Epilogue and Retrospective

I have settled back into my home and routine for the better part of a week now. This last post will close out this blog by allowing me to look back and summarize the meaning of the trip, not just its activities.

First, I would like to thank God for the wonderful wife He has blessed me with. I could spend many, many pages extolling her good points, but will spare you all the details. Let me just say that when she first heard of the idea of losing her husband to Siberia for a couple weeks, she was most enthused. Not in the way you think. She was enthused for me; she had genuine joy that I would experience something wonderful and meaningful, even if she would not share it. In fact, it would mean extra work for her, or at least fewer hands to share the work. But she actively encouraged me to make the trip; she knows I would not have gone through even the application stage if she was at all hesitant. My debt to her grows every year, and I thank God again and again for gracing me with a wife whose outer beauty is eclipsed only by her inner loveliness.

In a similar way, I would extend thanks to the elders of my church for approving and funding the trip. And, though they joked about making the ticket one-way, both I and the people of Siberia are grateful they sprung for the round-trip fare.


As I reflect on the trip, I find the experience very humbling. It was humbling on a very basic level, since one is forced to live so consistently on the kindness of others when one goes to a foreign land with a strange language (see the post on “what I hate about mission trips”). But it was humbling on a more profound level as well. It takes no fluency in Russian to see faces light up when the soul they belong to grasps a new level of God’s holiness and goodness. God’s spirit worked in special ways. I don’t say this proudly; far from it. I say it with wonder that He would use someone like me to be a channel of His blessing, a tool of his healing.

This is the God we serve: able to speak through Balaam’s donkey or just some jackass like me. Or you. And He has reminded me afresh that we don’t have to travel to Siberia to be used by God. The world is right outside the door.