In 1992 we took a group of about twenty Americans to distribute about 50,000 New Testaments. After World War II, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt redrew the boundaries in Europe, and about 16 million ethnic Romanians found themselves in the Ukraine. So we drove to Chernovski, Ukraine with about 10,000 Romanian New Testaments and 10,000 Russian New Testaments. What a joy to hand out copies of God’s Word where it had been banned for over 40 years! The hardest problem that we faced was to make people understand that the Scriptures were really free. No one had ever given them anything, let alone a copy of the Bible! My wife gave a little old lady a New Testament, but the lady was bewildered. The translator assured her that it was indeed free and that it was a gift for her from America. The lady told Kathy (through the translator) that she had heard of the Bible and had hoped that she would someday be able to read it for herself. She took the New Testament hugging it to her heart and kissed Kathy’s hand. The little lady’s eyesight was so poor that she had to hold the book within inches to read it. As we distributed the New Testaments in the park that day, we would see the little old lady sitting on a park bench, still reading her New Testament holding it right up to her face. Are we like that little old lady? Do we respect and love God’s precious Word?
