I struggled over this title. To Christians these four words conjure up a scene, a song, a promise so deep that there can be only one meaning. Yet I learned about something new last week that brings another beautiful color to its significance.
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I’ll never forget Father Andrei. Father Andrei is the priest of the Russian Orthodox church in Komsomolsk, the small rural town housing the orphanage that many of the kids from the ministry center in Ivanovo grew up in. He is a big, happy, laughing, gregarious man with long hair whiter than his age and one of those awesome greyish beards that frames and expands his amazing smile. Sort of a young Santa Claus vibe with a subtle dose of The Dude.
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How do you measure if your efforts are successful? That’s a question we all think about, especially when we’re trying to be good stewards of the resources entrusted to us by God. Probably each of us has our own measure: for some it’s numbers, for others – its the ever difficult-to-measure quality-of-life.
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“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:37–39 Have you ever been blessed with the gift of good neighbors?
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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?
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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