have that thing planned out all the way through because that's where we're comfortable knowing that all we're going to have all the resources, we're going to have all the finances, we're going to have all the people and but that's not how God works. He never does work that way. So that's our humanitarian aid. It's still moving along doing great and y'all know about our camps. Oh man, that's such a such a powerful story. You know, when we, the fake camps first started, I came into, I was starting to fellowship with the church there in Harkheve and they, they were just the lovingest, they were just the lovingest church. We still work every day together and they said, I said, man, I said, somebody called me and said, they know where we work along the front line and they have a property we can use if we, if we want to, to bring kids for it and make a camp and I think we need to make a camp and my buddy said Eric, you need more than a property to have a camp. You need a like an organizer, you need a program, you need money. I said, oh, I said, well, let's pray about it. He said, he looked at me funny. He said, okay. So I prayed about it for a week. In the end of a week, we had a work like a, like a director, we had a program and we had the money. So I went back to, I was excited. I said, man, I said, we got a program, we have a director, we have the money and a place and he looked at me like a deer in the headlights and he said, I was actually praying against it. He said, we're so busy. I don't know how we're going to do this, but he wanted to, but he didn't know how and he was overwhelmed with the war, overwhelmed with all that he had to do and overwhelmed with it. How could this ever happen? But it happened. And I think we've had around nine or 10 camps now and hundreds of kids come to these camps. But of course, when you have a camp, we take these kids from the front line orphans and fatherless and kids that are hurting and you take them and you have a camp. I got a static in my ear. I'm sorry. You take them to a camp and you show them love for 10 days. You create 10 days full of gains and fun and you're not there trying to convert those kids. You want to introduce Jesus to them in this time, but you want to show them love. You want them to be able to trust you. You want them to, you want to build a relationship. And that's what I was talking about with this and everything we're You can't run up in there and just put your finger in a bunch of people's face and read 'em the Romans' road

and if they don't accept you, just walk down the road, try somebody else. So we have to create this environment that they trust us and they believe us and that they find love. And so that's what we do in these camps. And when we went back home, I said, well we can't just have a camp and come home and not ever speak to these kids again, we need to create a place for them to come because schools are a mess. There are some metro schools. Most kids are doing school online though. It's mostly online. So they don't have the friendships. We had one little boy, 11 years old at camp this year and his name was Yuri. And he, when the war started in Harky, he lived in Northern Harky, and his father took him and his mother to a bunker. And his mother and his sister to a bunker and they stayed in that bunker for 12 days. Father came and got him and somehow helped them to get out of the city and to the border and they ended up going to like Germany and Poland, like Bulgaria, Italy. A lot of these European countries would provide a program for 30 days. Maybe a hotel, food, everything for 30 days but in 30 days you had to have it figured out what you're gonna do next or how you're gonna do things.

Well, most people like a mom with two kids in 30 days, she hasn't learned the language of that country. She doesn't know how to find things. She can't work at a gas station. So she moves on to another country that has a program. They did this for multiple countries, ended up back in Ukraine, ended up in a village near Kiev, no power, no water, ended up back in Harky, where they had left. And during this time, the father had to go to war and the father was killed. So here he has come to our camp. He had a birthday on the train on the way to camp. So we celebrate his birthday. I didn't know all this story though at the time. But I was going somewhere with that hope. I said all that to say something. But anyway, he'll come back to him maybe later. But anyway, this little boy, it's kids like him. How do you come back home and just send him back to that? Oh, I know what I was gonna say. I asked him, I said, "So you got friends?" And he said, "Yeah, I got like, I said, "How many friends?" "I don't know, I got about six great friends." I said, "Do they live in your area?" He said, "Oh, none of them even live in this country." He said, "I know I'm all online." So that's what the kids are growing up to. So now that kids are growing up, social media wasn't that big when that war started over there.

You couldn't find anybody that was like, this LGBTQ thing didn't exist over there. Actually this year, they just drug all these LGBTQ flags out in the streets in Harky, in Burnham, in June, because that's what their opinion is toward the Pride month and the world's view of the Pride month, and they're seeing it start in their culture. And it's coming through those cell phones, through the social media. And that's where a lot of problems are growing in. So when you have these children who are growing up online school and being raised by social media, being raised by a fear of war, they need Jesus. Everybody needs Jesus, but they need Jesus. And how can we show them Jesus, the love them? So we started our youth centers, and in these youth centers now, we have so many platforms inside the youth center. We teach them guitar and piano, singing lessons, English. We have, they can just come and just read books, they can come and get help with the schoolwork, they can come and get counseling, if they want to talk about something. You'd be surprised how many kids just want to find somebody that cares that they can talk to. That's amazing. And you start hearing their stories, and you can't hardly bear it. And so, of course, I think we baptized 16 to 20 youth this year. And when a kid comes to faith in Christ,

