Busy, Busy, Busy

I never thought I would be this busy while living in Ukraine. We've mentioned before that we've been keeping busy, but ministry has really picked up lately, keeping us extra busy.

One of the young men in our church fellowship had the idea to put on a hip-hop outreach concert. We are just a few short weeks away from the concert, and Byron and I are learning a lot about what goes into planning an event like this. Thankfully, we're not alone when it comes to all the planning, but we are definitely doing a lot things that we never thought we'd be capable of doing, and we're totally having to depend on God for everything.

As many of you know, I'm a really black and white person. I'm musical, and I love to sing and play the guitar, but I need boundaries in my creativity. I need the lyrics to already be written. I need the strumming pattern to be recored on a track for me to practice with and "study." I can't simply create. But lately, God's been asking me to trust Him more, and surrender my creativity, or lack there of, to Him.

If you had asked me if I would ever be willing to design a concert flyer two months ago, I would have said, "yeah right!" But God had a different plan.

Our first week here in Ternopil, the young man that had the idea for the concert asked the church congregation if anyone would be willing to volunteer to create a flyer for the concert. When he asked, I didn't think, "hmmm, I should volunteer." In fact, I didn't think anything at all except, "hmmm, an outreach concert is a cool idea." But, God asked Byron and me to step out in faith and make the flyer... And it was the beginning of the "business" :) I mean that in a good way.

It's been really cool making different flyers and invites for our church here in Ukraine for a lot of different reasons. My favorite reason? Byron and I do it together. Even if we aren't working on a  project at the exact same time, we both have an equal role in the process. We bounce ideas off of each other, we make sure we both agree on the overall appearance, the colors, even the font. It has been really cool to see how this has impacted our marriage too. We've become even more likeminded than we were before. We've also learned how to communicate clearly and pointedly, but without being gruff or harsh. We've learned how to encourage each other, and when to tell the truth and say, "that doesn't work." We've also learned how to tell the truth in love, and say "that doesn't work, but it was a good idea. Maybe we can use it on the next project." Haha

Today, Byron and I made my favorite flyer/invite to date. An English Gospel track. I need to say, the basic design of the track is a replication of one of the Gospel tracks that Calvary Aurora sent us to use, but we have their permission to replicate it. We did have to design the track from scratch on our laptop, but we had the copy of Calvary Aurora's to help guide us as we designed - kind of like tracing. The text is all original though... And for me, I really enjoyed working with Byron to put the Gospel, the essence of why we do EVERYTHING that we do, into words.

As we've been working away, we're reminded of Galatians 6:9, which reads, "And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart."

And so, we're busy :)



Blessings,

Emily


(P.S. Honorable Mention to the world's coolest translator, Tanya :) Thanks for helping us translate the flyers! You're the best!)