Moscow Map

You will need to click on this image to have a good enough view to make sence of it, but this should give you a general idea of where I live in Moscow, in case you were courious. the thin blue circle (you can barly see it) is the MKAD, kind of like a loop and anything on the inside of it is moscow. So you can see I live in southwest Moscow betweeen the MKAD and the center of town (where Red Square is).

My Corner of the City

This is a close up of where I live and work. My appartment is located right where the thumbtack is on that big "C" shaped building in the upper right. The LSL-Russia office is where I work most days. We rent a cubical in the building where that tack is. Finally Kalluzhkaya Metro station is my portal to the rest of Moscow. The Metro is the name for the subway system here, one of the largest in the world. There are other forms of public transportation, I use those too, but for the majority of the places you see listed here the fastest way for me to get there is to hoof it!

The Virtual Apartment Tour Returns

For those of you that have been getting my updates for a while you may remember the Virtual Apartment Tour. Now you can see it on my blog! How about we start with my room.

The living room complete with one of the only pecies of furniture I acually own, my exercise bike.

This is Dan's room. I wonder, can anyone tell me what state he's from?

Getting some breakfast in the kitchen before I head out for the office. 

Hey dude, it's time for work. Let's go!

Walking in an autumn wonderland, our first snow of the season.

LSL-Russia Office
Finally after 2 years of MTI 1 year of support raising and almost 2 more years of language school we are finally here in our new office having our first buisness meeting. An event certianly worthy of a picture.

I need to summarize the last few weeks because a lot has been going on. The second week Dan, Adam and I spent most of our time fixing up the new office. We went down to IKEA and bought a load of shelves desks and chairs. I was put in charge of putting it all together and getting it organized. I can tell you that I've become an expert at putting together IKEA furniture. You never know, that skill may come in handy some day. Dan and Adam helped a lot but they were pretty busy themselves. Dan volenteered to do a jr. High retreat for Hinxson Academy naturally needed to free up some time to put his talks together. I forget exactly what Adam was doing, but that's only because he's done a million and one things since then. That left me in the cubical tightening screws, driving in nails and taking things back apart again because I put some dumb board on backwars or something. Honesty, though, it was refreshing to do something with my hands for a while. It's nice sometimes to be able to do something concrete, where you can look back and see that you can see a desk that wasn't there when you started. The best part of the week, though was when we were all sitting in our brand new office having our first meeting together. It was a great feeling, not only to see the office finally come together, but also because 5 years of preperation had offically finnished and we were beginning a new chapter in our ministry, and, in our lives. It was a moment that we all releshed together.

The next week we put together our schedule. Adam explained to us his vision for us in this initial stage in our ministry. As I understand it he wants us to start with the most fundimental part of our ministry-training local church leaders within Moscow Bible Church. I always knew that our servie within the local church was an important part of our ministry but I never understood how key it was. Adam explained that without a local church ministry, how could we hope to effectivly train pastors. If we are going to be training pastors how to do ministry, we need to be doing it ourselves. I can't effectively train pastors drawing on experiences that I had 5 years ago. Therefore, during the next month I will be visiting with different ministry leaders at MBC to determine what area's I could possibly serve in and, most importantly, to better understand where the Lord wants me to serve here in Moscow. Outside of that I'm still spending quite a bit of time studing the language, at least 50% of my time to be precice. That won't last forever, we'll reevaluat after 6 weeks, in fact, but I have to admit, I'm not doing as well in the language as I thought.

I had a lesson today and I feel like I did horribly. I don't know if it's because I'm not used to Mukhabat, my new teacher, or if it was the long time that I spent away from studing the language or what, but I feel like I've forgotten so much. I know that I need a lot of reiview, but some how, I just feel like I should know more. My grammar is all over the place and my vocabulary is really not where it needs to be. Perhaps I get nervose as well, and that doesn't help when I'm talking to my toutor. One encouraging thing has been that I've gotten a lot of compliments from the Russians. I think part of it may be that the Russians in Moscow have gotten used to American's who speak verly poorly if at all. I never used to be complimented by people in Krasnodar. They were either really used foreigners who spoke really well, or they weren't used to foreigners at all and so had nothing to compare me to but native speakers. Either way, I've still got a way to go.

Sparrow Hills

Your looking at Metro stop Vorobin'iy gory or sparrow hills. This area of Moscow is supposed to have the best view of the city. I really wanted to get out there while we were having good weather. I think you'll agree the fall colors are specatcular.