The visa situation

We are going to apply for new religious visas. Will turned in almost everything to start getting our invitations, which is the first step. Hopefully the last piece will come in this weekend, so that those applications can go in early next week. The invitations should take about a month to be completed, then probably two more weeks before we have the finished visas. At that point we'll leave the country and come back on our new visas.

Please pray specifically
1. For the visas to be ready as soon as possible, with no holdups. And that they will be granted visas!
2. That the letter we need would get to Moscow this weekend.
3. That there won't be any trouble while we're still unregistered for another six weeks (or however long).
4. That this will actually solve the problem. If the trouble is that someone just wants us out of Kovrov, religious visas aren't going to solve anything, but we're praying that it's not that.
5. For the finances to cover this. Visas are already our biggest expense, and now we'll be paying for them twice in one year.

Update?

There's not really much more information to share. Will and Volodya did go and talk to the man in charge of Migration here. There's still no way that we can register our current visas and no way that they'll let us stay unregistered. We'll need to look into getting new visas.

We are encouraged that this is not specifically against us, as it had appeared at first.

For now we're going to leave the city for a few days, so I won't be updating. Please keep praying, though!

Tomorrow

One of the men from church will go with Will to talk to the head of Kovrov Migration Service. Please pray for Will and Volodya tomorrow morning. (For those of you in the US, that would be late, late tonight.)

More

Praise the Lord that we've been able to get in touch with the lawyer for the Bi-regional Church Union. We were having trouble getting through to him.

Please pray that we would find the right person to go with Will on Monday. We were hoping the lawyer could, but he thinks that's not a good idea. Pasha can't do it, because he's not Russian either and has recently been threatened with documents problems.

Visa problems

We had a visit from Migration Control today. We're stuck in a situation where we can't register our visas and must register our visas. Legally we have three days to figure something out or move to Moscow. (In Russia that isn't necessarily a literal three days and isn't necessarily set in stone. On the other hand, it could be.) Will will try to meet with the head of Migration Control in Kovrov on Monday to talk about it.

Technical note

If you're getting this by email, you might want to unsubscribe, and then come back and resubscribe. I've switched to a different service to send out the emails, and the new ones are in a much nicer format. To subscribe, just come to our prayer requests page and type your address in on the right-hand side. There's an unsubscribe link at the bottom of all the emails. If you need help, please email me (mayakovsky@willphyl.com).

Good and bad

We seem to have escaped from the cold germs. Thank you for praying! Raia's runny nose never got worse, and no one else got sick.

Now please pray for my back. I strained it yesterday. Already today it's somewhat better, so I think (and hope) I'll be fine very soon. Please pray for that! It's hard not to be able to pick Raia up.

Camp development

It seems like the main emphasis at the moment is to get everyone here that is involved all in agreement as to what needs doing, how, and in what order. Especially pray that they can work out who's in charge of further development of the camp.

No colds, please!

Please pray for us to be healthy! We just had such a bad bout of sickness recently, and now we're seeing drippy noses and early signs of colds.

Answered prayer

The trip went well. We're excited about the camp property! Thank you for praying. Thank you, Lord!

Trip to camp

In a few minutes Ivan is picking us up to go see the new camp property! Please pray for a good trip, good weather, and good children. (Jaan and Raia are usually pretty good, but calm and quiet in the car would be nice. It's 2-3 hours each way.)

Church

The General Political Council gave Pavel a much better reception. The most influential person there said that this is not a matter for public opinion, or ideology. They said it's just a technical and city planning question, so that's where Pavel will be going next.

Update and changes

With this new version of Blogger, I'm going to try a new way of posting prayer requests. Instead of going back and adding updates to old posts, each update will be a new post. However, I'll use the labels to connect them. If you want to see related posts, click on the label at the end of the one you're reading. You'll see how it works. . . .

Exciting camp news!

God has provided a camp property! Praise Him with us! I hardly know what specific prayer requests to give now, but we'll have more later.

Church

This week we'll start having two services every Sunday. Please pray that this would be a good solution to the crowding. It will be more work for the men who preach and lead, so please pray for them, too (mainly Pavel, Will, Sergei, and Volodya).

January 21
Tomorrow Pavel will be making a presentation to request that the city give land to the church to build on. Please pray that all goes well with that!

February 3
Pavel was able to share a little, but not much. He didn't get a yes or no answer, either. They want him to get the public opinion on building a church, which means publishing a newspaper article and seeing what kind of feedback comes in. Please pray for wisdom in deciding whether to go on with trying or to stop here.

Julie's coming!

Please pray for our friend Julie as she gets ready for her trip to visit us. She'll be here January 22-February 12. Pray especially for health and a wonderful time together.

I'm back!

I hadn't udpated here for a while. We've been busy! Now I've added to Seryozha, and Our roof, and hopefully I'll be updating again regularly.

Seryozha

Please be praying especially for Sergei in the next few days. He's "our" orphan who graduated a few years ago from the orphanage here. He's going to visit some relatives near Moscow to see in the New Year. We just said goodbye to him, and he promised he wouldn't drink; pray that he'll be able to stick to that and stay out of fights and other trouble! Pray for God to protect him and keep him strong.

January 12
He did make it back safely, but we don't know any more details than that. We've only had a quick phone call from him so far.

Our roof

It has started leaking again in a few places (not so many as before, though). Could you please pray for the leaks to stop? Will says to pray for really cold weather, but I'd rather just have a miraculous cure. :-)

January 12
The roof was better for a while, even with the warm, wet winter that we've had. Thank you, Lord! Now it's back to leaking again. There's a building meeting coming up on Sunday. Please pray that they'll decide to fix the roof.

This week

I updated Maksim (just added a photo), Visas, Gospelink, travel, etc, Raia's teeth, and Sunday school this week.