Global Impact

g l o b a l i m p a c t

The “Global Impact” section of the MIX is designed to share stories of how God is expanding his kingdom. For more info on International Ministries, email international.ministries@vineyardcolumbus.org.

A Season of Change An update from one of our Middle East workers

This past month has been full of expected and unexpected transitions. I enjoyed a mere one-week acclimating to my new team and culture, and then the government instituted a countrywide quarantine due to COVID-19. Many things have been put on pause, including the launch of our clinic, language lessons, team gatherings, and purchasing a car. This has brought much disappointment and many challenges. This country is struggling as well; the people have already experienced so much hardship, and the pandemic is only adding to the difficulty. For me personally, it has been especially hard being so new here and physically disconnected from my team. However, in the midst of all these extra challenges I am grateful for leisurely mornings, internet, sunshine, and video calls with friends and family.

Life on “Pause” An update from Central Asia

During this time of COVID-19, much of the world seems to have been put on pause. It is the same way here. Usually each evening we hear constant honking, and the traffic is thick and extremely slow moving from every direction (we live on a major intersection), as people travel home from work. Now it is quiet instead. The streets are usually full of people walking, unlike cities in America, but now we see only a few people with white masks. We ourselves are just getting over what was probably a light case of THE virus. We could not be tested (not easy to get done here), but we had all of the symptoms, and still have some lingering symptoms. We are deeply saddened for the loss of life here in our city, and around the world.

D r a m a t i c C h a n g e s t o Normal Life An update from Brazil

A few weeks ago, we left home for a ministry trip that included serving a local church in Recife,

followed by a three-day worker care retreat in Joao Pessoa. We are so grateful that all the workers were able to attend the retreat despite the pandemic. Our main speaker was not able to travel to be physically with us, but through streaming video we still were able to have him speak. It was a great time and thankfully the technology consistently worked well! However, so much can change in just a few weeks. As we set off to start our journey home, we had two airline cancellations, which forced us to change plans and travel by bus most of the way. For the final leg we had to rent a car. All said, it ended up being a much longer than anticipated journey. We arrived home to a different world: our city is now in lockdown. Thankfully, there are no cases of the corona virus in our town, but since the city only has seven ventilators and it does not want to be overrun by the virus, lockdown has been imposed. Normal daily life has changed completely and tragically, people are being hit quite hard financially as well.