Dear
Prayer Partners:
This
summer has zoomed by! Thank you for
praying for the day camps that our friends in Krasnosyolka
ran. They had about 20 children in Kubanka for two days, then another 20 in Shamanovka for 2 days.
This was the first children’s outreach in Shamanovka,
so the kids were excited! We now have a
good group of children coming on Sundays, so pray for our youth who teach
Sunday School in both villages. We decided not to hold camp in Pavlinka. We are
having wonderful attendance at the new Sunday afternoon services in Shamanovka. Pray for
Roma, the young man who was one of the first in that village to come to Christ.
He has been facing a lot of opposition and ridicule and has stopped coming to
Bible studies. Pray for God to overcome this Satanic
attack. Maria (Roma’s mom) and Sasha and
Natasha have continued to be faithful. But they chose to wait until next year
to be baptized.
Thank
you for praying for the dental team. We
had 5 days of clinics, serving over 200 patients from 10 different
villages. We were especially pleased by
the good response in Limaniy. I usually see about 20 patients there. Over 60 came in response to posted
announcements and invitations personally handed out! Pastor Anatoliy made
some wonderful contacts for their church.
Many new children came to the children’s program. While the clinics were going on, three teens
led a children’s day camp, involving over 150 kids. During the week, two
patients and several children made professions of faith. Pray that they will get involved in their
local churches and grow in their new faith.
One lady who frequents the Makarovo clinic
with her younger children brought her teen-aged daughter to see me for the
first time. This girl is struggling with
a lot of emotional problems from a dysfunctional home. I sent the girl to talk to the evangelist,
but the mom ended up trusting Christ as her Savior! Pray for this whole family to come to Jesus,
and find healing for their many problems. Praise the Lord with me for this
group of Americans who sacrificed their time, energy and finances to serve the
people of Ukraine for a few days.
Continue
praying for the preparation for the pregnancy care center. We are currently involved in gathering
information about the situation in Odessa--Christian resources already
available, legal questions, where and how abortions are done. One of our ladies found statistics on the
internet that stated in 1990 over 1 million abortions were done in
Ukraine. But government reporting says
that has decreased to 250,000 per year in the last few years. I think that is because the government is
paying women a stipend for each baby so more families are having additional
children. Also many IUD’s are being
placed, so the number of early abortions caused by IUD’s are
not being counted. The population of
Ukraine has decreased from 52 million in the early 90’s to 48 million. So that means in 1990, Ukraine had about 5
times as many abortions per capita as the USA did! It is a serious problem. We are eager to
start a counseling ministry to help women who are facing a difficult pregnancy
with their physical and spiritual needs. Last Saturday, we had a very
profitable meeting with a group who will be serving as our steering committee.
Pray for them to have wisdom to build a firm foundation for this new ministry.
They asked me to serve as chairman of this committee so pray for me as I lead
this group of Ukrainians and Americans who are burdened for this ministry.
Last week I was in Kharkov
at a conference for pastors and missionaries where two men from our ABWE home
office were teaching “Good Soil” evangelism—how to prepare people’s hearts and
minds to understand and receive the gospel.
Thank you so much to those of you who contributed to the expense of
printing “The Story of Hope” in Russian, a wonderful new tool for teaching
God’s grand plan of redemption from Genesis to Revelation. This would be a
wonderful resource for YOUR church!
Check out www.goodsoil.com.
We
are in the midst of preparation for a medical team the first 2 weeks of
November. I am thrilled that Dr. James Oakman is coming back to Ukraine for his 4th
trip to provide eye care and glasses. Our patients in the villages cannot afford
to go to the cities and buy glasses, so many can no longer read simply because
they don’t have reading glasses. What a wonderful opportunity to give them
glasses and put a Bible verse in their hands to read! The joy lighting up their faces is contagious!
Thank
you for praying for the medical ministry here, especially that God would touch
the hearts of patients to trust Him as Savior.
Angela, the paraplegic in Makarovo for whom we
have been praying for several years, called me today. Her family is facing many problems, and she
has been dealing with more depression and fear.
After a long talk on the phone, she said that she does want to trust
Jesus Christ as her personal Savior!
Please pray for me to find time to make an extra trip up to Makarovo to talk to her personally, and pray for her
understanding of the gospel. She needs to trust Jesus because He is the only
way of salvation, not because she is looking for an escape from her problems.
Leaning on The Rock,
Miriam
Psalm 119:49-50
Miriam R. Wheeler, MD
ABWE--Odessa, Ukraine
Vonage internet phone: 864-248-4845