The perspective gained from living on foreign soil opens up one's world view.
I wanted to pass along some news you may not know about that affects our world.
Kingdom:
One of our classmates, Jason Han, is a missionary from Korea. He informed us last week that over 200 Korean missionaries were deported from Kazakhstan. Apparently it was racially motivated, not just religiously motivated because other mission groups were not bothered in this instance. The dislocated missionaries had a conference in Turkey to decide where they should go next. Jason's wife was killed there a few years ago while they were serving as missionaries. Did you know Korea sends more Christian missionaries out into the world than the US?
Here in Ukraine, there is ongoing political turmoil and instability. The parliament, the president, and the prime minister all have their hats in the ring. It's really difficult to make sense of it all, even to know what's really going on.
(Before you read this next paragraph... I found a great link that tells it better than I do:)
Some of the facts that you might not find on CNN (even if your news source is covering this at all)-- The blue party (the old Russian faithfuls) are paying people to "demonstrate"-- interpreted meaning they are standing around, downtown in the main square. The estimate for the demonstrations has been about $13 million. This is the same square where peaceful demonstrations took place two years ago when the president's party came into power. You may remember that quiet revolution, The Orange Revolution, when the ex-president was looking defeated in the elections, the winning candidate, the current president Yushenko was poisoned. The experts said that he should not have survived, but he did and went on to become president.
There are many things that could be said about it, but basically, it's like it is everywhere else: the rich men are fighting for power so they can become richer. The people of Ukraine are only seeing favor when the politicians gather support.
To keep up with everything, I went to Google and signed up for a news report to be sent to my email with the key word "Ukraine." It's an RSS type thing for the computer savvy out there.
What do politics mean for the kingdom of God?
