The local church has been running their annual summer camps for both children and youth over the past month. Here’s a small report and images of these much loved youth camp gatherings at the mission centre in Lebedyn.
From 26th of July until 1st of August, we had our youth camp which took place in Hrunivka village. We were afraid that we will not be able to do it at all as the situation with Covid-19 seemed to be worse and measures were getting stricter. But our God is good and through Mike and Peter's wise support we held the youth camp in a different place and as a result of that we solved 2 situations. Firstly, we had a nice, safe and suitable place to have a camp at and secondly, we partly helped to purchase that place for children from the Sumy rehabilitation centre.
This year’s camp became a great challenge for us. We had 37 new non-believing youth attend. Almost everyone was from troubled families and only their mothers or grandmothers taking care of them in their homes. That's why we decided to have an important topic for this camp – what is our identity in Christ? looking at who is a man and a woman in God's eyes.
The young people we had were between 15 up to 19 years old but their lives are so full of amorality. A lot of boys started to smoke from age 9, 10, 11. That's why it was very difficult for them to stop smoking in our camp and to use bad language in their vocabulary, sometimes they were really aggressive towards others, even if they were friends. For us it was day and night work.
We also had some accidents that had an influence on our camp. On the second day one girl's mother died (the girl's name is Natalia). The news were very hard and I (Bohdan) had to tell her about this. Her mother died during surgery. Her mother's sister is a member of our church and that's why we decided to organise the funeral. It became a very good support for the family and great testimony for non-believers. Natalia says that she is atheist; she doesn't believe in God but perhaps she is angry because her father is a "strong orthodox christian" in real life and is a very bad and cruel person. Because of her mother's death she became even angrier with God. Please, pray for Natalia. Inna and our girls from the church are trying to build a relationship with her.
On the 4th day in the evening we played a game and 3 people crashed into one another and as a result 1 boy seriously broke his leg. His name is Vlad Marchenko. On the way to the hospital in the ambulance I was telling to the hospital workers about God and they were really interested. It was amazing. I spent 24 hours with the boy in hospital until his mother came. He had 2 operations on the leg and we decided to help the family financially straight away. I had a great opportunity to share about God with his mother. Praise God, Vlad's leg is getting better. And Vlad and his mother were and are so open and thankful to us. We keep in touch with them. Even through difficult situations we still have possibilities to spread God's Love and God's Word.
After the camp some of the youth really wanted to know more about God and as a result some became Christians and were baptised. We have immediately organised a home group for these young people. At the first group meeting we had 6 young people: Liza Zibrova, Marina Hetman, Tania Vasylyna, Zlata Nazarova, Kiril Miroshnichenko, Eduard Vasilkov. Please, pray for these young people, that they would become strong Christians.
Thank you all very much for your love and care, that because of God and you we were able to have this camp and to find new young people who need God's love and Salvation.
