October 13, 2008

Dear Friends and Family,

Warm greetings to you from Moscow! After six weeks in the States, I (Ellen) returned to Moscow last Tuesday. It is the longest trip away from the family that I have had yet. Everyone managed fine, and no one complained, but we were all so very glad to be together again under one roof. I have been absent so much over the last six months with the visa challenges that we have learned to use the time available to us well and have stayed in touch by email and Skype when we had to be apart.

My time in America has been full of many blessings. I visited churches from coast to coast, spent a little time with family, and attended the Russian Mission Network Conference in Columbus, Georgia. One of the great joys of our work is that we now have so many friends across the United States, and we meet new ones as we travel. Throughout my travels, my friends have shared their communities and regions with me. In Oregon, I had the chance to drive along the southwest coast, which is spectacularly beautiful. Friends in California insisted on giving me a day off from interpretation and took me to Lake Tahoe, also spectacularly beautiful. Hearing that Meg was applying to colleges, new friends in Omaha, Nebraska, encouraged me to visit Hastings College on my way to Grand Prairie, Nebraska, to meet another friend. Hastings is a Presbyterian college and offers a special program that Meg is now interested in. In my travels, to western Pennsylvania, I was able to slip over to Ohio and visit Jeff Koning. Some of you know Jeff, who used to work in Perm, Russia. If I had to be away from my family, which I did, time with my brothers and sisters across the church gave me time for rest and reflection, as well as good dialogue about the ministry in Russia.

Mikhail Chekalin, pastor of Good News Baptist Church in Moscow, met me in Atlanta at the beginning of my last week in the States to participate in the fourth annual Russian Mission Network Meeting. People gathered in Columbus from all over the United States to participate in the meeting, and there were many new faces. We had representatives from churches that have been engaged in partnership for over 10 years, some that have been engaged for only a short time, and some that have not yet engaged in partnership. We had friends of the RMN as well. Two churches engaged in the same region connected for the first time and are now planning a joint trip for this coming year. Mikhail’s contribution was invaluable, as it gave a Russian perspective on the partnership relationships. Each year the planning team fine-tunes the program, and the RMN continues to mature. We are working on the location for next year’s RMN meeting. I’ll let you know as soon as the date and location are finalized. We hope many others will join us next year.

This coming week we will be welcoming to Moscow Dr. Jane Charles, a developmental pediatrician from Charleston, South Carolina, and Dr. Lucia Horowitz, a psychologist from Greenwood, South Carolina. They will be putting on the autism seminar that I have mentioned a number of times this year. Thursday and Friday of this week, October 16-17, orphanage directors and social workers, lay workers engaged in ministry with special needs children, teachers of special needs children, and parents of autistic children will be gathering for this event. There has been an outpouring of interest in the seminar, more than we can handle. We have done everything possible this week to accommodate many more than we had planned for. After the seminar, the doctors and I will visit orphanages in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Kaluga region. We are very grateful to Presbyterian Women for the Thank Offering that has made this possible. I look forward to sharing the outcome with you later in the month.

So many of you have held us in prayer through this difficult year. We are deeply grateful. I had hoped to resolve my visa challenges while I was in the States, but I ran out of time. We are, though, significantly closer to solving this problem. I will have to leave Russia one more time, but not immediately. I have until January 5, 2009 to sort things out. That gives me some time to be home.

God bless you all!

With love in Christ,

Ellen and Al

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 158