I recently came across shoeboxes of letters from summer weeks long ago full of thoughts and stories and photos for keepsake. These particular notes were from Russian and Ukrainian orphans, my teenage peers at the time, anticipating the beginning of the school year, or First Bell as they call it in Russia.
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“What are we going to do?” It was the first question I asked Doug Patterson when I met with him a little over a year ago to discuss joining the Orphan’s Tree team he was leading to Ivanovo in May 2013.I thought it was a perfectly natural question. After all, weren’t “mission trips” all about doing something? Weren’t we supposed to build things, fix things, provide things to help the people we were going to see?
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Pure and faultless religion is defined as looking out for widows and orphans in their time of distress. The orphans we meet in Russia need to see human love modeled for them, in personal and practical ways, to comprehend the vast love God has for them.
Read MoreIf there was one overriding thing I took out of the experience, it was a deeper appreciation for the idea that people are people, no matter where they are.
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