Exciting times...

Hello everyone!
Again, the snow has nearly all melted as the temperatures have increased by a few degrees, but the river Neva and the canals are in the stages of freezing! I don’t think skating will be possible, as the ice is very rough where it freezes and then moves around as it melts…but I think that is something to ask Rachel, the rivers expert!
I hope you are all well, and not too discouraged at the speed at which time seems to passing by!
Again, we have had a fairly normal week. Jo and Aaron had a local leaders conference on Monday and Tuesday, so it was a bit strange without them, but Luke ran the training session on Tuesday, so that was alright. Discipleship coaching on Friday with Jo involved building a snowman as we had just had a blizzard – it was good fun.
Something exciting happened yesterday – one girl called J***, who is from China and is studying International Relations here prayed to ask Christ into her life. She has been coming to church for a few weeks, and we met her as a result of the SSK project as she was one of the 6 students that came to the event we held to explain the Gospel. It is really exciting!!!
This weekend, we are braving a trip to Pskov, a town about 4 hours outside of St Petersburg. We are taking some of the students (who don’t have too much work – it is getting to that time!) to go sightseeing there. We are going by bus, and leaving at 7.15am and arriving back in St Petes at 11pm. I think it will be a very long day!
Next week, we are holding a “Soul Talk”, an interactive café, where we discuss spiritual questions in literature, film, music, and art. We are hoping that about 50 students will come and be ready to listen. I will also be giving my testimony, which will be quite scary!
We are going to Talinn next weekend, to get a new visa for Jo, and to visit the city there, and go shopping for warm hats, and shoes which are more expensive in St Petes. It will be really exciting, as I have never been there before.
Right, I think that is about all I have time for today! Time to go to the university for our prayer meeting.
lots of love, and happy thanksgiving to anyone from America!
Sarah
xxx

Hello from a not so snowy anymore St Petes!

Well, the snow has mostly gone now, as it rained on Sunday, but if anything is coming out of the sky now it is usually white and it is really cold out there! Hopefully we will have some more snow soon. I met a girl yesterday who said that at 17 she was too old to make a snowman. I beg to differ there!

I was invited to a baby shower for one of the members of the Russian team on Sunday night. It was good fun, and the games there involved tasting baby food, making a potato or a banana into either a newborn baby or a pregnant woman, by decorating it with cotton wool, ribbons and paper. Our group decided to go for a woman giving birth which was very funny. We also had to make a lullaby using an existing song but changing the words. The group that won that one used Britney Spear’s “Baby one more time” and changed the words to something like “Oh baby baby, how was I supposed to know, that you would not go to sleep…” A good time was had by all!

On Saturday evening we ran an event where we explained the Gospel in 10 minutes to all the students that had said that they wanted to hear it, and also for those who had won the prize of a memory stick. Of those, 7 people showed up, and only one of them had won a memory stick. This was obviously quite disappointing, but I think that those who came really enjoyed it and were ready to listen to what we had to say to them. One of them came to the Believers Group to find out more, which is very exciting.

This week has somehow involved eating lots of sushi. Russian people love sushi, and it is also quite cheap here – one restaurant does a happy hour where you can get 2 for the price of one! I went with Jo on Friday in our discipleship coaching time, as we both like it. Then it was decided over the weekend that we would go on Monday, our day off with some of our friends from church here – Sonia and Jo. Then, we had already arranged that we would meet one of the students and go and eat sushi with her and her friend yesterday… I think if I’m not careful I will start to look like a piece of raw fish!

Right, I think that is all I have time for today, as I need to go and get some lunch!

Lots of love

Sarah

xxx

Walking in a Winter Wonderland...

Hello from a snowy St Petes!

Winter arrived right on time this week, with the first snow last Sunday morning. It is very exciting and I have turned back into an excited kid for the week. However, it is also quite cold, with temperatures around 0º (actually, the TV told us at midnight last night, i.e. 00.00 the temperature was 0.0º… Little things!)

We decided last week to take the Believers Group and their friends on a day out. We went to Tsarskoe Selo, which is one of the Imperial Palaces. We didn’t go into the palace itself, but went for a walk round the park there. It was a really beautiful day with a dusting of snow on the ground – just enough for a good snowball fight. It was quite cold, but laughing and throwing snow at each other soon warmed us up, and a good time was had by all.

Other than that, this has just been a usual week. We invited Indira and a friend over for dinner on Friday evening, then we had a mammoth session with her on Saturday – we spent 4 hours together. We started with a Bible study, then did some training, and then I went out to do some evangelism with her. We only met one girl, and we did a survey with her about love. I’m really glad we met her, as when we asked her how God shows His love for us, she started to cry because she had a friend who had died last Wednesday when some drug addict friends had spiked her drink. It was a shocking example of how the drugs culture is so prevalent here and how damaging it is to the lives of the students.

