On Their
Hearts and In Their Prayers
For some, the war in Ukraine has been something happening to other people on the other side of the world. To the Markham Woods Church in Longwood, Florida, whose membership includes many Ukrainian families, war is on their hearts and in their prayers every moment of every day. In 2021, they adopted Ukraine as one of their countries of mission emphasis.
Three years before, in 2018, Larysa Georginova immigrated to the United States from the Ukraine with her family and joined the Markham Woods Church. At the time, her mother, Valentina Mohylna, chose to remain in her hometown of Berdyansk on the coast of the Sea of Azov, 56 miles from Mariupol. Larysa kept in contact with her mother through occasional visits and through Skype.
Then the unthinkable happened. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, destroying Mariupol and occupying cities and villages in the southeastern part of the country, including Berdyansk. While many residents abandoned their homes and businesses, Valentina, then 86 years old and living alone, could not imagine leaving the only place she called home.
Meanwhile, Doug Hardt, Markham Woods Church senior pastor, contacted Vladimir Tkachuk, the Euro-Asian Division treasurer who is Ukrainian. Hardt told him the Markham Woods Church would take up special offerings to buy buses and fuel for evacuees who lived on the front lines, and to bake four tons of loaves of bread daily for the people of Kyiv and eastern Ukraine.
The first Sabbath, the church raised $50,000, more than double their goal. They put a tab on their church website where the community could contribute. Since the beginning of the war, the Markham Woods Church and the surrounding community has raised more than $350,000. Florida Conference administration also saw the great need in Ukraine and promoted this project in all of the churches and raised an additional $700,000. The total sent to Ukraine has exceeded $1 million.
Twice, Hardt visited Ukraine with churches from Florida to deliver funds for their summer camp and the medical clinic in Chernivtsi, to help children orphaned due to the war, and to bring medical supplies. A Ukrainian organization conducted a survey that asked individuals which government or nongovernmental agency helped them on the front lines the most; 71% of respondents named the Seventh-day Adventist Church. At this time, 6,000 individuals are taking Bible studies, many of whom received aid from Florida Conference special offerings.
During this time, Larysa joined the prayer and quilt ministry of the Markham Woods Church. In 2015, five women with limited quilting experience came together weekly to sew quilts for individuals experiencing serious illness, death of a loved one, other trauma, and for baby dedications. Over the years, the group has added quilts to cover incubators for premature babies in a local hospital and, most recently, comfort quilts for Ukrainian refugees. The ministry has grown to 16 women who have distributed more than 350 quilts, which take between 30 and 100 hours to construct.
Larysa asked the quilters to pray for her mother and gave them weekly updates. Early reports of “She’s okay” eventually changed to “It’s not good.” Yet, Larysa’s pleas for her mother to leave Ukraine were met with an unequivocal, “No, even if they fire or bomb, I will stay here at home.” When the occupying power stopped granting travel permission into Ukraine, Larysa’s personal visits ceased, and as living conditions deteriorated, she relied on the support and prayers of her quilting sisters and church members. Slowly, over time she began to see the Holy Spirit act on her mother’s heart. Finally, she heard the words she’d been waiting for: “Yes, I’m ready.”
Larysa embarked on a journey from Orlando to Warsaw on May 17, 2023, where she reunited with her mother, who had traveled for two days from an occupied territory to Poland. Together they proceeded to Kyiv to arrange Valentina’s travel documents for the U.S. As they prayerfully waited for the documents, they lived in Bucha for three weeks in one of the buildings of the Adventist University, where Larysa had previously worked. Every night they heard air raid alarms, explosions, and rockets whistling overhead. As the process took some time, they returned to Poland, first in Podkowa Lesna near Warsaw and then in Warsaw itself, before finally flying to Orlando on July 12, 2023. During this entire process, the family of Olena, Valentina’s granddaughter, provided great assistance. But the most important leader was God!
Twelve days later, they met with the quilters of the Markham Woods Church who presented Valentina with a welcome quilt they had been working on since Larysa left. Each of the 30 quilt blocks used fabric with the colors of the Ukrainian flag and the United States flag. No two quilt blocks were exactly alike.
Help is still needed in Ukraine. Twenty-seven churches have been destroyed or severely damaged. All of their schools have had to build bomb shelters or the government would shut them down. Almost 20% of the church membership has left the country.
God blessed the mustard seed of faith of the people in the Markham Woods Church. With the donated funds from the church and community, it is estimated tens of thousands of mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers and children of all ages have been helped in a land on the other side of the world, but not so far away — including one 4ʹ11ʺ 87-year-old grandmother who is learning to quilt.
Florida | March 2024
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