About Philip & Dasha

CRAZY MISSIONARIES

It was 1987 and Christmas was just around the corner, but my two Texan grandparents weren't that happy because they would not be seeing their only grandchild (me) for Christmas. I was only 14 months old and my parents were some of those crazy missionary types. We were going to Norway that first Christmas I could walk for. It's not easy being a missionary and that first trip only lasted for 4 weeks. Don't get me wrong, for my family the hardest part about being a missionary was never being on the missions field, but the hardest part was raising the finances to get to the field and to stay on the field. I think most other missionaries will probably agree with me on that. If you are called to a place by God, then His grace is there with you. The biggest difficulty is when you do things that others might expect you to do, but God might not have called you to do those things.

NOT EXACTLY LIKE WE PLANNED

After spending another 11 months in Norway (during which my sister was born) on another trip we headed back to the States to "quickly raise some more support and get back on the field", but what we hadn't expected was how many other things God had for us to learn before we got back on the mission field. While we were in the USA my parents worked with children at our home church in Houston, Texas, and a year interim pastoring in a small town, Rockdale, Texas. During that time we joined a missions organization as recommended to us by a pastor, but we took so long trying to meet their requirements for getting on the field that they finally released us to be on our own. After 8 years of being in the states, we made it back to the mission field, only, we didn't make it back to Norway, nope, God sent us to Russia. Funny how we never know the whole story ahead of time, no matter how sure we are that we do. God just gives us enough of a glimpse for us to take the next step, but He alone sees the whole picture before it's painted.

RUSSIA THE DARK

It was April of 1998, and Russia was cold, dark, dirty and gray. Kursk was nothing like Texas, where I had grown up before this. I was 11 years old at the time. The culture was very different, the food was bland, the language was weird and everybody frowned, everywhere. After taking a few months to settle in and get used to the novelty of where we were, I developed a bad attitude and became disgruntled. I didn't like the food, I didn't understand the language, I couldn't make sense of the people. "Yeah, maybe God called my parents here, but He must not have called me! Why couldn't my parents just leave my sister and I in the States with our grandparents, while they did their missionary thing here as much as they wanted?!?" I thought. But my parents kept praying for me. One Saturday afternoon, as our custom was then, we went with our mother and some of the youth from two of the Russian Churches in town to minister to the children at an orphanage on the outskirts of town. A seat opened up in the left-hand side of the bus as we were going back into town after ministering at the orphanage and one of the young ladies from our group sat down. Even though it was only a row of single seats she squished up against the side of the bus and motioned for me to sit down next to her. I was a small twelve year (almost thirteen) old at the time and so we could have fit, but I smiled and shook my head to signify a "no thank you". It was at that moment when the love of God became real to me. There was nothing spectacular in what that young lady had done, but through that simple act of kindness I got a revelation of the love of God. I had heard my whole life, "God loves you", but I always heard it in a general context and I had never realized it as being personal to me. It was then that I realized God loved me personally, me, with all my faults and imperfections. It hit me that God knew exactly where I was, that He had a plan for my life and that I was not in Russia by accident. Soon after that event I got involved with the youth at the church that we were working with. The food wasn't weird anymore, I wasn't annoyed by the people, I wasn't deterred by the strange language and I wasn't depressed by the drab gray surroundings anymore. Nothing in my surroundings had changed, yet everything seemed so different. What was different was my inner world and my outlook. I now knew that God loved me and was interested in me. Everything around seemed so different to me because I was now looking at everything through 'Jesus-colored-glasses', and Jesus is the perfect expression of the love of the Father. Jesus is the revelation of the goodness of God.

IN RUSSIA WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD

Then after our first 4 years in Russia, God moved us out of the unregistered Pentecostal church, with the blessing of the Russian pastor that we had been working with, and had us start an English speaking church for the growing community of international students in our city. We ministered to Tanzanians, Sri Lankans, Malaysians, Indians, Nigerians, Ecuadorians, Zambians, South Africans, Cameroonians, Ghanaians, Brazilians and smatterings of people from other countries. It seemed like God had brought almost the whole world to us in Kursk, Russia. For 5 years I helped my parents with their new church, but when I was 20, the Lord sent me back to the US to go to Bible college and afterward I worked at our home church in Houston, Texas for another 4 years. The culture shock that I experienced moving back to the States for those 6 years was much greater than any other culture shock I had experienced.