On Sunday we went to Church as normal, and then we had our usual girls pie session afterwards. Only this time, a boy called Harrison who is in our Believers Group, decided to come along too. He didn’t realise that he was the only guy until we were jus about to start eating, and then I thought he was going to leave. I think he enjoyed the session, although I think Luke may take him for lunch instead next time. It was a very interesting group, as it was the biggest that it has been yet, and of the 7 of us there, only 2 were native Russian speakers. Despite this, we worked in Russian (or mostly!)

Last night, we had another SSK follow up pizza party. We decided that the best way to follow up such a large number of people together is to run an event for them all, and share the “essence of the Bible in 10 minutes” with them all together. We are going to hold that on Saturday evening, in our Church building to give credence to the proceedings. We rang loads of students to invite them there. It was good fun. Qifeng and Indira came to help us, and were great.

Right, I am going to have to get on and learn some language!

Lots of love

Sarah

xxx

A week in St Petes

Hello there. Congratulations for making it to my blog!

It has been another busy week, but I made up for that on my day off, by not even leaving the house, and watching the last 6 episodes of Series 2 of Prison Break. Apart from Notting Hill the other day, all the films we have seen here have been on a prison/escape film. Maybe it is some sort of subliminal message??

Anyway, we made up for that on Saturday, when we managed to meet 6 students and ran a Connect Bible study (one of Agape’s resources) for another 3. I left with Jo after the session of that had finished at 8pm, to go to dinner with one of the students, but we came back at 11pm to find 2 of the 3 were still there, deep in spiritual conversations! It was great. I don’t know if we will hold a record for the longest course, as we started at about 5.30…

The clocks changed on Sunday, but it hasn’t really made much difference other than the extra hour of sleep. It is still dark a lot, and we had to go out at 8 am on Tuesday morning for our city-wide prayer time, and the sun still hadn’t come up then. The metro is insanely busy around that time in the morning. Think of crowd surfing, whilst being vertical. You are generally lifted up the steps (and if you are lucky, you don’t have someone’s elbow in your tummy) and through the doors. The trick is not to get pushed through the machines, as it means that the alarms go off and no one can get through. Someone once told me that they weren’t sure if there is enough air in the Metro for all the people in it during rush hour…

On to a less morbid subject, I decided to go to a youth group in an Orthodox church with one of the students last week. To confuse matters slightly, the name of the group is Agape. I didn’t tell them I worked for Agape (especially as in Russia it is known as Novaya Zhizn). It was very interesting. It seems that it is part of the Russian mentality that church has to be really, really long. In some churches, they have 2 sermons. Our pastor usually talks for over an hour (although that is with the translation). This group went on for 3 hours, and it basically consisted of one of the priests showing us this dvd of pictures from a trip he made to Jerusalem. Although what he was saying was very good, it was a big challenge for my Russian, and if we hadn’t been sitting where everyone could see, I think we would probably have left. It was interesting to meet them afterwards, especially as he spoke English to us (and a bit of Chinese to Dasha, the student). He was explaining to us about the history of the church itself, which was apparently a soap factory during Soviet times. I’m not sure if I will go back there myself, but I would be able to recommend the church to any Russian students who want to go to an orthodox church.

Wednesday was a really long day (even with the morning off!). We started with team prayer in the canteen at the university, and then met with a student called Ira to study the story of Jesus turning the water into wine in John 2. Then as I needed to practice my language, we went to talk to a student, getting her to listen to a text that I had learned and correct me. We stayed chatting to her for a while, and then I had to rush home to eat and get my things for a language lesson. I got a marshrutka (a sort of minibus/taxi – it follows a route, but stops wherever you want it to. They are really great) home. Jo stayed behind for another 10/15 minutes. Traffic was pretty terrible, and when I eventually got home after an hour sitting on this bus, having had it go backwards, forwards, left, right, to get round the traffic, I had 15 minutes to cook and eat and go out. I was very unimpressed to find Jo already home. Grrr. I then had a good language lesson with Anya, and then went to meet a girl called Lida in Coffee House, a café. It was finally 11.30 when I got home!

Language Error of the week

I can’t think of one for this week, although I did remember a good one from when we were at Zelenogorsk last week. They were asking everyone first thing on Sunday morning what time people had gone to bed. Unfortunately I missed one word, which meant I thought they were asking how much sleep we had had. I won the competition, thinking that I was saying I had had 6 hours sleep. People kept coming up to ask me how on earth I had managed to go to bed at the same time as them (at 2 am) but then only go to sleep at 6. The only saving factor was that Luke also thought that was what they were asking!

Right, I think that is about all I have time for this week. Enjoy the weekend!

Lots of love

Sarah

xxx

PS Some pictures from Zelonogorsk!