Mark's Blog

On these kinds of trips, Sherrylee and I get to talk to lots of different people. That’s a funny sentence actually. First, there are only different people, and secondly, the differentness of the people is most of the reason why we make the trip, so why should it be unusual. Well, as the French say, vive la difference!

As we are talking to these different people, one of our favorite ways to get to know them first is to ask them to tell us the story of how they became Christians.  On our last night in Turkey, during a visit with A and K, they introduced us to M and T, two Russian Christians that are their co-workers in Antalya.  As they told us their stories, I was reminded again that God’s ways are not our ways, or as the old hymn says, “God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.”  Read the short version of their stories and delight with me in the different and unexpected ways God finds people who want to find Him.

M’s parents were atheists, so he had no religious thread to his life. He was, however, brought up with a sense of morality and a tender-heartedness towards people–not traits highly regarded among his peers. When he entered the Russian army as a very young man, he says he was beat every day. If it was not other soldiers taking advantage of him, it was instructors or officers trying to toughen him up. For the most part, they just humiliated him.

Of course, he left the army as soon as it was possible, but then he decided he needed to be tougher, so he started drinking more, carousing, confronting people and picking fights whenever he could in an effort to be a tough guy.  But M, as much as he tried and as depraved as he could act,  was not a tough guy at heart, so when his conscience would catch up with him, he said he would just lie on his bed, cross his arms over his chest, and wish to die–right then and there. He had lost his soul!

One day after lying all day on the couch and wishing to die, he got up to go outside and get something and a complete stranger came up to him and began talking to him and being friendly–pretty unusual for M who really only had friends who humiliated him. Out of the blue, this stranger invited M to church with him.  That’s all it took.  M went and found God and was found by the love of God, and now he is spending his life serving God!

T, his wife, has a very different story.  Her parents followed the party line under Communism, not believing in God and not teaching her about religion, but her grandmother was different. Everyday, her grandmother would go into the sitting room in their house and shut the door for a while. When T was about seven, she followed her grandmother into the room and discovered that her grandmother was reading the Bible and praying to God during these secret times.

From that moment on, T believed in God–in her own way. God became her secret friend, she says. She would talk to God but not in a religious way, rather in a child-like way, not really knowing anything about him. But He knew her, so the story just gets better.

As was pretty common in Georgia, when T was about 15 or 16 years old, her mother took her to a fortune-teller to have her future told.  As T tells it, the fortune-teller looked at her hand and used her cards, but then did not want to tell them what she saw. Mother insisted that the fortune-teller tell them even if it was bad, but eventually all the fortune-teller would say was that she could only see until T was 21 years old and then everything went black.

T was baptized when she was 21!  The seeds that her faithful grandmother had planted grew into a beautiful Christian young woman who was among the leaders in her church group. The devil had lost claim to her soul–no wonder the fortune teller’s powers could see no further. Tamoona belonged to God now!

T was at the church that M first visited–another providential act. They married and have promised to give their lives in God’s service–and we got to have supper with them in Antalya, Turkey. 

Tomorrow, I will tell you about our visit in Bucharest and about our friends and hosts Albert and Lavinia Cook.  The story just gets better!

PS. I have not figured out how to get pictures from my phone into this blog yet using public computers in Eastern Europe, but if you want to see pictures of the people I’m talking about, you can find them on my Facebook page–eventually.