When anxiety overwhelms the heart, one feels compelled to seek God's face even more. This is how last year ended and the new one began.

As a church, we spent the first week of this month in fellowship and prayer for personal and church problems. We had actually prayed for a revival all year long. Although we prayed, we made no efforts to mend the relationships among us.  God had a different way to deal with things. He started a revival among ourselves.

We asked ourselves many questions regarding our Christian walk and realized we had had a lot of activities over the years that were not effective. We had been in a routine. In one week, God showed us things we hadn't been able to see before. It was in December that I called upon the name of the Lord and asked Him to intervene. The deacon of the church and I decided to have a time of fasting and prayer. We prayed that God would give us a vision for this ministry. I was surprised to see how fast God worked.  All the church services around Christmas (January 6-8) were very special.  Many people we had forgotten about came to church. We all understood that we made a mistake when we ceased to pray for them which revealed our unbelief.  Right after the holidays, several church members came to me to share some ideas that would revive us. We had a special meeting with the church members and talked about our problems, our purpose and what we should do. We made the decision to start everything with fasting and prayer so that we could be clean and wear the good armor. We determined to pray for the people that repented of their sins but never expressed their desire to be baptized, for people who used to be church members but were deceived by the devil, for our families, relatives, neighbors and colleagues that don't know the Lord as their Savior, for other people to be saved, for the leaders and officials from our country, and for Christian freedom.

We decided not to start fasting before we made sure we knew everything about fasting. Although I had talked about fasting several times, they told me they had forgotten all about it. We read and studied Isaiah 58 and all the other Bible texts on this topic. There are four major lessons about it:

1. What is the acceptable fasting that pleases God and when do we need to fast?
2. How do we loose the chains of injustice?
3. How do we break the cords of the yoke?
4. My neighbor and doing good to the others

We've been through three lessons so far and then we will put it all in practice.  After the second lesson, people confessed their sins and conflicts were settled down. It was actually different even after the first lesson.

Beginning in February we'll have a fasting day once a week. We'll pray for personal righteousness, for the people that have not been baptized, for the people that are sick and all the above-mentioned things. We decided to pray more, do good works for our neighbors and speak less. That's how we want to draw them to Christ. Pray for us!

We had several group meetings where we talked about our problems. There was a young man in particular that was so interested in his own personal revival that we spent six hours talking together. I answered many questions that troubled his heart. Pray that God will use Him in His ministry!
Things are pretty much the same in the church but there is a fresh zeal.

We'll continue to go to Zavoloca when they have their Orthodox holidays as people have more spare time then. I visited the Christian people from Kamenka twice this month. I read, underlined and made an outline of six chapters from "Joy Unspeakable".