we never try to get a kid to say a prayer. We want that kid to come to us and say, "I believe," and in their own heart, in a decision they make with God themselves and believe. And then we have a small discipleship program to put them through, to help them make sure they're understanding what they're believing. 'Cause sometimes you can get caught up in emotions, you can caught up in a message, you can get caught up in just the loving people and say, "Okay, I want to jump on this train, but you know what you're believing." So we have a short discipleship program for them where they can really understand and they get baptized. And now we have, like each week, we pray have 25 to 30 young people who voluntarily come to a home group Bible study. And so this isn't like, okay, it's entertainment, it's pizza, it's something that, it's Bible study. And we ask them, like when we finish with a book, we ask them, "What books do y'all come together?" So we, they wanted to go through Roman's next and then now I think they're the first Corinthians. So they're really, I see God working in people's lives. And I told some of the staff, I said, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna win the youth of Harkyve, but it's not gonna be us as leaders, it's gonna be these kids that go out and reach. We now minister to the one youth center in Harky,

we minister around 150 kids, 150 youth now there. And we have a main youth service on Saturday. And then during the week, we just have a lot of different programs for the kids where they can come at any time during the day to spend time with friends or to get help in any way they can or to be part of a program, one of our platforms there. So many of them are learning instruments. And of course we use some of the children in like the worship team in church, but you can't use all these kids there. But they wanna be involved somehow. So we started worship nights at the youth center like every Thursday, every other Thursday. And this is a time when the young people can get involved in using their instruments in worship and spending time praising the Lord. So we're just always creating a way to help people, to see Jesus, help people to use their talents. Another program, another platform we have, we have, so we have humanitarian aid, we have our camps, we have our youth center. Another one that we have is, we feed 250 orphans in the hierarchy of community every month. Of course we feed people all over that country, but for me it's a special to feed these, to target groups sometimes like orphan groups. This lady that runs that department, she was down in Crimea, which of course has been taken over by Russia.

And she escaped after it was, after that area had been taken over by Russia, she escaped, got back into Russia, went up around the Belarus and came in to Harkiev. And she came to our church. It's funny how God brings people places. It's amazing how God, God's people around and brings them right to your doorstep. This woman has such a heart for people, has a heart for young people. And she has like a degree or some study in psychology. So she's able to go into these homes where these orphans are living because the orphans, you can't put them in one building. That's illegal to put that many children, how's that many children in one place because it's a target. And so they create like a foster system, like whether it's a grandmother that can keep the orphan, whether it's a family of a friend of the family that keep the orphan or whether it's just somebody that wanted to take the orphans. But you can't always trust every situation. So she's going in and she always every month she's working with the children. She's working with the people they're with so that they make sure that everything's safe and everybody's okay. And a lot of these orphans are the ones we bring to camps and are in our youth center. And so we're seeing God change their lives in amazing ways.

Another platform we still do is we've done in the beginning is evacuations, which we're not, I'm personally, and our personal like team in Harkiev is not involved with evacuations as much now, but we have helped to create teams to do evacuations. So we've helped to purchase vans and other teams and they raise their own money for the fuel for evacuating people through churches in Ukraine. So that's an ongoing need every week. There's not a day where someone doesn't need to be, people don't need to be evacuated. So then we also have the working with soldiers. Once you do humanitarian aid for a couple years and you know your resources, you know your routes and everything, you can condense everything down to where you don't have to be in the truck for 30 days a month. I've got it down to about 10 days a month. And so that leaves me 2/3 of my month left to do other things, which I enjoy doing, which we do a lot of work with the soldiers. So we have one group of soldiers in one camp outside of Harkiev area, we get 400 new soldiers every 50 days that just did that one facility with this one chaplain I work with. So that gives us another 400 people to pour into every 50 days. So you got 50 days to listen to their stories, you got 50 days to talk to them, to show them love

and to share Jesus with them. So for me, that's a very special ministry over there because these soldiers are people just like you and me. They're not warriors, they didn't go spend a whole bunch of years in the military, they haven't fought before, they were probably a mechanic the week before. You know, they were just snatched up and forced to go to war and so many of them are hurting, many of them don't want to leave their home. But they have, you know, I think I've told you before Well, some say, "Well, they made me come fight." And some say, "Man, I just really want to keep our freedom." And I fight for my family, my children. Now when you ask them, they have a new one. If we don't fight against them, now we're going to fight with them later. They know that if they don't defeat Russia today, they're going to fight with Russia tomorrow. So that's their reality. So some of them really oppose fighting and go into war, and some of them embrace it, because they know that that's the future. So we go to a lot of these soldiers, as they're camped out in the woods. They love to cook, and they cook for us, and then we go in there. And the first couple of times I go to meet these guys, I don't share the gospel with them. They call me a man of God. They call me American.

