We made it to 2015! Doesn’t it feel good to have a new start? Last year was a challenge. Life in Ukraine was especially challenging due to the violence of war and conflict. Our lives personally were challenging due to things that happened to us. We traveled to London for two weeks. We traveled to the USA for two months. We didn’t do too well living healthy lifestyles. We didn’t accomplish everything we wanted to in our relationships with God, with each other, or with others. We didn’t see all the progress we wanted to in the developmental process of our special ones.
Here’s the thing that sometimes causes us to look back on last year and see so many things that we consider failure or difficulty — His ways are not our ways and our ways are not His. When we try to put things on the scale of failure vs success, we use faulty measurements. Our idea of success, when measured by worldly standards, doesn’t meet His standard of success. And what consider as failure or difficulty, when considering God’s sovereign will and plan, may not be failure or difficulty after all.
And then we turned the page and it was blank. Ready to be filled with what is sure to be a year of blessing from God. 2014 is in the books. 2015 lays ahead.
I, for one, choose to say with Paul:
“This one thing I do…forgetting what lies behind, and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
We thank you for your prayers for the ministry in Ukraine during this coming year. May God use us ALL in life-changing ways, wherever we find ourselves in 2015.
