Attention everyone! Here's the Christmas news from L'gov. Pastor Viktor Saltykov reports...

Every Sunday we invite Romani children to church for Sunday School. Once, in November, the children surrounded me and asked:

- Are we going to celebrate New Year's?

- Of course we will, New Year's and Christmas!

- Will there be presents?

- Certainly there will be presents! (What else could I say?)

 

 

At that point I had no idea where to find the means to buy presents. We figured we would need about 6,000 rubles ($200). We had no idea where to get the money. We kept on praying and didn't give up. During this time the children started to prepare their Christmas program - learning songs and verses...

On December 25th we decided to share the program we had prepared at the evening service of a neighboring church. God worked three miracles there! First, when I called the pastor to arrange our visit I said there would be 15 of us, but in fact we came with 20 adults and children. They hadn't been counting on that many people - they had prepared a little refreshment beforehand - chocolate and lemonade. But even though our hospitable friends only expected 15 people, God worked it out so they had 20 chocolates and even our older children weren't deprived of a present. That was the first miracle.

A little later, as I was talking with the pastor of that church, he asked how I thought we should handle the bottles of lemonade. They had bought 11 of them. How should we divide them? The second miracle was that there was no need to divide anything! We had exactly 11 children with us, so that each of them received a bottle. Praise God! The pastor said that God had in fact figured it all out.

We joyfully conducted the service, and just before our departure God worked one more miracle! An elder asked me to stay back for a few minutes. I sat down to wait. Then I saw him coming, and there are two deacons with him. Then I heard the words that made my heart rejoice in a prayer of thanksgiving: "We talked it over and decided to help you in your development of this ministry," and he held out five new thousand ruble notes. God is great - he takes care of us!!! With indescribable gratitude I told them about how we had prayed for the means to provide gifts. These brothers in the Lord were very happy that God had used them to answer our prayers. We didn't ask them for anything, we didn't even hint at the need, but God spoke to their hearts... Hallelujah!

Two days later I shared this news with our church. Before I even finished, one of our members took out his wallet and added another 1,000 rubles to the five thousand we already had. We now had 6,000 rubles. After the meeting, God spoke to yet another few people, who contributed more money. The final result: we had enough not only for presents, but also for New Year and Christmas refreshments for the children and the church!!!

Salvation Church of Poltava also joined in and contributed some wonderful boxes for the gifts and other material contributions, for which we most heartily thank them in the Lord!!! Clearly, this service is acceptable to God, and he provides for it through those brothers and sisters in the Lord who love our Father and desire to do his will.