January 1, 2004
Dear Friends in Christ,
Our warmest greetings to each you for the New Year. May His light
shine upon you and may His peace and joy be with you in 2004.
We hope that you have had a warm and wonderful Christmas season.
Since I last wrote, Al and I closed up one apartment, moved into
another (where our goods are now being stored), and then packed
up enough for the next six months and flew to the United States,
arriving in Minneapolis. We quickly drove to Green Bay, Wisconsin,
to celebrate Allison’s 20th birthday (she was at her grandparents’).
The following Monday, we drove to North Carolina to take Meg to
her orthopedist and to visit friends. We returned to Wisconsin
for Christmas and have spent the last two weeks with family. It
has been a blessed and a relaxing time for all of us.
Today, we write you from the road, as we drive from Green Bay
to Louisville. We have an apartment waiting for us on the campus
of the Louisville Theological Seminary. The girls will start school
on Monday, and at the end of next week our travels to visit churches
will begin. We will be visiting with many of you over the next
five months, and are certainly looking forward to that. We have
carried with us from Russia the warm greetings of your brothers
and sisters in Christ—Baptist, Orthodox and Lutheran. We
look forward to sharing with you the exciting work that is going
on in all three of these churches.
Since our arrival, we have struggled some to get our email files
transferred over to laptops. We are still in that process, but
hope that everything will be in order shortly. We are receiving
all of your emails, but are still working on other email issues.
We have finally gained full access to our address book. This problem
kept us from sending you our Christmas greetings. The elalsmith@eamail.net
address is working. There are two other addresses as well (ellsmith59@aol.com
and elalsmith@yahoo.com).
It is still best to send emails to the “eamail” address
unless you have trouble with that one. We do have a snail mail
address as well, 1044 Alta Vista Rd #2, Louisville, KY 40205.
The phone number at our apartment is (502) 896-8412. We hope to
have a cell phone in the next few days as well, in case you need
to reach us while we are traveling. As always, if you have the
time, we would love to hear from you.
We look forward to being with many of you shortly. We are glad
to be back in the United States, but are also looking forward
to our return to Russia in June. We are in touch with many of
our Russian and Belarusian colleagues. If you need to send any
messages, just let us know.
Peace and blessings,
Ellen and Al Smith
The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
182 |
