hymns!

When I was a little girl, my Grandpa B. always asked me, "Did you sing in church this Sunday?" (He also always asked me if I thought I was passing my classes and told me to be kind to small children and animals.) Well, this past Sunday, I sang in church. A Ukrainian Baptist church, at that. There's nothing like being in a foreign-language church for the first time and being asked to sing a solo in English (well, I think Brandi had to give her testimony her first week at her church in Germany)...I gave a sort of shaky intro about who I was in Ukrainian and then sang two verses of "How Great Thou Art," as we'd already sung it in Ukrainian.

It's a small church--probably about 50 people, with 15-20 of them children/young adults (10 kids from one family!), but the majority being older people ("ancient saints," to quote my dad). It reminded me of the Rock Lake church in a lot of ways--partly the demographics of the congregation, partly that during prayer, some of the people kneel and quietly pray out loud while the main prayer is going on, partly just that, while all married women wear headcoverings, the married women with kids tended to have their hair in sort of a "puff" under the headcovering. :)

It's a singing church, which makes me happy. There wasn't one long sermon, but rather various men of the congregation would speak for about 5-10 minutes, then we'd sing and someone, either man or woman, would read Scripture or pray, then we'd sing some more and then have another mini-sermon. I couldn't follow a lot of it, of course, but I could pick out words here and there. I have a bilingual Russian/English New Testament, so I could hand it to one of the kids, who would find where we were at in Russian, and then I could use the numbers and the book title to find it in English. It is also a hymn-singing church (!!!)--we sang "How Great Thou Art," "When the Roll is Called up Yonder," and "I Surrender All" in Ukrainian, plus a lot of songs I didn't know. So I have to travel half-way around the world to be part of a church that sings a lot of hymns?

Anyhow, I like it and I plan to start going regularly.

~*~

Am moved in the apartment. I have loads to say about it, but I need to get off-line and go home, as I have furniture supposedly showing up in half an hour!