Home | Blogs | dan's blog

Gross Fly Paper

IMG-1864Minus temperatures are coming this week.  Talking with someone yesterday, I said that I appreciated the wildly different seasons of Ukraine… until I had to work outside when it is –10.  It’s comin!

We are “moving again”. We have in our “possession” 8 cars. Three of them are getting worked on so that we can sell them for a slightly bigger profit. One is for sale. Four are waiting on documentation that was being held up for some reason. We advertised them anyway, and people have been ringing, but we couldn’t sell them until the Ukrainian documents were processed. We just heard that they’ve been processed and we should have those valuable pieces of paper by tomorrow.

We still haven’t taken any of the profit out of the business for other uses… apart from US$600 to pay off an old loan. We have been making on average US$522 profit per car and have sold 7 cars in the past two months. It seems to be working well… but is certainly not without hiccups. (Three days have passed since I started writing this and I’m just about to post it. Over the past three days, we managed to sell four of the cars recently imported. May this sort of progress continue as we trust God and work responsibly.)

We finally moved Petya out of rehab into the adaptation stage! (Petya is the one closest to the mug on the bench.)  It’s been a long time coming. This is the second time he “made the leap” and we sincerely hope it will be the last. He has been with us for 18 months or so now… a considerable long stretch. He’s grown in the Lord though and has actually been lovingly helping the other guys in rehab with sound Biblical advice and wisdom. If he can stay out of the doldrums and keep on prioritizing his relationship with God… I can envision some beautiful days ahead for this young chap. We actually have him working on the cars we’ve been bringing in cleaning them up and even doing some body-work.  I enjoy spending time with him.

I had an interesting Saturday. I listened to a couple who joined our church 12 months ago work through their 25 points of offences they had and things they didn’t like about me and our church. It was quite an adventurous four hours… and I fear rather pointless, in the end. (It felt very much like they just didn’t want to leave the battlefield without firing their guns.) Anyway… it looks as if this imperfect, but special church will continue without them and their two young children. In all sincerity: it is a mercy of God to have people who criticize, judge and reject - from the perspective that it kind of keeps my feet on the ground. For many years now, I’ve been leery about “thinking of myself more highly than I ought.”  And when a lot of people begin to foolishly think I am somehow special… it’s far to easy for me to start thinking that they might just be right.  “Soli Deo Gloria” is not just an old refrain for the theologians. May it be the attitude of my heart, at the very least!

IMG-1867We continue the work on the church building. Yesterday, we had 18 people come out to help with the different tasks.  (I snapped this pic of 6-foot-something Bodya bent over under a big pillow of leaves we raked from the front of the yard.)   Just before nodding off last night, I thanked the Lord for His blessing in this project. I realized that when there are 17 extra hands pushing forward towards a goal… the goal is achieved so much quicker… and strike, was I thankful that I don’t have to do it all myself! 

As a church, we have been meeting in two groups for the last couple of weeks. It works OK for now, but our government health minister has said that the new quarantine measures are expected to continue through until April. “All hail the great Covid!” (Let the reader understand.) Ukraine is only experiencing about 200 deaths a day from this virus for now. With our hospitals at 70% capacity though, surely that is going to go up considerably as we head into December/January.

We realize that until someone from our church dies or goes into intensive care… it all kind of airy-fairy. Personally, I’d like for everyone in our church to live sprightly until they are all 80 years old… but I trust the Lord for His perfect plan to come about… and am half-expecting to do a funeral for one or two of us.

Psalm 145  -  Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.

God always perfectly knows what He is doing in His world. His greatness is unfathomable. And if I truly understand what this means and remember it when I encounter sadness, I am “blessed indeed”.IMG-1851 

Talking about death…  I noticed this week that the guys still have their fly papers up.  Gross?  Yup.  But it made for an interesting photo.