My name is Karen McDonald. I am 63 years old, am married, and have 3 grown children and 9 grandkids. I have ministered in and across 5 of the 9 time zones in Russia for 12 years, first in the mid 90s for 1.5 years when our kids were teenagers, and then for 10.5 years (since 2004) with my husband.
It was a dream fulfilled to live and serve in Russia. We thought that we would be in Russia to the end of our days and probably be buried in our beloved adopted country. For the last 7.5 years we have worked alongside an indigenous church planting movement that evangelizes the most desperately down and out of society’s cast offs; drug addicts, homeless people, and criminals coming out of prison. It has been a wild and exciting ride, and we have seen God move in might and miracles; healing disease, lives, and families over and over again.
Ours was a wide open door of effective ministry, but in 2012 God began to shift our purpose from Russia back to America in order to bring what we had learned in Russia to the problems in the US. In July 2014, we said good bye to everything that was familiar and fulfilling and to people who we dearly loved. We now are living in Indiana and are endeavoring to open a home for discipling drug addicts.
Please pray for my adjustment and reconnection. This last year has been a year of trauma and death for me. Starting in March of 2014 we began to disassemble our home, dissolve our ministry, and say our good byes to loved ones we knew we would, in all probability, never see again in this life. For 3 months when we arrived back in the States we lived out of boxes in a temporary apartment in New Hampshire, while we took time to go around and thank our supporting churches for their years of support. The last week in October we moved to Indiana and I have been trying to adjust to this new life. Culturally I am lost, laboring, and struggling with depression. The only certainty I have in my life is that I know that it was God who directed us to come here, but this has been the hardest transition I have ever made.
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