Peggy Griffith: 0:14

Hello, and welcome to Next Door Gospel. I am your host, Peggy Griffith Today, I'd like to give a warm welcome to my friend Cassie, who joins us from the beautiful state of Montana. I am honored that Cassie has agreed to join us on the podcast today and to share an incredible journey that she and her family have been on. She and her husband have devoted their lives to mission work, and And served as Bible teachers, continue to serve as Bible teachers. And that eventually led them to service in Ukraine. This is actually part one of a two part series where we will talk about her experiences leading up to Ukraine and their journey of evacuation as Russia invaded the country in 2022. And then in part two, we'll talk about their lives back in the United States and how they've continued to experience God's presence in their work. Here. So welcome, Cassie.

cassandraspeck: 1:10

Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here to chat about this.

Peggy Griffith: 1:14

Well, Cassie, I'd like to start by setting the scene at the beginning. You and your husband Garrett met through work in missions. So you've literally been a couple on a mission from the day you met, Tell us a little bit about your work with the Titus project and how the two of you met and decided to devote your lives to this type of work.

cassandraspeck: 1:33

Sure. So I met Garrett exactly. It's 2025. So exactly 12 years ago, yesterday He came to Montana to do a missionary training school with our organization. We work with Youth With A Mission known as YWAM and Garrett came to do his training school and I was his staff. And he just immediately was someone who loved and cared about every person he was around. And we went on a two month mission to Brazil together with 53 other young missionaries and shortly after getting back, because I was his staff and he was my student, we were not dating until about 15 minutes after he graduated. And we've been together since.

Peggy Griffith: 2:17

I love it. Tell us a little bit about the Titus project.

cassandraspeck: 2:22

Yes, so that was back in 2013 and over the course of our training and our ending up getting married through our dating engagement in marriage. We really sought the Lord on what we what would it look like to use both of our gift sets for the kingdom of God? We both wanted to be in missions. We both wanted to be in ministry. And so actually in our pre marriage counseling part of that was we had to come up with a family mission statement, which was our combined individual statements, which became to bring hope and restoration to all people through the teaching of God's word. And as we knew we wanted to move into overseas missions instead of domestic and training. We wanted to get more theological education because we really felt that pull to the local church globally. And so we sought out different seminaries and different trainings because we are gifted so differently. We ended up both attending Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, At their main campus in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, which is just north of Boston, where Garrett obtained two master's degrees one in biblical languages, one in Old Testament, and I got a master's in social ethics. And so, while we were there, we had our 2 oldest children, Levi and Nora. And when Nora was 10 weeks old, we took all of this training, all of this experience, and we moved to Kiev, Ukraine. And what we did was twofold. We worked with a Bible teaching team that focused on the local church. So part of that was Titus Project, which is actually what we're doing now in the state. So it's kind of cool to see this full circle moment. But the other part and the main reason we went was Garrett and I wrote a Bible curriculum that would take three years to work through multiple classes, any denomination, any person could access this. And what it does is it. Explores every book of the Bible inductively. So that's meaning we're looking at the text in its original context, the original audience. It was written to. Why did it need to be written? What was the author's intent? What is the, what is going on at the time it's written because we firmly believe that the Bible was not written to us, but it is written for us and. He wrote a Bible curriculum to train pastors in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, how to access what the word of God says for themselves, because one, it's really hard to find sound doctrine in the Russian language, but two, it's a post communist post USSR where truth was relative. And we firmly believe that truth is Jesus and so we developed it in English as well as Russian and we built workbooks and so we used Titus project as an avenue to walk out this training for pastors and lay leaders in the church in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Peggy Griffith: 5:31

That is so amazing. And to think that need is there to build that biblical understanding and knowledge in the context of the author's intent. The context of what was happening at that time. That is really important because so often I think a lot of people stray away from the teachings of the Bible because of human interpretation of words that are sometimes taken out of context. So, yeah, I love that. Just makes so much sense. Tell me a little bit about The three years that you spent in Ukraine and the things that you did there.

