Ukraine Series: Chance Encounters
My wife and I were walking to the nearby bakery here in Budapest to buy some bread when a man accompanied by his wife and an elderly woman approached me and asked in broken English if I knew of a photo place nearby that could do passport photos. I figured out they were Ukrainian and was able to start talking with the man in Russian. I said I wasn’t a local either, and I said I didn’t know of one. But then I thought of googling to find one on my phone. I found one that was open on a Sunday night until 8 p.m. and offered to drive him over there. He was pretty happy about that and agreed. He needed to get a passport photo for his 96-year-old aunt, who came across the border without a passport. They were on their way to Israel to join his daughter, who already lives there and had evacuated from Kyiv just a couple of days before.
We drove to the address of the photo place, and it was just a normal apartment building. I thought maybe the Google info was out of date. Or wrong. But a Hungarian man walking by helped us call the apartment listed in the address. We discovered that a Ukrainian woman was running a photo business out of an apartment, and was specifically targeting Ukrainians who were needing passport photos.
As we trudged up the stairs with this 96-year-old woman - she was hunched over and had to be helped - the man’s wife called me her guardian angel. She told me her husband had said prior to him meeting me that he would start believing in God if they would be able to find a photo place open on a Sunday evening that was able to make the exact photo they needed. They had already tried one of the automatic photo booths, and it didn’t make the right size picture. As we were waiting on the photo to be processed, he admitted that he had started believing in God and called our meeting a miracle.
His wife told me that she had seen so many miracles over the past few days of their evacuation from Ukraine that she knew God was taking care of them. In our home church meeting with other Ukrainians that morning, we had read Psalm 23, and I was able to share with her the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death and not fearing because God is with us. I was able to encourage her that they had lived that verse the past few days. And she agreed.
I also had a chance to tell her about the OMS team in Israel and gave her their contact information, while encouraging her to connect with them. She said that she used to attend a Messianic Jewish congregation in Kyiv, but in recent months (years?) had started to drift and wasn’t really involved. She said the last few days of miracles and our meeting had caused her to realize her need for a Christian community. She said that when they got to Israel, they would definitely make contact with the team there.
An interesting fact about this family is that they lived not far from us in Kyiv. We were neighbors—well, we lived a metro stop from each other—but still in a city of three million, that is pretty close.
God’s timing is incredible.
