Here is the story of how Moises and Sali Menezes heard God’s call to the Ukraine.

In 1996, Sali and I returned to Brazil to participate in some training in Rio de Janeiro. At the same time I was invited to preach in a missionary conference in the town of Caxias, not far from Rio.

My wife stayed at the training center while I went to the conference alone. On that Saturday at the conference, some people made the decision to obey the missionary call from God. It was a special service and my heart beat for the needy of Latin America.

That night I was invited to stay with a brother who kindly prepared a very comfortable room for me. I lay down, but I couldn’t sleep. Something strange was happening to me that night and I was taken by a sudden compassion for a people that I did not know. God placed in my heart an enormous desire to pray for the people of Eastern Europe, specifically for the Ukraine. I prayed, asking God to bless that group of people by sending missionaries to them. After prayer I tried to sleep again, but I continued thinking about those people. Just then my heart was aflame with the desire to say to God that I was ready to go wherever He wanted me to go, even the distant Ukraine, but I did not have courage to make such a statement.

After some minutes of fighting between my own missionary projects and that great challenge from God, I decided to say yes to God. Finally I prayed saying, "I am ready to go wherever You want me to go—even if it means the distant Ukraine. That night my answer to God's call was: Yes, Lord, send me.
One thing I knew for sure, God had to break the heart of my wife to convince her about moving to another continent, especially to a place totally unknown to us at that time. Returning the following day to the training center, I woke her up to tell her what had happened. She said that I could go alone but not with her, that she was not going with me to any other place but Chile. As a result of this we got stressed out and I promised her that we would not talk about this subject again.

After finishing the training in Brazil, I decided to visit my family in Brasilia mid-west, while Sali went to the south to visit her grandmother before departure to Chile again.

In Brasilia, the federal capital, I visited the Central Baptist Church of Taguatinga for the first time in my life. I arrived exactly when the pastor was introducing the visitors and he asked me to say my name and origin. After I mentioned that I was a missionary in Chile, he said that the church was a missionary one, and that they had a special vision toward Eastern Europe, more specifically the Ukraine. One more time, at the mention of the Ukraine, I was in shock. And I remembered that I had promised my wife not to mention this again.

When we got back to Chile, only for curiosity, I bought one of those books that promise to teach you to speak Russian within 15 days. I learned the first letters of the Russian alphabet, and that was all. Sali stayed in Brazil for two more weeks and I was in Chile alone.

On the following Sunday after my return to the mission field, I shared in the church about our time in Brazil, but without mentioning anything of my calling to the Ukraine. That same day a family of the church, knowing that I had returned alone, invited me for lunch after Sunday school. They are simple and very kind people. After lunch sister Berta showed me some photographs that she had kept in a box for a long time. She placed three photos in my hands. The first one was some unknown missionaries, the second picture was taken in Brazil. The last photo almost stopped my heart. To my astonishment, it was a photograph inside of a church somewhere in Eastern Europe!

In the photo I could identify the letters written in the wall behind the pulpit. With the little Russian that I had learned with my "super book," I was able to read the word "BOG," God in Russian. That drew my attention. I asked if sister Berta would give me that photo just as a souvenir. However she said that she could not give me that photo because it was a prayer request from a missionary. She had been challenged to pray for those people, which by the way, she had no idea of who they were. She prayed asking God to send missionaries to work amongst those with the "so sad faces."

When I heard those words I couldn’t help crying. I confessed what was happening and how God was speaking with me exactly about the Ukraine. After saying this, sister Berta gave me the photo and said that now I could have it, because God already had answered her prayers. "I never could imagine," she said, "that God would make this happen in so special a way, bringing somebody of another country to be my pastor for a while and then call that person to the mission field that I have been praying for over the last five years."

After that, I did not have any doubts that God was working, but I had promised my wife not to talk about this any more. What should I do now?

That Sunday night after the service, still shocked with everything that happened that day, I lay down to rest and I turned on the TV to the Discovery Channel. It was about ten o’clock and the program, to my surprise, was a documentary about Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. It was hilarious. It seemed that I was at a dead-end; was God speaking, or was everything just an extraordinary coincidence?

One week later Sali arrived from Brazil and we had so many experiences to share. But as soon as we started to talk about the Ukraine, we began to argue.

That same night I went to a meeting with the missionary board of the church and when I came back home I found a great poster with a Bible verse hung on the door of our refrigerator. The verse said: "I know the thoughts that I think toward you, said the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end." Jeremiah 29:11. Then I knew immediately that something had happened.

My wife told me that she had been horrified with the idea of leaving Chile. Then she prayed to God asking about our future and what would become of us on the other side of the world. God placed in her heart the Bible reference Jeremiah 29:11 and she looked it up. That verse was the word of God, not only for her, but also for us that night. He was giving us a future and hope. Years later we discovered that future and hope were two elements absent in Eastern Europe.

Then Sali said to me: I'll go, I'll go with you wherever God is calling us to go because I trust that He is faithful to keep His promises. We talked long into the night about that great journey.

But still there was something that she had not told me. When she was visiting her grandmother in the south of Brazil, she mentioned something about the Ukraine and immediately her grandma asked if the Ukraine was the same as "Ukraina" and if that was close to Russia. On the positive reply of Sali, her grandma told her, for the first time in her life, that her father was born some place in the Ukraine and that she remembered lots of stories of the black land, the bread, and the language.

Two years later we arrived in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine and the hometown of our firstborn, Lucas. After four years of ministry, we returned to Brazil to prepare for the new work that God had laid on our hearts, and look forward to going back to the Ukraine in mid 2006. Our plan is to form a youth leaders training center to reach the countries of eastern Europe. The center will focus on teen evangelism, discipleship and leadership for youth ministries. We also want to start a camp that will serve the training center and other ministries that work with youth.

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