cassandraspeck: 6:23

So I have loved Ukraine since 2013 I did a leadership training course and there was a married couple. He was Ukrainian. She was American, but they were pioneering this work in Southeastern Ukraine and since 2013, which was the year Garrett and I started dating. I was like, I have to go to Ukraine. And Garrett knew early on when we were dating that I was a woman on a mission. And if we were going to make this happen, that he was going to become a man on a mission and we were going to do it together. And so Ukraine was always in the back of our minds. And then when we had Levi at seminary, we knew we needed to start looking for where we were going. And so we looked at different places, but Ukraine was exactly what we were looking for in that it allowed both of us to use our gifts for the kingdom of God in the fullness of them. And to go with an already established Bible team, but also to start this new thing. And so we moved to Ukraine in August of 2019. And as you know, world history, you know what happened. We moved the end of summer 2019, which meant we moved almost exactly six months before COVID started. And so we were full of hope. We were full of dreams and like the rest of the world in March of 2020, we kind of watched everything fade into the back as everyone was trying to figure out what does the world look like, but the coolest thing, like something I'm so grateful for in the way I look back is because the whole world went online at that point, our Bible program that we were training three to five leaders, our first class, once COVID had started was 47 people

Peggy Griffith: 8:12

You get out of here.

cassandraspeck: 8:14

seven nations. And so where we thought we were going to focus on Ukraine and Central Asia, and we was going to be this slow build, we were seeing like five year vision pieces happen in the first six months. And so while everyone else was fretting, we're like, this is amazing. Like our ministry is going, people are getting trained. We had people from central Asia. We had people from Canada. We had people from all over Europe which ends in some really cool God stories since, including an outreach we went to Belfast, Ireland with this year because of that COVID, that first COVID year. So where we thought we were just focusing on training so small, COVID opened the entire world for us from Ukraine and really brought in people's focusing on what was happening in Ukraine long before the full scale invasion happened in 2022. So we started. And what we do is we take the Bible and we've broken it down into nine modules and we do it thematically. And we explore all of these different themes, what the text is saying. So that's what we did for three years. And then we also led Titus Outreaches. So we weren't just using this Bible curriculum, but we were also taking international missionaries as well as Ukrainian missionaries in training them how to be effective communicators of the gospel through inductive preaching, inductive teaching how do you lead Bible studies? How do you communicate cross culturally? And so we really got to see the fullness of this vision that God had given us in such a short amount of time. Where we saw incredible things in a short three years.

Peggy Griffith: 9:55

That is like unexpected grace, right? Like you go thinking you're going to focus on this small group of people in this, this small thing, and it ends up exploding due to something that brought a lot of people grief. And, you know, you were able to have a reason to embrace it, which is really, really neat. How, how did the COVID epidemic impact your time in, in Ukraine or, or was it as big of an issue there as it, as it was here in the United States?

cassandraspeck: 10:25

I think it was bigger for different reasons. I think a lot of Americans think Ukraine is more developed than it is. The city, sure, very developed, very tech savvy, but that's like Ukraine is predominantly agriculture and there's a lot of village. And so life was weird for about two weeks and then people can't survive if they're not going to work. People can't survive if they can't come into the cities and sell their, their produce that they're raising in their gardens. And so it was, it was definitely different, but because we'd only been there six months, like six months, you're barely done with culture shock. And so it was kind of just, we, It just felt like another piece of learning the culture. And I think very early on, we watched friends around the world try and hurry home to get to their home countries because no one knew what was going to happen. But we made the decision in those first few days, like, no, God caught us to Ukraine. This is home. This is where we're staying. And so. You can imagine the grief that comes with then a short year and a half later having to face and have those same conversations, but not because of a pandemic, because of a war. And so I would say that Ukraine looked nothing like what we thought it would. And and yeah, I would, I would do every single thing again. I would move back tomorrow if we thought that was wisdom for our kids. Yeah.

Peggy Griffith: 11:56

That makes sense. And I know I probably didn't until I really started to read into the conflict that's going on between Russia and Ukraine. And this is not something that started in 2022. There has been ongoing unrest for quite some time and Tell us a little bit of the back story there. And what the environment was like in the Ukraine during that unsettled conflict.

