Eating & Drinking for Jesus

The Pres. of my agency talks about "Eating for Jesus." He's referring to the fact that when you're meeting with staff, sometimes you have meeting after meeting after meeting, and you end up eating and drinking at each location. Today I really got to experience a bit of that. =-D I had a nice relaxing morning and then went from one meeting to the other from noon until returning to the apartment at 9:30. I learned that sitting for that long without much movement is kind of painful. What a joy it was, though, to spend my day again with our younger staff getting the chance to hear their stories, their hearts, and what God is doing in their lives.

Anya is a dear Ukrainian sister whom I just love. She's gone from Odessa to Egypt to India and is now praying to go to Thailand.

Caleb is a fellow American who's been here for about 2 1/2 years working with the Downtown team.

Katya and Marina are girls from my Odessa church who went through the Odessa Training Center, did their internships in Uganda and are now part of a church plant with another IM colleague. They're also special to me, b/c they were in my English class at the very first camp I did before moving to Odessa. What a joy to see their growth and their heart's desire to serve.

So, that's two cups of coffee with Anya, one cup of tea with Caleb, water with the girls, and then I took Laura out for dinner, followed by ice-cream. One thing that a lot of missionaries don't do very often is go to a nice restaurant. Laura and I used to talk about it when we lived together, but never went anywhere other than McD's with the orphan boys. So this time around we scheduled that time to go someplace nice together. It was a long, but great day full of wonderful people.