BACK TO RUSSIA

I had my own ideas and plans about what I was going to do with my life, but God had His own plans and after 6 years in the States God put it on my heart to move back to Russia. After coming back to Kursk, I went to a Russian University (as led by God), got involved in a Russian protestant Church and for 5 years helped out with the youth there at that church. After 4 years at the church I married a single mom there and we now have 4 beautiful children. Since then God moved us back to my parents' church to help for a season and we are excited about the adventures that he has for us in the future!

WHERE'S DADDY?

“Mommy, where is daddy?? When is he coming back???” 3 year old Masha asked Dasha after her father didn't come home, “he is on an important trip for his job, sweetie.” Dasha knew that he wasn't, but she was hoping that he really would come back to them.

Dasha had grown up in church from an early age, but after high-school, when she went to college, she thought to herself: “Well, I won't smoke or drink, I'll just be a good person and I won't need to go to church”. As it is for a lot of people, for Dasha church was just a good social place for good people, she hadn't personally met the Savior yet.

After being in college for a while she got married. A few years into marriage they had their first daughter, Masha. Life seemed to be great until Dasha got pregnant with their second child and her husband insisted that she have an abortion. Even though she had not had a personal relationship with God, her conscience wouldn't let her do an abortion. Her husband fought with her and since neither of them were willing to compromise, he decided to leave. Legally he couldn't file for divorce until Varya (their second baby girl) was a year old. But the extra time and two sweet daughters still did not sway his hardened heart to reconsider his decision. He started living with another girl so his conscience wouldn't be affected by his daughters.

The mounting tension between Dasha and her husband was not eased when she found a lump in her breast and was diagnosed with breast cancer on her 28th birthday. Being a mother of two, whose husband impatiently awaited the day when he could officially file for divorce, having a diagnosis of breast cancer and being devoid of any income put Dasha at the end of her rope. “God, why?!?!” she cried out as she went to the hospital for a mastectomy. The nice life she had always dreamed of and which had seemed to be within reach was crumbling before her eyes.

She was sitting in the oncology hospital when the surgeon came in to do a preoperative checkup. Then as he began the checkup he looked at her with a confused and perplexed expression on his face and said, “Where’s the lump?!? What doctor sent you here??? You don't have a lump in your breast!!!” She checked and sure enough - no lump! They called her doctor in who had diagnosed her and he didn't know what to say. The biopsy of the lump before had tested malignant but now there wasn't even a lump to test. They ran some blood tests and could find no trace of cancer. She realized that even though she had left God, He had never left her! After getting home from the hospital and figuring out how to feed her girls with no income, she came back to the church with her girls and immediately got involved in the social outreach ministry at the church.

BACK WITH GOD

“I haven’t slept in three nights and Masha isn't feeling well. I don't think I'll be able to make it to church today...” thought Dasha to herself. It was November 27th, 2016, about a year after Dasha had come back to church. This Sunday morning was special. The service was led by the youth of St. Peter’s Church and they had asked her to share her testimony about how she had come back to Church. Even though she was exhausted and her oldest wasn't feeling well, they went anyways.

I (Philip) had been seeking God in November and He took me to Isaiah 43:26 where it says to “argue your case” before the Lord. God had led me to write out my case of what the Word of God said about getting married and what was promised to me, so I did. My case actually turned out to be much larger than I had anticipated. Every day I was reading, praying and meditating on the abundance of scriptures that I had found on the subject. Faith began to replace the delicate shreds of hope that I had remaining after years of getting nowhere in this area. I began declaring with boldness and confidence that God was providing me with the best wife.

It seemed like a normal Sunday when the youth were in charge of the service. I was going to preach on walking in love. But then before it was time for me to preach, Igor called Dasha up to tell her testimony of how she came back to Church. It was good that no one could see me where I was standing, because as Dasha shared her testimony it touched my heart so much that I teared up. The whole following week I couldn’t get away from her testimony. It wouldn’t leave me alone. Then the wife of a good friend said to me in an unexpected segue of conversation, “Philip, Dasha would make the best wife for you and I know that it wouldn’t be a problem for you that she has children!”, or at least something to that effect in Russian. I decided to pray until January; after all it would be a really serious step, not only getting married, but also immediately becoming a father to two girls.

