The official opening of the Agape Rehabilitation Complex is in 5 days!! Construction and cleaning continue this week and we are excited as we anticipate the events of this weekend. On Saturday, we celebrate the official opening with foreign donors, local officials, friends with disabilities, and our team. Then after church on Sunday, our fellow brothers and sisters from Fimiam Church will be taken out to see the facility and celebrate together with us. It will be a time of rejoicing and prayer for what God has done and will do with this facility!
We have spent the past two Saturdays cleaning with volunteers from our ministry and the church. Since I normally run on Saturday mornings, I decided to run from my apartment to Agape, which took me through a couple of villages, over railroad tracks, and past blooming fields. Here's a few phone pics to show the beauty of the Ukrainian countryside in summer:
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| It currently poppy season |
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| This field is on the back side of Agape |
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| The building in the distance is next to our apartment building |
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| The view out the back window from the 3rd floor of Agape |
And now for a few recent pics of Agape:
These four plots (above) were recently purchased in answer to prayer for God's provision of additional land. Thank you to those who joined us in this prayer! The fence in the distance now marks the extended boundary of Agape Rehabilitation Complex territory. This land is in view if one is looking out from the balconies in the previous picture.
The driveway between the main building and the garage now has bricks, as does the front of the building. The back and one side are still in progress...
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| The back side of the building |
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| Welcome to rehab! |
We will move the remainder of our equipment and furniture when rehab finishes at the end of the month, but we are glad to have some new pieces of storage and have already started filling them up.
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| So thankful for all these donated pediatric orthotics! |
This will be the room for the PT school. Sveta is showing the storage space for Henry, our life-size skeleton. Clearly this room is still a work in progress...
A local Christian business man generously donated equipment for a training room.
More pics to come as we complete the cleaning and set-up of the Agape Rehabilitation Complex this week. Workers have been prepping the road for more than month now and we are told that the asphalt will be poured this week. It's such a joy to see the Lord bring years of prayer and work to fruition!
This past weekend we had a wonderful opportunity for celebration at Fimiam Church and within our ministry. Seventeen people were baptized yesterday during the church service! Among them were four people with varying ties to our ministry.
First is Galina whose son, Sasha, has cerebral palsy. Galina and Sasha have participated in various events with our ministry, including rehabilitation, summer camps, and twice monthly crafts and Bible study groups. The seeds of the Gospel were sown for many years and have now born the fruit of repentance!
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| Pasha, senior pastor of Fimiam Church, baptized Galina |
Dima is a young man who had a stroke several years ago and came for rehabilitation (I was still in the US at the time, but Sveta was here). After rehabilitation he began to attend other events in the ministry and also repented. Kolya Prokopchuk, who is a quadriplegic, has been discipling Dima for more than a year and it was a joy for us all to see him baptized!
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| Sergiy Bolchuk, leader of our ministry, baptized Dima |
It was a special joy to watch Lubomir and Anton be baptized together as we have been praying for their salvation for many years. Lubomir is the oldest son of Sergiy and Natasha Bolchuk, the leaders of our ministry. Throughout his childhood and teenage years, Lubomir was openly disobedient to his parents and resistant to God and to serving the people with disabilities that his parents loved and served with all their hearts. Anton is the son of Kolya Prokopchuk, who came to our rehabilitation center in 2008 after his spinal cord injury and repented the following year. Because of their parents involvement in the ministry, both young men had many opportunities to hear the truth of the Gospel over the years, but neither gave evidence of repentance...until recently. The change in both of them is now clear from the joy on their faces, their desire to serve, and their hunger for the Word. The gift of salvation is theirs! And their fathers got a pretty great gift on Father's Day - baptizing a son (Sergiy) and watching a son be baptized (Kolya).
We rejoice at what God is doing here in Lutsk and I look forward to sharing more soon!
