Day 5 of Mission: Armenia 2016
Today we visited families with very sad stories and troubling circumstances. All the people I have met are loving, kind and giving. They’re always so generous even though they themselves don’t have very much.
Today we visited families with very sad stories and troubling circumstances. All the people I have met are loving, kind and giving. They’re always so generous even though they themselves don’t have very much.
Today we visited different areas of Armenia, though there are beautiful parts of Armenia I was saddened to see that there are even more areas filled with poverty and destruction.
Day 3 was spent visiting families and their friends. Everywhere we visit the people are always so warm and welcoming and very eager to learn. We have many more visits scheduled for the upcoming days.
We started Day 2 by reading 2 Corinthians Chapter 2, which we all agreed was the perfect start to our trip.
We went walking around the area where we are staying and I couldn’t help but notice many elderly women begging for money or trying to sell flowers or fruits from their garden so they could try to raise any sort of money. These women do not have food, family or a place to stay. Many times the families of these women leave Armenia to start new lives in other countries often leaving elderly behind .
Our first day traveling to Armenia! We traveled around 15 hours, from Montreal to Paris, then Paris to Armenia arriving in Yerevan 8:00pm local time.
Pastor Joseph is getting ready for his seventh trip to Armenia this summer, from August 7 to 30, along with his wife Jessie and granddaughter Alexis.
Please pray for our team as they make preparations — and pray for those they will be reaching out to in August.
Local friends, if you’d like to help in some way, we are collecting unused reading glasses (in a variety of strengths) as well as bottles of Tylenol and Advil. These are great needs in Armenia that we are able to easily carry with us. Thank you!
Ann-Margret wrote this article a little over two years ago but we want to share it again as it’s a good introduction to the church in Horom that we work with, as well as our ministry in Armenia in general. Please continue to pray for us!
“Twenty-one people, mostly women, gathered in a shabby room at the back of a one-story building. It looked more like an abandoned warehouse than a church. The floor was covered with curling, overlapped pieces of linoleum. The furniture consisted of a tiny table, a bookcase, and two dozen rickety chairs lining the walls.” MORE
Here is one of several exciting reports we have received from our mission field in Armenia lately. This one is from a pastor we support in a poor farming village:
Our son, having been called up to join the army, had to have a medical examination. As a result, we found out he had some problems with his nasal septum and needed surgery. He had a tough time after the surgery, which lasted over two hours. There were problems with his blood pressure and the doctors had difficulty waking him up. All we could do was pray and, thank God, he is fine now.
There were many doctors, nurses and other workers in that department. They knew we are a Christian family so they had many questions. Many were surprised to hear my son’s name is Timothy, and I told them that if they were Christians and had ever read the Bible, they would have known that his name is taken from the Bible.
All things work together for good to those who love God! My wife and I evangelized those people in the hospital. Several doctors were eager to hear the gospel. There was also a nurse who used to attend a church several years ago but stopped attending because of some problems. At the end of the day, two nurses came to our room and we talked for an hour. They repented and accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.
The whole department knew about us the next day and five more people joined us, all of them very interested in the gospel. We had very blessed days. We shared nine New Testaments and 13 copies of Pastor Hovsepian’s booklet “Does Your Life Have Meaning?”
Please pray for our brothers and sisters in Armenia who faithfully and boldly share the gospel with the people around them.
Our friend Susanna likes Pastor Joseph’s book “God’s Workshop” in Armenian so much that she has created a Facebook group where she will be posting chapters from the book on a regular basis. If you read and understand Eastern Armenian and would like to see these posts, we invite you to join this group… and share your comments on the devotionals!
It happens all the time. You wait for something for weeks or months and then you blink and it’s over. That’s kind of how this year’s mission trip to Armenia feels. Months of preparation went into this trip, a major undertaking even under the best of circumstances, and now Pastor Joseph and Jessie are resting for the night with two full days left in Armenia. They will leave Yerevan on Thursday morning and, crossing over eight time zones, will arrive in Montreal on Thursday afternoon.
The last few days were quite busy for them so we thank you for your prayers for their health and strength. On Friday, Pastor Joseph visited several families in need, accompanied by a couple of the brothers we work closely with in Yerevan. Most of Saturday was spent in a town called Charentsavan, where the local Baptist church was celebrating its 10th anniversary and had asked Pastor Joseph to preach.
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