cassandraspeck: 12:24

I would say for anyone who's curious that this is a century old story. It even goes beyond back to 2014 when you have people who are trying to wipe out cultures and trying to wipe out whole people groups. And so you can look. Through even like the beginning of the 20th century with how the USSR is established and post Bolsheviks. It's a pretty fascinating story of humanity and how God does things in the midst of it anyways. But for the purposes of our conversation the Maidan revolution began in 2014, but it was triggered by events at the end of 2013. So the Ukrainian president that time was ushering in this new season, this new hope for Ukraine of joining the EU. And in November of 2013, he was supposed to sign the contract that began that process for Ukraine's entrance into the EU, and instead he backs out last minute and signs a document in agreement with Russia because he was pro Russian president. And so the youth of the nation. Had something to say about it and they showed up and so they call it Maidan revolution because the main square in Kiev is the my it's called Maidan. It's the main square and the youth, it was the college students. It was the youth who knew their future hung in the balance that showed up and really took a stand against a government that wasn't working for them and wasn't doing what was in their best interest. And so what happens during that time is in early to actually February of 2014, Russia sends troops into eastern Ukraine, as well as into Crimea and annexes Crimea, which historically, depending on who your historian is, has belonged to Ukraine the actually the Crimean Tartars are their own people group, and they have been there for centuries as well. But so Russia takes Crimea and sends troops into almost like a proxy war in 2 states in the East called Donetsk and Luhansk. And so That happens in 2014, and it was barely a blip on the map in the West, because it's Eastern Europe. It's Russia. No big deal. So there has been active warfare happening in the east of Ukraine for 10 years. And so in spring of 2021, I am nine months pregnant with Logan and we start hearing this rumor of Russian troops building up on the border. And honestly, like none of our Ukrainian friends were concerned or worried. It's just a military like operation practice. So that peaks up internationally. People start to take notice. So they pull back. So that's spring of 2021. Thanksgiving of 2021. So mid November, right before American Thanksgiving the troops start building up, but they don't pull back this time. And so we start getting notifications from the United States Embassy in Kyiv, the city we live in, in November of 2021, saying, Hey, this is suspicious behavior. We don't know what's going to happen, but it seems as something's going to happen. Well, all of our friends, Both Westerners who have been in Ukraine and Ukrainians are like, it's just saber rattling like that's all we heard for months. It's just saber rattling. They're not going to do anything. Okay. No problem. So Orthodox Christmas, which is January 7th, we get a notification from the embassy that they suspect that Russia is going to do something and they're advising people to start evacuating the country. This is early 2022. And all the other missions organizations in Kiev at this point have pulled their missionaries either out of country or move them to the West. But our missions organization, our base directors were saying. Hey, we trust that you hear the Lord. So however the Lord leads, we're going to support you. If you feel what's best is to go, then you're not going to be penalized, we honor that. And so we prayed and it's like, well, God's not asking us to go. And if they're not making us go, then we're going to stay and run Titus project. So that's what we were also doing in Ukraine. So we had four Bible teachers, two Ukrainians, two Americans, and we started Titus project. And. Within that month, by the end of January, we went to an international church in Kiev. We were the only internationals left. And so we walked into church the end of January and there were like 15 people in there and we were the only foreigners and we're like, this is interesting. But again, Our friends aren't concerned. We're not concerned. This is where God has called us. We're training these Bible teachers like ministry is normal. And so as that starts to progress, we get this random donation from this little red brick church in Northern Illinois. Never supported us. And so we tried giving it away because at this point, older Ukrainians who needed healthcare and things like that, their families were starting to evacuate them. We had some foreign friends who had left and so we offered it to our Ukrainian friend and she was like, Hey, actually my sister paid for it. She, my mom's going to Germany. No big deal. And we're like, okay, so I guess we just hold onto it. And Garrett was like, well, let's pray. And so we did. And as we prayed, we were like, it doesn't hurt to move our family a little further West because we are in the capital of the country. Like if anything was going to happen,

Peggy Griffith: 18:13

It would be there.

cassandraspeck: 18:14

Yeah, it's going to be there. And so we're like, okay, like we're on outreach anyways, because that's what we do, Titus project is going and actually doing the teaching cross culturally. So we take our two Ukrainians West to a city called Ternopil, not Chernobyl, Ternopil, different places. Chernobyl sits above Kiev, about 63 kilometers. Ternopil where we were is eight hours West. So a couple of hours from the Polish border. So

Peggy Griffith: 18:42

Wow.

cassandraspeck: 18:43

we're there. We're teaching we are having the most fruitful season of Ukrainian Bible teaching like we are working with churches morning, noon and night. We're, we're hitting all of our teaching hours like thriving and Valentine's Day, they shut down the airports in Ukraine and we're like, Oh, that's interesting. Like, something seems to be actually happening if they're shutting airports down. And so the things we were told to look for is if Russia was actually going to invade, the first sign would be the troop buildups, which at this point, it was assumed there were 95, 000 Russian troops on the Russian Ukrainian border. And the 2nd thing was, if Russia declares that states have what Americans would call seceded, like, they've become like their own states, their own

Peggy Griffith: 19:30

nation. Okay.

cassandraspeck: 19:31

Oh, that's kind of what we were looking for. So we're teaching we're preaching. We're doing all these things and then Monday, which would have been either the 20th or 21st, we wake up. It's a Monday morning and Luhansk and Donetsk have announced themselves as independent states and we're like.

