I will have to tell you about our church's Ladies Christmas Tea that happened a few days before Christmas. Something like this hadn't happened for years because of covid shutdown and then the lady who used to host it had to care for a mother who'd had a stroke. Finally things came together this year.
One of the activities we did was to split the 20 ladies into four teams and dress up one person per team into an angel with tissue paper, garlands, tinsel, and other decor. We had ten minutes to do it!
Two ladies who ended up being judges were having a hard time deciding who got the prize until this angel flapped her wings, and that settled it! She was such a cute angel!
My part in the tea, besides contributing a gift for the gift exchange and a cheeseball and crackers for among the edibles, was to speak about Jonathan's and my Christmas in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine 30 years ago. I shared about a woman there with an empty cup (a widow we stayed with who was not a believer and who had just lost her husband), a woman with no cup at all (a drunkard whose little son begged Jonathan for some food and we took groceries to them), a woman with a cold cup (that was me struggling to stay warm and figure out why God had us in such a miserable apartment for a whole week!) and a woman with a full cup (a believing wife and mother of six, in whose home we had a short visit).
I took this pathetic twig with three lonely ornaments on it to illustrate the pathetic little scrubby tree the first lady had in her apartment when we arrived that week in the mountains of Ukraine. We were supposed to be involved in a youth meeting there in the mountains, speak at services, and try to buy a used car while there. Quite the experiences we had, which I told about at the tea.
The woman with a full cup thirty years ago actually ended up losing her 6-year-old son to leukemia while we were still in Ukraine, and I found out before the tea through our pastor friend Roman, that she later lost her Christian husband as well in a freak accident, only a few years after we left Ukraine. He was walking with his two little boys and stopped to help where a Prayer House (church) was being built. A crane was trying to set a big foundation block, and the man got into the hole in the ground and tried to guide the block. Instead, the block somehow hit him in the chest in such a way that it killed him instantly.
The poor wife, who was at that time only just getting over the shock of having her oldest son recuperate from an accident that left him unconscious for days and was still recuperating, ended up in a psychiatric clinic for several years, our pastor friend told us. My heart broke for her. She seems to be doing okay now, but our church decided to take up an offering to send Pastor Roman for his own family and for this dear lady, Luba.
A couple days ago, we were able to transfer the money to them as a small Christmas gift. It was one of the joys of the season--sharing with some in that war-torn country of Ukraine. I wish what was sent could have been more. It's easy to transfer; we just use Paypal.
Back home, I cut my men's hair.
Ladies tea or not, I became a barber afterward!
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