Living in Hope: A Week in Strikī

On the last day, the field behind the school filled with the sound of relay games and basketball — students and our missionaries chasing the same ball, the translators right in the middle of it, more laughter. It wasn’t on any lesson plan. It was just what the week kept doing: pulling people closer than a classroom alone ever could.

Our theme this week was Living in Hope: Lessons from the Life of David. We walked through his life day by day, and on Friday we landed on God’s promise to him — that an everlasting kingdom would come from his family, a promise kept generations later in the birth of a child in Bethlehem. Hope, the lessons kept insisting, is not something we manufacture. It rests on what God has already promised and is already doing. That felt like the right note to end on, because the week was never really about what we accomplished here.

What we mostly saw was the Lord drawing people together. Conversations with students that went deeper than we expected. Time spent praying for and alongside our translators, who carry the language and the relationships long after our flight leaves. Small things, hard to measure, easy to overlook — and yet they seemed to be exactly where God was at work.

This was our last week with Ruth, who is from the States but currently serving as a long-term missionary in Romania. We’re grateful for her, and we’ll feel her absence as we move on. But that means that for our next week in Sabile, we get ot welcome back a former short-term missionary to Latvia, Jennifer.

I want to thank those of you who sent these missionaries and prayed them through the week. You were part of this in ways you didn’t see. None of us did this on our own, and none of us finishes it. A week is short. We leave with relationships only begun and plenty left unfinished — and that’s all right. The fruit isn’t ours to count. It belongs to The Lord, and it stays here in the hands of our Latvian partners, the local church and school, and the students themselves, who were here long before we came and will be here long after.

From here, we travel on to Sabile, a smaller, poorer rural community, to begin again. Please keep praying — for Sabile, for our partners, and for the work God is continuing in Strikī now that we’ve gone.

Blessings, Mark