Thank you for all your prayers! I am back home–safe and sound!–and in time for Christmas.

My last presentation in Kashira, near Moscow, for twenty-some teachers started an hour later due to a power blackout. None of those teachers however left the room before we completed the training, and all their questions were asked and discussed. One last comment still makes me smile when I remember it:

What a wonderful Christmas gift you have just given to all of us! I will be celebrating these holidays with a meaning that is completely different than ever before–not just a nice folklore story or a beautiful custom but as a real historical event! I cannot wait to share it with my guests around the table and to see their faces when I tell them the Good News–that the Nativity story actually happened! Was it fun for you to see my face today when I heard it for the first time in my life? I will have that same fun too!

Have a blessed and fun time around Christmas and New Year!

Pray for my quick recovery from jet lag, especially as I am jumping right into preparations for my next trip in the end of January!

I am writing this note on an early morning commuter train to my last event location – Regional Teachers’ Continuing Training Center in the city of Kashira 100 km south of Moscow. I just realized that I could have missed this one on my last round of “confirmation” calls/e-mails. Hope they are still expecting me.

I have already been presenting at this place twice before in the last couple of years, each time attracting more and more History Teachers from wider and wider geographical area and spiritual strata: believers and non-believers, atheists and priests, non-Christians and agnostics. I can’t wait to see whom the Lord will bring to my classroom this morning.

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One more overnight train and I am in Poltava, covered with snow and freezing cold. Seems like the further south I travel the cooler it gets! I’m afraid that by the time I make my way from the Baltics to the Black Sea shores next week it will all be frozen over! Is that what they mean by “global warming”?

My last two days in Kiev presented me with a long awaited opportunity–to teach at the Ioninskiy (Jonah’s) Monastery. They have been known to attract scores of students and youth for their Thursday night gathering to speak very openly and vividly on the most burning topics of the day–politics, mass culture, sex, family, drugs, etc. Fr. Iosaf expressed his honest concerns: “Will they be that interested in subjects that are 2,000 years old? Should we be ready to help you with prepared questions if the audience starts to tune out?” Two hours later he was laughing at himself and his worries. Judging by the questions from the audience, they very much enjoyed examining the historic evidence for the New Testament Gospel, and loved digging into the foundation of the Christian faith and applying it to their lives.

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