This is part of a series of posts over the summer where members of the Presbytery Staff Team write posts for the website in place of Stella. This week: Daria (Dasha) Oskolkova (Communications Officer)
I started working for our presbytery in August 2024. But did I get an introduction to my role two years prior to that?
My mother and I left Kharkiv on the 4th of March 2022, a couple of days after fighter jets shook our apartment building into a fleeing scare. And I mean literally shook - I watched walls and furniture move as if from an earthquake.
I decided to go to Scotland for two reasons: it felt like home (I had lived in St Andrews for 2 years doing my Masters) and I spoke English. Both reasons gave me a much better chance of landing on my feet.
On 13th of May, my mother and I boarded a plane from Berlin to Glasgow. We didn’t go to St Andrews or Glasgow – we spent our first six weeks in the tiny village of Kirkmichael in South Ayrshire.
That’s how two ladies born in the Soviet Union found themselves walking to a church on a spring Sunday morning.
Suddenly we were living the lives of the Bennets and the Woodhouses from our beloved Jane Austin adaptations: same green hills and blue skies, lambs and dry stone walls.
This description comes to me only in retrospection. Back then, I felt like I was lying at the bottom of the ocean and everything I saw and perceived reached me – if it did – through a thick layer of water.
Visits to church brought hope of a community, but more than anything, they brought solace. We were sitting in the house of God in full humility – last months were nothing if not a reminder of having zero control and being at God's mercy.
I remember the minister talking about the church building. There were meetings to be held in Maybole, nothing was yet decided and discussions were to be had. All of that flew over my head – too preoccupied with our precarious situation and other troubles. I know now that the Presbytery of South West was about to come into existence and I’m sure they had been discussing Mission Planning.
And then there was an event dedicated to the history of the church. Children of Kirkmichael’s primary dressed in periodic costumes took us on a journey through the church’s lifetime. We enjoyed the tour of the graveyard. There were information boards, too, where I first encountered the term “church elder” and read about the church’s history.
Our life of rural parishioners lasted for six weeks. We went to stay in a hotel in Glasgow. My mother went back to Ukraine in 2023.
And I was still living in a Glasgow hotel in 2024, my third one already. Interpreting gigs were running dry, and I was desperately looking for a permanent job in the hope that it would allow me to rent something in case all my housing applications fell through.
How do you call a lesson that is not fully learned? I was stuck in a strange limbo and worried sick about the future. Part of me didn’t want anything to change at all – I wanted to go back to the past, to that first hotel where we had just been welcomed and everything was okay just because we had a place to stay for the time being. Back then, nobody was even thinking about the life we had to rebuild, we were just happy to have a roof over our heads.
Little did I know that an offer of a house in Aberdeen was just around the corner and that it would be followed by an offer of a job. And that two years later, I would be writing this post looking back at those six weeks in Kirkmichael and seeing them as part of God’s plan.
When Cults West Parish Church and Cults East Parish Church were faced with the union, none of the congregations were willing to let go of their buildings or welcomed the change. But change comes, welcomed or not, and things must move forward.
Somehow, one of the elders was an architect. And somehow, he decided to knock at the neighbour’s door and ask him whether he was – by any chance – looking to sell his property. The only way to sell the church’s land to developers was to sell it with the neighbour’s lot.
And it was sold, and the rest is Cults Kirk Centre’s history, which is better told by its participants below. The project brought congregations together, and now, the new building is enjoyed by the whole community.
Change is scary and therefore often resisted. I’m not sure we can ever see God’s plan in full, but I know we can learn to trust it.
Or in my case, keep learning.
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