DAY 00 OF MISSION: ARMENIA 2018
After about 20 hours of travel time we have finally arrived safe and sound in Armenia! We’re all tired but very excited for the coming days.
After about 20 hours of travel time we have finally arrived safe and sound in Armenia! We’re all tired but very excited for the coming days.
By God’s grace, we completed our last day of ministry in Armenia for this year! We had a long day—two churches services in different parts of the city and two visitations in eight hours—but we feel blessed by all the opportunities we had for worship, fellowship, teaching, and encouraging. Pastor Joseph was urged to speak at both services on the same topic he preached about last Sunday: Running the Race. It’s a message all believers need to hear.
We did one visitation en route to the afternoon service, in response to an urgent plea to pray with a family going through a hard time, and the second visit was on our way back to the hotel, when we dropped by someone’s workplace to give some words of encouragement.
We are here for one more full day and will probably have a couple more brief meetings but mostly we’ll be preparing our suitcases for the journey home and trying to rest, so this will be our last report. Once we’re settled in back home, we’ll organize our photos into a slide show for those who may be interested.
Once again, we appreciate your prayers over the past three weeks and ask that you hang in there with us for the next 48 hours. We look forward to returning home but will definitely miss our beloved friends here.
Today we were out for about seven hours and visited seven homes, meeting with a total of 28 people (including 3 small children). We can’t possibly go into detail about each of these visits but, in each home, we listened as struggles were shared, we offered spiritual guidance as needed or requested, we prayed with the families, we left them devotional books and we offered practical help as we were able to. The needs are endless so we always pray for wisdom and the direction of the Holy Spirit.
If you have followed our past mission trips, you may recognize some faces in our photos and videos. We also met some new people today, including a dear 96-year-old man who was an Armenian hero in the Second World War.
Though we were tired as we headed back to the hotel, we were in good spirits and our group began joyfully singing hymns. What a blessing to serve together in God’s kingdom!
When we reached our rooms, we found that Emmy had kept her promise to meet with the young woman who lost her legs in a car accident (she travelled 60km to see her) and give her our literature and some help. Unfortunately, our time here is limited and we cannot visit everyone who would like to meet us, so we are grateful for faithful friends who will continue to do outreach and discipleship long after we are gone, working on their own as well as in cooperation with each other.
Please pray for Pastor Joseph as he prepare to speak at two different churches tomorrow. We look forward to the times of worship and fellowship. God bless you all.
Since our first visit to Sayat Nova a few years ago, we are always eager to return to this village, about half an hour southwest of Yerevan. Pastor Joseph has baptized a few people from that village and it was nice to reconnect with one of the families and make some new acquaintances. One lady in particular had sent word a couple of weeks ago that she wanted to meet with Pastor Joseph and she was able to join us with her daughter. It was a good opportunity to answer some great questions about what it means to be born-again, about heaven and hell, etc. It also gave us joy to see that Annie, a young teen we have taken photos with in past years, is still faithfully reading her Bible and sharing her faith. You’ll see in the photos that Sayat Nova is one of many poor areas in Armenia, with challenging living conditions. However, the believers there inspire us with their joy and gentleness.
The rest of the afternoon was spent meeting with or talking on the phone with our ministry partners here, making further arrangements for outreach, visitations, book and Bible distribution, and so on. Pastor Joseph was also able to offer some counsel over Skype to someone who had a few questions.
We hope to do some more ministry tomorrow as we also prepare for Sunday, which will be quite busy. After that, we’ll be getting ready for our trip back home on Tuesday morning. Your continued prayers encourage us. Please pray, too, for the people we meet and reach out to.
We had another busy day, driving all over the city and nearby villages to visit families desperate for an encouraging word and God’s touch in their lives. Please pray for these five situations we encountered today:
If we shared a full video compilation of today’s visits and prayers, it would be too long, but we hope that these clips give you a glimpse into the wonderful ways the Lord is working here. We would not be exaggerating if we said we’ve been astounded by how many people have received and are responding to our devotional books and are eagerly reading the Bibles and New Testaments we provide. Thank you for your continued prayers!
Condensing today’s experiences into a few paragraphs seems impossible. We visited three families and witnessed varying degrees of poverty and hardship, but also different levels of understanding about God and the Bible. We tried to visit a couple of others but the timing wasn’t right. In between two of our visits, we stopped at a beautiful Apostolic church for a quick look. There, we met an Armenian couple visiting from Crete and immediately befriended them (Pastor Joseph was born in Greece so the connection was natural). We hope to stay in touch and share our faith with them.
One thing that really struck us today was the contrast between the opulence of the state church and the dire conditions of some of the homes we have visited. It was a good reminder that beautiful buildings are nice to look at but they do not ultimately meet the basic needs—physical and spiritual—of people. We, the Body of Christ, need to be the Church and reach out to those around us. To that end, we’re grateful that we were able to meet with these families, talk to them, pray with them, and leave them books and Bibles. (One family was so embarrassed about their home that they were reluctant to let us take pictures. We were able to take a few, however, and feel it’s important for our supporters to see the needs of those they are helping us help.)