Peggy Griffith: 19:50

Oh,

cassandraspeck: 19:51

And by the end of the day, Russian troops had crossed the border into these 2 states because they're now sovereign nations. They're not Ukraine, which they don't actually declare that Russian media is declaring that so that they can come in without starting a global anything. So that was on Monday and before we went, we made wills because we knew that this was always a possibility, but never dreamed it would happen. So we had our living wills, We had a game plan. We always had a backpack just in case with passports, birth certificates, our wills, like all of the important things. And so we had that with us on outreach. And when they cross, we're like, okay, this is actually happening. We should, start praying about leaving. So we plan to leave March 1st, which is a week later. Because at this point, we still don't think anything is happening. We just know it possibly could so we're praying on Tuesday. And as we pray, we just felt like God say, look, I've made a way forward and that was what I needed to be able to leave because I was the one who was hesitant to go. And I was adamant that until God said to go, I was not leaving the country, because that is what God had asked us to do. And so,

Peggy Griffith: 21:03

heart was there.

cassandraspeck: 21:04

oh yeah, it, it was home. Like, we moved there because that's where I got, I mean, I had a baby there. I, delivering cross culturally is not for the faint of heart. Especially in a post Soviet nation. 10 10, don't recommend. It was not great.

Peggy Griffith: 21:18

Yeah.

cassandraspeck: 21:19

But so we, we get tickets for a week later and that was a Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, we were like, we can't pay rent in America and in Ukraine. So we Garrett drives seven hours back to Kiev to pack up our house. We put it at a friend's house at our offices in Kiev and he drives the eight hours back. So like the most insane

Peggy Griffith: 21:43

All in a day.

cassandraspeck: 21:44

All in a day. Gets back to Ternopil in the West at 3 48 a. m. on Thursday, February 24th. And at 5 a. m. My phone is blowing up with phone calls from America that is watching Ukraine be invaded on their nightly news, but it's the middle of the night for us. So all of Ukraine is asleep. And then my phone, I start getting all these phone calls from my friend Ruslan, and he was like, Cassie. Kiev is being bombed. They're bombing all of the cities. You guys have American passports. You have to get your kids and get out of the country right now. And we were like, Oh, okay. So Garrett had one hour and 12 minutes of sleep after driving and packing a house. And I go wake him up and say, honey, the war has started. We have to go. And. That was unimaginable. Like, even now I say it out loud, and it is definitely from a place of detachment of, I know that that's what that happened, but the chaos and the fear and the unexpectedness and all of it was just like, Is this really happening? And so he's unpacking the car. He's doing all these things. I'm trying to pack up because we're on outreach, right? We're not at home. So I'm trying to pack up what little I have of the kids because we were only supposed to be gone 3 weeks and I get our emergency bag together. We get in the car. And Garrett comes in after packing up the car and he's like, did you hear that? And I was like, hear what? And he goes, go out on the porch. So I opened the bedroom door to our porch and the air raid sirens are going off and it was the kind of fear where your bottom drop like the stomach, your stomach drops out, but you also think you might throw up and all of a sudden, nothing in the world makes sense. Like, it was the most haunting, sickening, terrifying thing I've ever heard in my life. But we got in the car and we had friends who were in the same city as us. So we packed up and we evacuated together.

Peggy Griffith: 23:47

Right. Oh my goodness. And you took your car and you had plans where most people were evacuating through Poland. You chose to go another way.

cassandraspeck: 24:01

Yeah, so the embassy at that point had said, American military will not come into Ukraine to help you. You're on your own, but we'll have troops at the border in Poland. And so that's what everyone on all the message boards all the messaging apps go to Poland, go to Poland, go to Poland. But we didn't, we had friends in Budapest and Hungary, and they happened to be in the States. And so I was messaging with her and she's like, Cassie, like go to our apartment. You guys can stay at our house like for however long you need. And we're like, okay, we're going to, we're going to Hungary, but it put us in the country for longer because it was eight hours to the border instead of the two to Poland. The miracle of it is because the rest of the country was evacuating to Poland. We only sat at the border cross for five hours instead of three to five days, which was the wait time.

