Our dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we would like to greet you with the proclamation: JESUS CHRIST IS RISEN! HE IS RISEN INDEED! Please accept our sincere gratitude for all of your financial support and especially for your prayers through which our Lord has blessed us greatly this Easter because He gave us a chance to celebrate His wonderful resurrection twice! We were blessed to make small Easter presents with sweets and put into each gift a card that said “Jesus Christ is Risen!” in three languages; English, Vietnamese, and Russian.
Christians in Vietnam celebrate Easter April 21st and after the Easter Sunday service, we took half of the presents and went through the town giving out gifts to all the Vietnamese people who we run into and prayed for them. As we gave gifts, we told everyone the phrase ‘Jesus Christ is risen from the dead’ in Vietnamese. One of these people was an elderly woman (on the photo) who we usually buy bread from and we gave her a gift and showed her the card on which it says that Jesus Christ is risen, and she just became so full of joy! Glory to God for He works even through a few words!
Now, a lot of Russian people live in our city and because Easter in Russia is celebrated on April 28th, we were blessed to celebrate this joyful day of Christ’s Resurrection again. We took the rest of the gifts and again, after our second Easter Sunday service, drove through the town giving out the gifts to the Russian population, congratulating them with Easter by telling them in Russian ‘Jesus Christ is Risen!’
Finally, we had a few gifts left so we went to the hospital in our city thinking to maybe find Russian speaking people there, but as we looked up last names on the patients’ doors, none of them were Russian. We got to the last floor and didn’t know what to do with the two gifts. We then saw an elderly Vietnamese man with his wife and the Holy Spirit urged us to go to him and we gave him the gift and the card that said that Jesus Christ has risen and to our surprise, he took the card and held it in his hands staring at it, so we prayed for him right on the spot, and his sad face transformed into a smiling man. Meanwhile, a much older Vietnamese man was wheeled out of his room and he just sat there looking out the window. Again, the Holy Spirit lead us to this man and we gave him our last gift and told him that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead and that He loves him. We prayed for him as well, and the Lord filled our hearts with joy as we left the hospital! May we not forget to always proclaim to everyone that our Lord is alive!
Ministry in Vietnam – Tanya Yevstratenko