They call me a lot of things. And they know who I am. But I don't beat them over the head with the gospel when I come in. We just spend a couple of times going to eating potatoes or eating some meat or something. And you slowly break it in. And these guys really respect you for respecting their space and showing them love and care. And they say, "Why are you here? "What are you doing? You're an American. "What are you doing over here in the middle of this?" And that's that you can open a door. You can share with them exactly why you're there. So that's one thing, that's one platform I really enjoy also. But the other one is encouraging pastors and other chaplains along the front line, because a lot of our humanitarian aid work is done through churches and pastors and chaplains. And these guys that haven't left their positions on the front line, the position of their church, the position of their home, the position of wherever they're at. And they're gonna stay there until the last person's there. And that's commendable. 'Cause there's a lot of pastors that have just left and found refuge in America or found refuge in France or another country and just got away from it all and shook it off. But some of these guys have really stayed and it was their choice or it was what God put in their heart

to do. So it's really important, in my opinion, as you go in these areas and work with these people to spend a day or two with them, to cook something over the fire with them, to drink tea with them, to ask them how they're doing, to talk to them, to pour into them and to encourage them because they really carry in burdens that we can't imagine. And then I get to speak in churches regularly. Twice a month, I'm asked to speak in different churches. And so that's a real encouragement to me. As I've told you before, I believe that just being an American anytime, if you ever go anywhere in the rest of the world, you are a platform when you show up because you are an American. Why the world looks an American is the way they do. I don't know, but you will always be an American. And so when you go somewhere, take, for instance, if some of you young people wanted to come help in our camp, these kids be fighting over seats in that camp because they're going to be some American girls there. They just love Americans. There's an American there. There's a God there or something. It's like, that's how they look at it. They look at you highly. So it gives you a platform. And I think I told you before also, I can go in a place with 1,000 people and be with another chaplain.

That chaplain speak. You hear people mumbling and talking and people looking at the dog or whatever and talking to their kid. But when I speak, they don't, they're just quiet as a mouse. They want to know what the American has to say. So it's very important for us to have the gospel in our heart. And so I don't know what time it is here. We have time a little more time? OK? So one other point I wanted to make, I was talking to one of the sisters earlier about was coincidences. One day I was driving along and I was drove out to Eastern Ukraine. Trucks wanted to find everything's good. I went out and there's that one road I was talking about earlier. When you're on that road, you don't want to break down. You don't want to have any problems. You want to get in and get out. You don't want to get held up at all because those drones are watching all the time and they're targeting moving vehicles, especially humanitarian aid vehicles or military vehicles. And got back to the house that night. I was so happy. God got me home safely. I said, my prayers, Lord, thank you so much. Went home, went to sleep. The next day I had to get my truck and run across town

and deliver a couple pallets of stuff for the orphans. And got in my truck, crank the truck up, let it warm up a minute. And as soon as I put that thing in gear, went to pull out on the road, couldn't turn that steering wheel. I said, boy, I have a power steering line. And I said, what are the chances that that thing was going to break in the parking spot at the house? I've been on the road for nine days. Well, maybe it's coincidence. Another buddy of mine, he was in the Jewish Ocean, we used to do a lot of work in the church in the Jewish ocean, and now you can't even get in there. But anyway, he was alcoholic most of his life, and he went to rehabilitation, he got saved, he's working with the church out there, he's helping us with distribution, he's about 65 years old. And we were evacuating the church in the Jewish ocean, we were evacuating people I had to just go for it. And I said, again, I said, it's time for you to go too. He said, where am I gonna go here? Me and my wife, we lived in this town all our life. We don't know anywhere to go, we don't know the city, we don't know how to go somewhere in this country. How do we find a house somewhere? How do we go? I said, I don't know, but you got to go. It's getting hotter and hotter in here, you're not gonna make it much longer.

