It was my director, Mark Cathey who first told me about Ilya. In fact, I knew about Ilya years before he even thought about God, because Mark and Melinda have loved Ilya and his parents like family and talked about them to me for as long as I can remember. They were best friends and…

On this blog I usually comment on life and ministry here in Russia. For those interested more in my personal musings and reflections on life with Christ, there is a new opportunity. I have been invited to be a contributing blogger with Christian Leadership University, which is an honor to participate in. My two most…

In my old ages I’ve pretty much settled on one life message, but I can write, teach, or talk about it from a hundred angles. That message is looks something like this: We were made for relationship. We are most fulfilled in relationship. We are most productive in relationship. My message and my dream is…

To say that the health care system here is different than in the US is a major understatement. Here is our latest story: We had to take Simon in for abdominal pain in August. We went to the nearest emergency room where we had taken him a few months ago to get stitches. But after…

Kudos to my wonderful family for managing to hide from me and trick me into thinking that the one thing I most wanted for my 50th birthday was not going to happen – a surprise party. The ruse was laid well. We all went out Friday afternoon to a mysterious spot in the south of…

Every once in awhile I try to expand myself out of my left-brained box, hopefully in cooperation with the Spirit. Here is my latest attempt, which I wrote one day while at our agency’s semi-annual conference. The challenge to us was to write a lament. Time How long is time for you, O Lord? What…

I get wonderful testimonies all the time, but I seem to rarely remember to record them. This week in our group one woman, the wife of a pastor started talking about how much the course I have been writing and leading had impacted not only her but her entire church (through her),  I asked her…

Today I want to post a post that a mentor of mine in movement building wrote. It describes well one dimension of what I am working towards, and gives me a measure of comfort in how slow the process is. There were once three builders. They had very different approaches to building. Each builder thought…

I’ve been in Russia now for 9 years, which has the advantage of allowing me to see how the frog is boiling in the US from a distance. I’ve been here so long Facebook was a near start-up, so in the earlier days one of the best means of seeing where things were on a…

I could hardly be more excited about a new study I am writing for small groups. I’m going to beta test it first on my own group in St. Petersburg starting in April, and then offer it to others to try out, in Russian and in English, I expect by the fall. Here is the…