I was going through some old books this week and mixed in with the books was a little photo album.

The photos were from July 2001. They were taken on the first-ever College Church missions trip to Russia. At that time, the church in Russia was celebrating its freedom. Doors were opening. Summer camps for children run by evangelical churches were on the upswing. They were taking down the statues of Lenin and Christians were standing in the places and telling the story of Jesus.

Word spread. It was news that evangelical Christians were doing the camp. It was even bigger news that a group of Americans had come to join them. Most of the people had never met Americans. It was a little bit like we were from Mars.

Camp was in an elementary school the staff had rented from the local officials. Our big meetings took place in the dining/meeting hall. Kids and counselors and our team all slept in classrooms. I remember studying an old propaganda poster about local heroes in Afghanistan.

Cars were stopping with children in them. The drivers were moms or dads or grandmas or grandads. No, they had never been to church. But they had heard that there was such a thing—a Christian camp. Something our Russian colleagues thought impossible when they were growing up. They wanted to drop off their children to join the camp. The Russian counselors gave up their room and pitched tents outside so the staff rooms could be converted to rooms for. more child campers. They added more sleeping spaces in the other rooms as well.

We made tie-dye shirts with the kids. We brought over the shirts and dyes and soda ash, that just a few years later would have not been allowed because of security concerns. To keep dye from staining kids, we made makeshift smocks out of trash bags. In between cooking for lunch and dinner, the cooks managed to fit dunking the dye-drenched shirts into the giant cooking pots.

The next day after the dying, we unwrapped the shirts revealing the bursts of color. The kids could hardly wait to put them on. We tried hanging them to dry, but the bursts of color on the shirts were irresistible to the children. On the shirts went, dry or not.

During afternoon rest time, we got to know the Russian Christian leaders and counselors. We listened to them and they listened to us, telling how Jesus had touched and changed us.

This all happened about 130 miles south of Moscow. The expressway signs told us we were headed toward Donetsk. Another 370 miles on the same road, and we would have hit the border with Ukraine.

Things change, don’t they? The children in the photos are all adults. We would not be allowed in Russia to do now what we did then. The evangelical church there has to be careful what they do outside the walls of their churches.

But God did something. Most people would not have predicted or dreamed that it could have happened. And it was such a blessing that he used little us to be a part of it. A shadow falls as I think about that road to Ukraine and how different it must be now.

God never stops. Neither people nor Satan will defeat him.

Today, God is touching lives. He can still use little us, not in the same way as back then, but does that really matter? God can do what God wants to do. Ours is only to be willing and available with where he has put us and to not shrink back to our own ways.

When we look back in another 21 years, in 2043, we will be in a very different world. But Jesus will not have changed. The Holy Spirit will still be moving into the houses of souls. God’s living Word will still be speaking. Maybe the most hostile places to the gospel today will be places filled with churches and revival. May our hearts have grown to be more like the heart of Jesus between now and then. May we still be found serving Jesus, caring for and reaching out to others on the road to the kingdom that has no end.