He got a thinking about it. I said, I tell you what, we have a warehouse in Harkam, where we do humanitarian aid work. And I'm gonna give you a job. And he said, what's the salary? I said, I don't have one for you yet. He said, well, that's not too promising. I said, buddy, I said, the best I got. And he taught his wife about it. They finally said, yeah, we'll go, we'll go. We're trusting you. I said, don't trust me, trust the Lord. They got into this apartment and the windows were all open and everything. They got in and we put the stuff in. They closed the windows, went back to Drew Scruff, got to get the rest of their stuff. We came back to Harkam, it was about a three hour drive. And he got back home and they expect this. I was thinking smelling that apartment. They didn't smell that first 'cause all the windows were open and everything was smelling fresh and they got to asking around the neighbors and they were saying, yeah, well, you know, someone died and decomposed in that apartment. I said, you can't stay there. We got to find another apartment. So we found another apartment two days later, a drone hit his apartment in Drew Scruffa.

And you think, wow, that's a coincidence. And then, probably, I think it was July. When I went into Slaviansk, the road I go into to one place that I drop off, on my way into the city, a drone hit in the road where I had to drive. A glide bomb hit in the city on the same block that I had to unload the second stop. And I said, huh, it's funny, I'm just a little slow. What a coincidence. I start seeing these children that come from all over East Ukraine and end up in our youth center except in Christ, and I say, what a coincidence. At some point, coincidences aren't coincidences anymore. It's not a coincidence anymore. And God helps us to rest our trust in him to guide us, to be with us, to supply our needs, to rest in his sovereignty. 'Cause if we don't have that, folks, we ain't got nothing. And sometimes, I know it's harder to see it in more county, North Carolina, sometimes, because we do depend sometimes on our finances that we have to get us out of a problem, or we don't see it sometimes. I lived here all my life. I know it's sometimes harder to see. You say, how can you talk about all these things? I don't see this in my life. But it's there, it's there. Sometimes, we just don't see it.

We just trust our own resources to get us out of these problems. So anyway, I thank God so much that he cares about us and that he's with us. I wanna mention one other thing that we have. We have our team in Pakistan that's still working. And that's kind of an amazing little ministry. That little amazing ministry started in. We work, we just did a big thing a couple months ago with the blind and the illiterate. We bought a bunch of audio Bibles and they had a meeting and had everybody together, ate some chicken and rice and played worship music for a while, shared the gospel and gave them all audio Bible so that they can listen to the word of God. 'Cause the illiterate, people can't read, blind people can't read. So we were still working in the brick factories, working there, trying to get in there once a month and also the youth in the area where they live. They gather the youth every week for their house. So somebody gives me personally $300 a month and I use that $300 a month. I send that straight to Pakistan. That covers their rent, that covers their food, that covers their gas and that covers what they use for ministry. That one, 300 bucks. And we need a little more there.

So I ask you for your prayers to help us with, I'd like to raise another 6,000 a year, that's 500 a month. enable them to do the ministry a little more. So I'm going to close with one thought. This is a thought. It's been on my mind for the last couple months. I shared it a little bit this week with some people, but when we see this level of suffering, does God care? I think everybody in the world has thought of one question. Any other question? I believe everybody in the world has thought of one question. If God is a loving God, why does he let bad things happen? I think we can all agree that thought was throughout my mind at some point in time. It's a good question. And I say, well, you know, evil came in the world, the fall of man, and I like to use the expression of the fog. You know, you've been out on a thick foggy morning. That fog touches everything. You're in the fog. That fog is in you. That fog gets in the cracks. That fog, you leave your window cracked about that much. See if the hole inside of your car isn't wet. It gets everywhere. It gets under the car. It gets everywhere. That fog is everywhere. That's how evil is. You live in evil in this world. Evil touches everything. And we can understand that bad things happen because of evil. But what about things that God controls? What about a tsunami that comes along, kills 1,000 people? And someone just said, yeah, we prayed our wedding was going to be Saturday. We're going to have rain, but we prayed and that God moved the rain. But why didn't God move the rain when it killed 1,000 people? These are big questions. And as Christians, I feel like we need to answer more than God's in control. God's sovereign. God knows what's best. Who's I think about that question? And I deal with people who are suffering with these issues. I'm not a doctor. I'm not. I don't have a lot of money. I don't have any money. So how can I help people with big questions? And I think about what I believe. And at the center of Christianity, there's a cross. And on that cross, Jesus died as we know. He claimed to be God. And I believe he was God. I believe I can prove to you he was God. If you listen, if someone will listen, some people just don't want you to prove it to them, but it's pretty easy to prove. But my question is, what was God doing on a cross? The creator of the world, the giver of life, what was he doing on a cross? And at the very least, it shows me that he was not cold and distant from our suffering, but became part of our suffering. And it wasn't playing bee. That's amazing. That's the simple truth that we believe. But for me, sometimes that hits me hard when I'm dealing with people who

