Author: David

Some presents take years

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Our 2025 tree

It’s fun to hang Christmas ornaments, listen to Michael Bublé and Frank Sinatra belt out traditional Christmas tunes (and mix it up a little with Forrest Frank every now and again), and to prepare presents for special someones to open on the 25th.

However, there are a lot of “presents” that we’ve been asking for over the past several years that always seem just out of reach. A couple of those are peace in Ukraine, the return of our friends from the front, and a lack of constant threat from russian attack. As God always does, there have been good things that came out of these tragedies—new relationships, new understandings of God’s love and grace, new people understanding the hope that can only come from Jesus; however, there is still a level of sadness is my heart, even bitterness at times, that some prayers that I have prayed and prayed (sometimes daily for months at a time) are still unanswered. I know I’m probably getting stronger through them… please pray that would actually be the case, because it’s easy to slip into that bitterness.

Thank you guys for sticking with us through all of this—every supporter of ours is a HUGE blessing, and we couldn’t be here without you.

Please pray that 2026 would be the year of breakthroughs for all of these things.

Recording a song with friends

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Our pastor recently asked me to record a song that he wrote several years ago for a summer camp that he was a part of. It’s become pretty popular among summer camps in northern Ukraine since then.

Unfortunately, after that, another church pirated the song and recorded it as their own. However, I think that we will be able to make a new version that is much higher quality, so I’m hoping to kind of “win the song back” for him.

A family of musician came over and recorded a demo of the song with me last Saturday. We are then going to take the demo to a producer at the local seminary, who will help us to turn that into a full-blown song that we can release on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc. Please pray for that whole process. This has been a lot of fun so far.

Even flooding the apartment can be a good thing

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Walking into the flooded apartment

Last week, I woke up to a neighbor calling again and again trying to get my attention about water coming down from her ceiling. At first, I thought it was a mistake, but then I realized that it was the neighbors underneath the apartment where we are doing repairs—Katya’s parents’ old apartment. I threw on some clothes, ate a power bar, and flew out of the house.

It turns out that our repair guys had removed the old radiator heaters and had neglected to cap the pipes with anything. When the city turned on the heat (we have city heating), the water from the heater lines just went straight into the floor, pouring into the apartments three floors below us!

That morning and whole day was spent bailing out the apartment as if I was in a sinking ship, coordinating with neighbors about managing the water (several came to help bail out, mop up, and clean up), and then visiting the other floors to document the damage. Our contractor said that he would cover the repairs to the neighbors, as it was their fault, not ours.

It’s been interesting that God has used this to make us and our neighbors closer and has given us the opportunity to be a light to them. We are hoping to do some repairs to and older lady’s toilet (completely unrelated to the damages) and to just know our neighbors better after this. Please pray that we would eventually be able to preach the Gospel to them and just continue to be a light. Please also pray that we could finish these repairs sooner (we still need about $7000 + money for new appliances to move in).

Thank you to everyone that is supporting us, praying for us, and helping us with all of this!

Testimony: Why it’s important to talk to your friends about missionaries

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Katya and I support a local missionary named Oleksandra Andriyashyna, who is pretty well-known among Calvary folks that have been to Ukraine or have some connection with missions in Eastern Europe (she’s the one on the left in the photo). She often writes to us to let us know when she has some kind of need; however, we cannot always meet that need, because we have been having some financial difficulties ourselves—some of our supporters have had to either cut back or stop giving in the past few months, and we have had unexpected or emergency expenses (please pray for those).

One of the cool things, though, is that, when we cannot support and give to her ourselves, we will take the request to our small group Bible study (the picture above), and they have often raised money for her to be able to travel to the front lines in Ukraine to minister from town to town and on military bases. It’s really cool to be the bridge, to see God use someone else to meet a friend’s need and to be the one that He used to connect those two dots.

I say that because we have a need—like I said, we have had some financial difficulties these past few months, and, at least at the time of my writing this post, things are getting worse. Over the past fifteen years as a missionary, I’ve never been in debt for an any extended period of time—we try to be as fiscally responsible as we possibly can; however, there are things outside of our control.

If you would like to help, there are four different ways you can do that:

  • Praying for us—please always do this first!
  • A fast, friendly gift via PayPal (contact us for info on that)
  • Giving online (this will get to us about a month later)
  • Telling others about us (“Testimony”)

If you would like to get my (David’s) personal contact info to pass on to someone else, please click here and send me a quick message—I’ll give you an intro letter and other information that you can pass on very easily.

God bless y’all!

Apartment Repairs update video

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Hey, everyone! Thank you all for praying for our different ministries over the summer. One of the things that we haven’t talked about much that also affects ministry a lot is where we live—for the past several months, Katya and I have been renting an apartment, because our home is under MAJOR repairs (basically a full remodel). The apartment is in a solid building, but it needs major work, as the place was built in the 80’s at the end of the Soviet Union. We started the process at the end of last year, and we’d hoped to be moved in by this month; however, because of delays and lack of funds, we have been set back several months. Here’s a video about where we are now:

Please pray for us, as this process will give us a better place to work, minister, live, record worship songs, have guests over, create ministry materials, etc. Every decision we made about where to put this or that thing had all of that in mind. Please also consider becoming a regular supporter to help us finish, as we have lost some support recently. Here are a couple of links, just in case you’re considering that:

P.S. – We also have a private Telegram group specifically for supporters that we will add you to once you become a regular supporter, so that you can be updated with prayer requests weekly—we try to keep in close contact with everyone that is on our Support Team.

Thank you guys for watching and for praying for us!