Before heading to the hotel from our last visit, we stopped at another church—an evangelical one—and dropped off more copies of Pastor Joseph’s books and also gave two Bibles to one of the deacons who does a lot of outreach in his community.
Please continue to pray for our work here as we approach the end of our mission trip. Thank you!
In yesterday’s report we mentioned being moved by the faith of a blind gentleman at the church we visited. As if to continue on that theme, today we had the opportunity to be humbled and blessed by a 10-year-old blind boy. Our friend Emmy arranged for us to go to Gor’s home where we also met his mother and 12-year-old sister Annie.
Gor lost his sight from complications during childbirth and dreams of seeing one day. . . and becoming a famous singer! With his sister snuggled close and supporting him, he courageously belted out three songs for us, in Armenian, Italian and Russian. He also plays piano but didn’t want to play for us because he felt ashamed that three keys on the piano are broken. Gor also read to us for a while, mastering difficult words as his fingers swiftly skimmed over the Braille in his book. Surgery for Gor is a possibility but would be very expensive.
When Pastor Joseph engaged him in a conversation about life after death (the article he partially read to us was titled (roughly) “German Scientists Prove There Is Life After Death”), we were pleased by his insightful comments and questions, as well as by how easily he and his sister listed the Ten Commandments when quizzed. Before leaving, we gave copies of our books and also offered a small sum to the family to help with immediate needs. We parted with many hugs, knowing that we will not soon forget this dear family. Please pray for them.
We were in Masiv today, not far from Yerevan, visiting a new-to-us church that invited Pastor Joseph to speak there after their pastor heard about our ministry. There was an 11:00 a.m. service that was somewhat similar to our style of worship back home, and then another one at 2:00 p.m. that was more youth-oriented.
At both gatherings, we enjoyed the time of singing, led by a talented group of young musicians and singers, and then Pastor Joseph preached on Running the Race (based on 2 Timothy 4:7-8). After the second service, the youth were invited to pray out loud and several of them participated. The last person who prayed was a blind gentleman who moved us to tears when he praised God for opening his spiritual eyes. What faith! Just before the meeting ended, Pastor Joseph was asked to do one last thing: pray for a baby boy and his parents.
We had an added blessing today: We met an American missionary (Ron Moreland from Ohio) who is in Armenia for the third time. It was encouraging to hear about his family’s dedication to serving God in missions, Bible translation, etc. in various countries and we hope to stay connected.
When Pastor Joseph and his wife Jessie visited Armenia for the first time in 2008, they never dreamed that they’d return—much less that some combination or other of our family members would be back seven more times. With each mission trip, we’ve learned and grown and we’ve become accustomed to not having a strict, pre-planned itinerary for our time here. Sometimes we have to go with the flow and move when God moves us or rest when He tells us to sit still. Over the years, we’ve also been able to develop a strong network of foot soldiers, so to speak, to do the work of the Great Commission here. The people we partner with are not big-name evangelists, pastors or leaders. They are ordinary people who love the Lord and love people.
Today we had a second and longer visit with our friend Emmy, whom we will share more about in a future edition of our church’s monthly newsletter and on our Facebook page (she has prepared a write-up of how we connected with her). Emmy shared many insights about the challenges families here face and we were moved by the sincere and selfless compassion she has for the needy around her. We were able to equip her with copies of our books and tracts, as well as some emergency funds with which she can help those in dire circumstances. We are thankful for the generous donations that allow us to meet such needs. Please pray that we would continue to have discernment in identifying faithful and trustworthy ministry partners here. Pray, too, for those who work here year-round in difficult conditions.
Tomorrow, the pace will pick up as Pastor Joseph will be speaking twice at a church we’ve never been to before. We look forward to encouraging the group we’ll be meeting there. Thank you for following our trip thus far and for your uplifting comments!
We’re pretty much at the halfway point of our mission trip and today was our longest day, full of exciting and memorable blessings. We left the hotel around 7 a.m. and drove two hours to Vanadzor, the third largest city in Armenia, 128km north of Yerevan. Unlike most of the areas we have seen so far, Vanadzor is lush and green, high in the mountains (we saw snow on a far-off peak!).
In Vanadzor, we met with the congregation from Horom and were also joined by Susanna, a dear sister we have gotten to know over the last couple of years. Our Armenian-reading friends may be familiar with her Facebook group dedicated to sharing chapters from Pastor Joseph’s book, God’s Workshop. She has distributed many, many books for us and today took home a couple of heavy packages of more books to give out. We are thankful for faithful friends who help us reach people we’d never come into contact with ourselves.
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