are suffering. And I start thinking about that God chose. That's how he created us. I created everything before the foundations of the world. He knew he was going to come and die. He knew he was going to enter our suffering because he loved us. And he wanted to spend eternity with us. He designed us to spend to live with him for eternity. And so for me, for hurting people, the only thing you can do is help people understand that God does care enough to where he came in this world to fix the problem and that he designed us to spend eternity with him. And it's an amazing love, loving creator, a loving savior who came into our humanity. And that's about all I've got. So I would like to open just for discussion. If anybody has any questions, because a lot of times I know someone will come and talk to me and it looks like other people might want to talk to me. I don't want to interrupt that person. I've heard before that people, I had questions for you. But if anybody had any questions about what we've talked about today or about our ministry or anything, I'd like to take questions for a few minutes. If you don't, it's okay too. Yeah. Or did you take a team or did you find your team? Did God bring your team to you once you got there? So I went to Ukraine by myself and I was in Romania for two weeks at the border. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know anybody in Ukraine. I really still didn't know where Ukraine was and I was at the border. I didn't know the language. I was wondering how this was is going to work, and I've made I say, "God, if this doesn't work, how does it go home?" This is going to be easy just to go home. I feel like maybe you want me to go this way. So anyway, I was there two weeks helping with some refugee housing in a woman in Ukraine called me. Don't know this woman from Adam. And she spoke perfect English. And she said, "I heard you an American. I heard you wanted to help. I heard you were a Christian." And she said, "We're a Christian family. My father helped to build 30 churches in East Ukraine.

And we have a lot of resources. We need to get to East Ukraine, but we need some help. We need a driver. We need fuel money. Is there any way you could help us?" I said, "I'll come see you tomorrow." And that's the first team I had. God gave me a team. God brought it, put a team in my lap. I needed them, and they needed me. It kind of worked both ways. And so we started working together. And to this day, me and the father of that family still worked together. And the mother of that family has cancer, and she probably won't make it another couple of weeks. But by working with this family, them introducing me to different churches, different pastors, that's how I built other teams. So the people I worked with today in East Ukraine, the people I worked with in the beginning, I didn't need to start finding everything. And I've realized so many other organizations were trying to bring teams and trying to bring people over there and trying to get them accustomed and trying to work with them. And I know one guy, he went through a hundred drivers, a hundred different volunteer drivers. They didn't know I'd get along. And I realized that the Ukrainian people

know their people, their culture, and everything better than anybody. And it's so hard to try to get people to come over. So I never even tried. God never even opened that door. So we just work with the people that are already there. The people, and just the other things, Ukrainians want to do something. They want to help their own people. But most of them don't have money. They don't have a building. They don't have a way to make a platform. And they don't have a window to throw it out of. They don't have nothing. So it's hard for them. So when you come along and say, can we work together? They love it. It's like Nika, who runs our youth center. She worked online for a design company and out of Germany or something. She did design work. And I said, Nika, you have a heart for the kids. I see you have a love for the kids. You are like a perfect person to run the youth center. And she just started crying. She said, that's a dream of mine. I never believed that dream would ever come true. So God has just allowed us to build things there. And the amazing thing is, is how many people He brought to me to speak English, because hardly anybody speaks English there.

So God brought me people that can work as a team. This big English, we can communicate. There are a few people that I don't communicate. That I don't speak English with. So that's why God blessed me with some amazing translators that can translate as fast as I talk. So it's a bit of miracle, to be honest with you. It's been a miracle. Yeah. How much does the Ukrainian language have you learned since you've been there? Not much, because I learn mostly Russian. Because in East Ukraine, they speak mostly Russian. So when you get back to Central or Western Ukraine, you speak Russian. Then they're upset with you. Because it's not politically correct. But most people in East Ukraine still speak Russian. So I pick up a lot. And actually, my translators teach me Russian. Because I said, why am I going to learn Ukrainian? People speak Russian all over the world. Nobody else speaks Ukrainian in the world. Like it's a one country language kind of thing. I mean, it's kind of like Estonia, Lithuania. It's a Slavic countries. They speak their language plus Russian. Nobody else in the world speaks Estonian. So I thought for me, it's better to learn politically incorrect as it is over there.

It's better for me to learn Russian to be able to use it universally. And I can get away with that as a foreigner. I can get away with that. They frown on people over there. They encourage people to speak Ukrainian. I think they made a law now. In public, you have to speak Ukrainian. If you don't, I'm thinking it happens. But I really appreciate y'all standing with us in what we're doing. Because what we're doing is something that's of God. And for me, God bringing us together was of God. It's just all a God thing. No coincidences, right? Well, thank y'all for letting me share today. [BLANK_AUDIO]