Peggy Griffith: 24:55

Unbelievable. And you had initially had a plan to ditch your car and hitchhike across, or to walk across and hitchhike, but something changed.

cassandraspeck: 25:04

So, in Ukraine, you can't own property unless you have a tax ID number, which we did not because we are foreigners. And so we had bought our car, but because ukraine's not a part of the EU. We could not drive our car into central Europe without special documents that said we were allowed to do that and a special insurance. And so we get to the border and we have neither of those things and we're like, okay. Our friend in the city we had evacuated from was like, okay, if they don't let you cross, you park your car on the side of the road, throw your keys into the woods, send me a picture where they are. We will come get your car and we will find someone to come pick you up on the Polish border. And we're like, okay, so we get to the border cross and we hand them all five of our American passports. And I kid you not, as soon as we hand them all forth, it's the middle of the night. Like our kids have been asleep for hours. All three of our kids who are at this point, they are four, two and eight months old, wake up screaming, like blood curdling, top of your lungs screaming that these kids can do. And the border guard just looks at us and like gets really big. Looks at our passports, looks at the car passport, doesn't say anything, and just sends us through, like, sends us right on and as soon as we cross the kids go right back to sleep. So, yep. So little miracles like that because Garrett got home close to 4 a. m. He did not put gas in the car because he's like, I'll just do it tomorrow. So by the time we got on the road at 8 a. m. on February 24th, the gas station lines were kilometers long and we're like, we'll just keep driving. We should have made it. 45 minutes to an hour. We drove six hours before we had to pull over and our car was not going to function. We pulled into a gas station six hours later when we shouldn't have been able to drive more than one. We didn't look at the the news once we got to Hungary and looked at the map where bombs had been dropped. It like hit. All of the different sides of the road that we were taking to Hungary, but we never saw anything. The kids never heard anything. It was a beautiful blue day. And I think it was just the kindness of the Lord that just shielded and protected not only our physical bodies, but our minds and our spirits as well that. He was trustworthy.

Peggy Griffith: 27:25

Wow, that's amazing how your plans versus reality turn out and, you're going, God, I'm not sure how this is going to work out. But yeah. Looking back on this experience. Has this changed the way you see how God works in your life at all.

cassandraspeck: 27:45

Well, oh, yes, very much for lots of different reasons, but I was not raised in a church. I wasn't churched as a kid growing up. And so I had this radical encounter with the Lord at 22 and have kind of been in full time ministry since. And I think that this really forced me to reconcile my experiences with my theology with the Word of God. And

Peggy Griffith: 28:09

wow.

cassandraspeck: 28:11

beautiful passage in Exodus 34 that talks about the Lord's steadfast love and it's when he's revealing himself after the golden calf and that his love is steadfast and just who he is and the fullness of his nature and character. And You know, the goodness of God, that worship song had come out at about that time. And it took me years to be able to sing the words to that song that would come on. And I would be stone cold. Like you're not good. You're not kind. I also really value truth. So I wasn't going to say something that I didn't mean. And so even worship. And I think. During especially that 1st, year and a half, if I didn't have the liturgy of church history, and I didn't have the liturgy of the congregational church. I don't know if I would be where I am at, not just with my faith, but with in my journey with Jesus, because when I couldn't pray, it was the prayer of the saints of the centuries before us that carried me when I couldn't even go to bed when I couldn't find the words and I couldn't sing the songs. It was the liturgy of the church in all of her history that really carried me through the darkest season of my life.

Peggy Griffith: 29:29

Is there anything that just surprised you the most out of this whole thing?

cassandraspeck: 29:34

Probably that as a missionary, I was a terrible Christian. As a Bible teacher, did I actually believe what I taught? So again, this reckoning of my faith with my theology and the way I lead my life.

Peggy Griffith: 29:50

Yeah. And now you're kind of looking at, okay, this is how I'm supposed to show up. Not, not just talk it, but walk it.

cassandraspeck: 29:58

Oh yeah. Yeah. Nothing like a good old global war to get you ready and be like, Do I actually believe this? Like, do I actually trust that Jesus is with me? And a beautiful piece that I can't wait to share in the next part is how that came about with my five year old daughter in our return to Ukraine.

Peggy Griffith: 30:18

Absolutely. Well, hey, I want to thank you, Cassie, for sharing your story with us. Next week we will talk about the part two of your story and we'll talk about your journey back to the United States and what that was like coming back after three years and some of the challenges that were associated with that and, the formation that came along with that. So tune in everyone. And if you haven't done so already, click that subscribe button. So you won't miss a minute of Cassie's gospel story. And if you or someone, you know, would like to share your story on the show, please send me an email at nextdoorgospel@gmail.Com. And until then, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Amen.