The other morning, I opened my laptop to a message from Valery, one of our camp directors in Ukraine. He serves in the Odesa region, and he also pours himself into ministry work up in the Kyiv region. He is a faithful brother, and I wish you could know him like I do.
His message began with just three words:
“We survived the winter.”
I sat with that for a long time. You and I might say something like that after a tough season at work or a long stretch of bad weather. For Valery and the children he loves, those three words carry much more weight. They mean another winter of blackouts. Another winter of air-raid sirens. Another winter of a war that has dragged on much longer than any of us hoped.
And yet, the very next thing he wrote about, before anything else, was the children. He told me they are already asking about camp. They are counting the days. That is the heart of this whole ministry — and it is why I wanted to write to you today.
“But God will never forget the needy; the hope of the afflicted will never perish.” Psalm 9:18
A Long, Hard Winter
It is hard to picture, from a warm kitchen in America, what a Ukrainian winter feels like in the middle of a war. The power goes out for hours, sometimes for days. Apartment buildings sit cold and dark. Families layer on every piece of clothing they own and huddle together to wait it out.
It is hardest of all on the older people. Many live alone, in cold rooms, listening for the sirens and praying the lights will come back on. Some have not felt truly warm in months. And the children watch all of it. They watch their grandmother shiver. They watch their parents grow quiet. They learn, far too young, to carry weight that does not belong on small shoulders.
But spring has come, as spring always does. And the children are looking up again.
I Know What It Is to Grow Up Where God’s Name Is Not Spoken
I don’t often write about this, but today it matters.
I grew up in the former Soviet Union. I remember very clearly how hard that system worked to shape children from the earliest age. The teachers were trained in it. The schoolbooks were written for it. Even the little songs we sang at school had a message hidden inside them. The leaders of that time understood something we sometimes forget: whoever reaches the children, shapes the future. They were wrong about almost everything, but they were right about that.
They put their energy into the young because they knew young hearts are open hearts. They knew a child who is taught something at seven will still be carrying it at seventy. For decades, they used that truth to push God out of homes and classrooms across an entire part of the world.
By God’s grace, the same truth now runs in the other direction. The hearts of the children of Ukraine, of Russia, of every post-Soviet land are still open. Still receptive. Still longing for something real. The question is no longer whether someone will reach them. The question is who.
Will it be fear? Will it be the sounds of war? Or will it be the gentle voice of a counselor at a Summer of Hope camp, telling a child for the very first time that Jesus loves them?
The Day Jesus Stopped Everything
There is a moment in Mark chapter 10 that I come back to all the time. Mothers are bringing their little ones to Jesus, and the disciples — trying to be helpful, trying to protect His time — are shooing the children away. Jesus is busy. Jesus has important people to talk to. Jesus does not have time for this.
And Jesus stops everything.
“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” Mark 10:14
He gathers the children up. He puts His hands on them. He blesses them. In the middle of all His work, in the middle of a world that did not value children the way we do today, the Son of God stops and makes time for them.
That is the Gospel in a single picture. Jesus does not skim past the small and the overlooked. He kneels down. He lifts them up. He looks them in the eye. And He tells them, by the way He treats them, that they matter to Him more than almost anything else going on that day.
That is the heart we want to carry into every single Summer of Hope camp. That is the message we want every child to hear, maybe for the first time in their life: you are not in the way. You are not too small to matter. You are loved. You are loved by God. You have not been forgotten.
And Then They Bring Their Families
Here is one of the most beautiful things I have learned in years of doing this work. The children who come to camp do not just get changed themselves. They go home and they change the air around them.
A little girl learns to pray, and her mother starts asking questions. A boy comes home singing a song about Jesus, and his father starts coming to church. One of our pastors told me recently about a grandmother who had not stepped inside a sanctuary in over fifty years. She walked through the doors one Sunday morning because her grandson asked her to. She wept through the whole service.
We send out children. The Lord brings back whole families. Camp is not just a children’s outreach. Camp is a family outreach disguised as a week of games and crafts and campfires.
How You Can Be Part of It
This summer, we are expecting hundreds of children at our Summer of Hope camps, and Lord willing, even more. From Odesa, to Kyiv, to villages whose names you would never recognize, boys and girls are already being signed up. They are waiting.
The cost to send one child to a Summer of Hope camp is about $200 for the full session — with all four meals a day, a bed, games, crafts, Bible teaching, and a children’s Bible to take home. That works out to roughly $25 a day.
If God lays a child on your heart, would you send one? Would you sponsor a week of forgetting the war? A week of being just a kid? A week of hearing, perhaps for the very first time, that the God who made the stars also made them?
How to Give
You can give online right here on our website at www.russianmissions.net, or you can mail a check to Russian Missions, P.O. Box 1712, Southampton, PA 18966. Every gift, of every size, matters. Every gift sends a real child to a real camp.
And if you can’t give this summer but you can pray — please pray. Pray for the counselors who are already training. Pray for Valery and our directors on the ground. Pray for every child whose name is being added to a camp list right now. Pray for safety. Pray for open hearts. Pray that the seed of God’s love takes deep, deep root.
They Are Not Forgotten
If there is one sentence I wish every child at our camps could hear, and one sentence I wish every reader of this blog could hear too, it is this: you are not forgotten. You are loved. You are loved by God.
The cold is lifting. The buses will roll soon. And the children are waiting.
Thank you, friend, for standing with us.
Gratefully,
Pastor Vitali Yuchkovski