Tuesday May 31 - By Jessica Dexter

Today we kept in mind a few verses from Exodus chapter four, verses 11-12.  In this God reminds us that we do not have control over the way that things are on this earth.  God knows that there are orphans among us that do not have parents.  He knows that there are children who are not born with eyes, a hand, or legs.  He knows that all of these things have a purpose and work together into His intricate plan for humanity, yet we do not see the purpose behind these things that are.  These verses remind us how important it is to remember that God created the world and has everything under control and that He brings glory to His name in everything He does, even if we do not see it as well.  Today the women played with the children that we met yesterday.  We had a wonderful time reuniting with the children and we continued to share the love of Christ with them by loving on them and playing with them.  It was much hotter today than yesterday because there was no breeze and we became tired much faster, but we still had a good time playing with the children.  The children are so easily amused that it is easy for us to just play.  The difficult part about interacting with them is when we try to speak to them or understand them.  I don’t know much Ukrainian or Russian and they don’t know much English.  However, Sasha pointed out this morning at the team meeting that we all understand one common language…Love.  Some of the guys also came up to the children and played.

When the children came up to us, they smiled and hugged us and we felt that they loved us because we love them and spend time with them.  Although I was in building 3, I was able to spend some time with the children in building 5.  The children in building 5 are younger and were more quiet than the children in building 3, so we just played with them without saying many words.  A few of the women decided to help the guys by painting a fence at building 5, which helped us experience what the guys were doing all day.

The guys worked hard all day long, including some time after dinner.  The porch project is now finished, they prepared the ground to pour concrete tomorrow and they disposed of a lot of old play ground equipment.