NEW YEAR'S PRAYER

“Alright children, what do you want for New Years?” asked the teacher at Masha’s kindergarten during the first week of December. Most of the kids wanted various toys and things to play with, but Masha was different. Masha told her teacher, “I want to have a daddy who will love me!” The teacher, being skeptical and “realistic” told Masha that something like that couldn’t happen, which made Masha very upset. Instead of taking Masha to the child-psychologist like the kindergarten teacher recommended, Dasha told Masha, “Why don’t you pray and ask God?” So in December Masha started fervently praying every day that God would give her a daddy who would love her.

December came and went in prayer for both of the groups in this story, but just before New Years I asked if my sister Lily and I could visit Dasha, Masha and Varya on January 2nd. After that first wonderful visit the girls had chickenpox for a week and a half which kept them out of Church, but on Friday the 13th of January (no joke), I went for a second visit. I could already tell that I was getting along with the girls fine, but I wasn’t exactly sure what their mother, Dasha, thought of me. As I was sitting on the floor playing “garden and kitchen” with the girls, all of the sudden Masha with a deeply contemplative look on her face and the sincerity of an innocent child asked me, “Philip, when are you going to become my Daddy???”. Dasha’s eyes got as big as saucers; she was lost for words. “M-M-Masha, you can’t say things like that!!!” blurted out Dasha after regaining a bit of composure. Masha answered with, “I prayed and I decided that Philip is going to be my Daddy!!!”. I intervened telling Dasha that it was okay. When I left to go lead worship at youth that evening I left Dasha with the words, “As the scriptures say, from the mouths of babes…”. That was when we started talking about the possibility of getting married. We talked, prayed and consulted with pastors for a whole two and a half weeks before I proposed to her and she said “YES!”. It truly is amazing how quickly God can turn seemingly hopeless situations around and even put you ahead of the game! One thing that we can all say is that God is the One Who put us together, it wasn’t even our idea. Of course the prayers of a little girl who had no father on earth helped too.

We were married in April of 2017

WERE THEY PAYING ATTENTION?

It was the look on the girl's faces on that day in July that caught my attention. Dasha had just mentioned to Masha and Varvara that when I adopt them, they would get new documents with a new surname, a new patronymic name and if they were to want, they could get new first names. Dasha had nonchalantly said this in passing to the girls, but I suspected that they had taken serious notice of this possibility.

CHOOSING BABY NAMES

It was after New Years in 2018, Dasha and I had come up with two lists: one of boy's names and another of girl's names. Masha and Varvara had heard us discussing name possibilities for the new baby we were all excitedly expecting and they had paid better attention to our name discussions than we had thought. Finally we did the ultrasound and found out that we were having a boy, so Dasha and I kind of forgot about the girl names that we had been discussing, our focus was on boy names.

THEY TOOK IT TO HEART

I was playing with Varvara in the kitchen one afternoon in the Spring of 2018. She hid under the kitchen table, I could tell because of the loud giggling. Then I said "Who's that under our table?" in a goofy voice. Then she responded with "It's me, your daughter Yevdokia" (pronounced Yev-dah-KEE-yah), as she came out from under the table with a serious look on her face and no giggling. "From now on everyone should call me Yevdakia", the three and a half year old repeated. "And I am now Zoya" chimed in 5 year old Masha, who had heard the commotion and came up behind me. Dasha heard all of this and came to us from the living room. Dasha and I looked at each other and knew we needed to have a serious talk with the girls. "You do realize that if we change your names to Zoya and Yevdokia, you won't be able to change them again if you hear another name that you think sounds cool. We will only change your names once and for all, and no one will then call you by your old names of Maria (Masha) and Varvara (Varya). We will have to explain to everyone who already knows you that you now have different names and some people might not like it." Dasha and I explained to the girls. I knew why the girls wanted to do this, they wanted a clean break with the past. It symbolized to them that they were saying "goodbye" to the past with all it's pain of a hopelessly broken family and to them new names signified a new happy beginning. Stories from the Bible came to my mind of God giving people new names that signified a new life and a turning point for them, their new names reminded them of God's promises to them. I knew that for the girls it was a step of faith. It was them drawing a line in the sand, distancing themselves from the past.

Now the girls are Zoya and Yevdokia.