Home for the Holidays

Tyler and I made our return to California on December 11th. We are grateful to be back home for some time. The Lord has blessed us with the gift of being around family for the holidays. Tyler hasn't had a Christmas or birthday (01-09) celebration here in three years. So, it really is nice to have some time in the States to renew our visas and get recharged for our next trip to Russia.

At this time, we are looking at February as our goal month to return to Moscow. We are praying and leaving ourselves open to God's direction regarding this.

While we are in California, we want to keep our focus on ministry. The Lord has already provided great opportunities for us.

Last week, Tyler and I were introduced to the Rescue Mission in Victorville, located at the First Southern Baptist Church. This is a ministry that provides daily meals to the homeless and needy Monday through Friday. They also distribute clothes once a week, on Wednesdays. The Wednesday before Christmas, they held a huge festival, which I was priviledged to partake in. They had live Worship and Christmas music, a place for kids to see Santa, great snacks, prize giveaways, and tons of toys for the kids too. At least a couple thousand people showed up. It was an amazing day.

We want to become more involved in this ministry. From our experiences with the Rescue Mission food services, there are always at least 20-30 people who show up for a meal. They stay for about 30-45 minutes. It is a wonderful service that satisfies the physical hunger of these wanting people. However, they are not being given the "Bread of Life". Tyler and I have discussed the need for these people to have the Word served them during their meals also. We spoke with the director of the Mission and he was excited about the idea to have Christians give a brief message during the meals. He said they have wanted to do this for some time, but do to short staff it has been too difficult. Tyler is willing to step in and give messages throughout the week. However, we are hoping to share this opportunity to be a blessing and a strong witness for Christ with others. We know there are many good, strong believers who could offer so much to these people who don't know the Lord. If you are interested in helping us organize this please call or email us about it. 760-955-2400 tylergoodell@yahoo.com



Pray Requests:

• That Calvary Chapel Sokol will be blessed and continue to grow in Moscow.


• That Pastor Dean will be encouraged and edified in the work he is doing for the Lord and for the Russian people.


• That Tyler and I will use our time in the States to serve God and draw closer to Him.


• That the Lord provides people to help give messages to the homeless at the Rescue Mission.

Our Place

Well, Tyler and I have been living in our first apartment here in Moscow. It is a one room, tiny flat on the seventh floor in a building made in 1970. It is not bad, a little small, but it works for us. It is keeping us close to say the least : )

However, the place was in a pretty sad shape when we moved in. So, we made it our project to do some fixing up. We wanted to leave it looking better than it was when we got it.

Anyways, here are some cool pics that can help you understand the changes we made to our home.

Tyler unlocking our door for the first time.

We thought it would be wise to make changing the lock the first thing we did when we arrived.

This is our room. We are so thankful our friend Jimmy from chruch provided a clean rug and a new sofa.

Our bathroom started off this way, but thanks to Tyler's talent with a paintbrush and a great deal of help from our friend Dale this bathroom has had a nice facelift. It is no longer blue, but a nice clean white.

The water stains on the wall were the hardest to deal with. No matter how many coats of paint went over it, the stain kept coming through. Fortunately, we found out about this great stuff that keeps stain from showing, that fixed our problem pretty quickly.

Here is a good shot of how the kitchen looked when we got there. We got rid of that cabinet sitting on the floor. I was happy to see it in the dumpster. Doing this provided some walking room.

We started our kitchen project by cleaning the floor. It was especially a good thing we moved the fridge, 'cause there was a family of cockroaches living here.

We started to clean the dirt off of wallpaper and thought it just might be easier to tear it all down and paint. We never thought that we would find newspaper underneath. Crazy! Apparently, newspaper is commonly used in Russia to even out the wall before laying down the wall paper.

Here Tyler is just scraping away at the wall paper. It didn't come off as easily as expected.

We were not happy to see what kind of ads were in the paper. It is a sad thing, but this page in the paper was all for abortion advertisements. Russia has the highest number of abortions per woman of child-bearing age in the world according to UN data. Please pray for Russia!

Our awesome friend, Dale. He was really helpful in remodeling the kitchen. He mudded all the walls and gave the kitchen its new foundation. Thanks Dale!!

This is a look at the final product. Pastor Dean put in a new faucet and a "tumba" or sink cabinet. Dale and Tyler moved the cabinet to hang over the sink and painted the walls a pristine white. Looks so good now!

Oh, and we put down a fresh new carpet from IKEA-a great finishing touch : )

We want to thank God for our friends Jimmy & Svyeta who rented this apartment to us. We also are so thankful to the Lord for His graciousness in providing financially for us through Tyler's work which has allowed us to make all the changes here.