Could we borrow those life vests, please?

Hannah's best impression of a model, maybe? I love this, because you can see the lady who works at this shop in the mirror. It was sweet of her to let Hannah and her friend try things on and take pictures.

O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called "knowledge"--which some have professed and thus gone astray from the faith. I Timothy 6:1-2

It is a gray, yucky morning here in Moscow. We are heading to house church and then a birthday party for a friend then back home to finish packing our room, so it will be a full day here. It has been a rough couple of weeks for us--packing, getting rid of stuff, packing, packing, packing. We did have a really lovely evening with friends Friday night, and we've actually managed to have some family time amidst the packing, but it's mostly been a long, steady stream of going through our lives and realizing how much we've accumulated in our two years in Moscow.

Three weeks from tomorrow we leave Moscow. It's hard for me to believe, and I definitely have mixed feelings about it. There are many things about this city that I love. There are also many things I hate about this city. I will miss my friends here, certainly. On Saturday, we will have some Russian friends over for a farewell party, and that will be hard. It will be especially hard to say goodbye to Sergei, who has become such a part of our lives here. But we know for certain that it is time to head to Prague, at least for the next year. We are tired, and to be honest, we need a break. We have had no vacation in the two years we've been here, except for a couple of days in Prague last October, and we need some down time. Of course, we will still be working in Prague, but it is a smaller city, a little slower, a little more Western than Moscow. It isn't America by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a place where we have good friends, where we know for certain that we can breathe a little more deeply and relax a little. I'm looking forward to that. And there is ministry there for all of us, because there are Russian-speakers everywhere in the world. Any major city anywhere in the world is going to have a group of Russian-speakers, making our time learning Russian time well-spent.

The verses above are important to me. The "Timothys" are some of my favorite books in the New Testament (I'm reading Numbers right now and finding it a surprisingly good read), and Paul admonishes Timothy again and again to "guard what has been entrusted to you." I feel as though my main job here in Moscow has been to guard what has been entrusted to me. Sometimes, it feels like our little family is on a dangerously small life raft, clinging to the sides and praying for help against a choppy, rough ocean. Think The Perfect Storm without the lifevests. In the last two months, that has been especially true. And as we prepare to leave Moscow, it has really felt like we were fighting uphill battles against an enemy we can't see clearly, but whose arrows are poisonous just the same. I'm sure many of you who read this can identify with feeling like you are under attack from every corner. But you know what? Just because it feels that way, doesn't mean that's reality. It's easy for the enemy of our souls to find strongholds in our emotions and use them against us. I'm not saying emotions are bad, because they aren't--they are God-given just like the rest of our characteristics. But the reality is that often, our emotions lead us astray. We don't have to ignore them, but we have to evaluate them against what we know of our God. And when I read the Bible, I find a holy God who claims that we are NEVER alone. And because I know Him to be true to His word, I can trust that even though it seems that we are fighting enemies alone, we really aren't. He's here with us, just like He's always been. And though we might stray, He never does.

One thing I will say about the move is that it has highlighted the differences between Marc and me. He processes everything aloud. I process everything internally. Frustration makes him talk, and it makes me withdraw. It turns out that those personality tests were right--we are pretty much opposites. The great thing is that no matter how different we are, we have grown together so much the last two years that we can laugh at the differences. Not always, but most of the time. We've laughed a good bit in the last week. Wherever you are in the world, I pray that you know that you are not alone, no matter the circumstances, and that in a week, you will be heading to Greece for a week, too. Blessings to you and yours!

His,
Kellye