Young Dyal family takes its collective faith to Ukraine

LEESBURG — Pretty much all religious practices require a measure of faith. But there’s faith and then there’s FAITH.

Jonathan and Claire Dyal have the latter kind.

Jonathan Dyal has a job he loves, teaching math at Lee County Middle School. Claire Dyal is a little more than a semester away from completing requirements for her bachelor’s degree in psychology. And the young couple are completely devoted to their 14-month-old daughter Iris.

But in late July or early August, the Dyals will leave the serenity of their Lee County home to serve as missionaries in war-torn Ukraine. Jonathan will teach math and serve as athletic director at a school there, while Claire will raise Iris and work with some of the hundreds of thousands of orphans in the country.

“We both love the Lord, and we both have a heart for missions,” Claire Dyal said of the couple’s pending adventure. “Even at a very young age, I knew I wanted to do mission work. I think it’s important to tell people about Jesus who don’t normally have the opportunity to hear about Him.

“Jonathan and I have been talking about mission work since we’ve been together, and around December of last year we both felt God telling it was time to get serious.”

Unsure what steps to take, the Dyals turned to the source of their passion.

“We turned it all over to God,” Jonathan Dyal said. “We prayed to Him, asked Him to make his plans for us obvious. About three or four days later Claire got an email about a job opportunity in Ukraine. Their biggest needs were someone to teach math and an athletic director.”

Dyal teaches math at Lee County Middle, and he played both basketball and baseball at Byne Christian School.

Convinced God had answered their prayers for guidance, Jonathan Dyal accepted the position with Resourcing Christian Education at Kiev Christian Academy in the Ukrainian capital. The couple started the preparations that will take them from a safe environment, surrounded by friends, family and a supportive church, to a country whose civil war has left a great number of its children orphans, many of them homeless as well.

“We have complete faith that this is what God wants us to do,” Jonathan Dyal said. “If I wasn’t 100 percent sure, I would not be willing to take my daughter into a war-torn country. Ukraine is only about as big as Texas, and while fighting now is along the eastern border, it could easily spill over into the central part of the country where we’ll be.

“But we feel reassured. As Claire has said, ‘If God wants us there, He’ll take care of us.’ We are relying completely on God.”

Jonathan Dyal and Claire Reynolds were both home-schooled, Jonathan finishing his education at Byne Christian School from eighth grade on, while Claire did not attend classes away from her home until enrolling at Darton State College. While Jonathan is three years older than his wife, he remembers watching her play violin at Byne Memorial Baptist Church, where both were members, and thinking, “Whoever marries this girl is going to be a lucky guy.”

He turned out to be that guy, and shortly after they started dating each discovered that the other shared a desire to serve as missionaries.

“I’d gone on a mission trip to China,” Jonathan Dyal said. “It was my first time in an airplane and my first time leaving the country. It was exciting, but because our pastor was the only one who spoke the language, we spent a lot of time following his lead. It was exciting hearing the stories the people we were ministering to told him, though, and two people professed to know the Lord from that trip.

“That was awesome.”

Claire Dyal participated in mission trips within the United States and in Canada, and while she said those experiences were uplifting, she’s looking forward to the trip to Ukraine.

“I want to tell people about Jesus, and I want to help children in need,” she says. “There are more than 200,000 orphaned children in the area where we’ll be, and more than half of them live on the street. Only about 10 percent of the children were orphaned by parental death. The rest were abandoned or their parents imprisoned.”

One of the requirements of the Dyals’ mission trip is that they raise the funding to support their needs in Ukraine. They’re accepting donations on the www.dyalfamilyministry.weebly.com website (on which Claire Dyal will maintain a blog detailing the family’s experiences) and through donations made directly to Byne Memorial Baptist Church, their home church and mission partner.

“If anyone wants to make a donation through the church, they can mention our name or ‘Ukraine mission’ on the memo line,” Jonathan Dyal said. “They can also call (229-886-8088) or email ([email protected]) us directly. We also would love the opportunity to speak to local churches, civic groups or just small gatherings about our trip.

“We’ve had quite a few individuals make generous donations already.”

Adds Claire Dyal: “The thing about mission work is that not everyone is led to go on the mission trips. Others can be as involved by giving to help sponsor the trips or praying for the people who do go. I think one of the most important things the people here can do is pray for the people of Ukraine.”

The Dyals will hold a moving sale at their Crow Drive home the first weekend in May where they plan to sell pretty much all of their possessions. They’ll live a month with his parents and a month with hers before flying to Ukraine in late July or early August.

“Our families are sad that we’re leaving — mostly, they’re sad that Iris will be leaving,” Jonathan Dyal laughs. “But since I’ll have summers off, they know we’ll be able to visit them. The thing is, though, they all share one thing with us: They want us to be in God’s will.”