23

Refusing to Be Silenced

I will call my next storyteller Stoyan. The name means “stand firm” or “stay,” and it is a common Eastern European name. Stoyan was about sixty years old, energetic and friendly. We met in the capital city of his country. After my usual explanation of who I was and what I was doing, Stoyan began telling me his story.

He began by talking about his parents. After the end of World War II, the communists began consolidating their power throughout his country. Eventually, they took control of the government. For decades, the authorities oppressed believers. When Stoyan was twelve, they imprisoned his protestant pastor father. His father remained in custody for ten years.

“At first,” he said, “they held him in a secret police place in our city.” “Every morning one of the guards would take some of his own human waste and spread it on the piece of toast that he brought to my father for breakfast.”

Stoyan reported that the emotional and psychological impact of this persecution was even worse, and left deeper scars, than any physical mistreatment. Nine discouraging months passed with no word about his father. Stoyan’s mother finally received notification that her husband was being transferred, with a group of other prisoners, to a distant labor camp.

The jailers allowed the families a one-hour visit before the transfer. Stoyan and his mother went to the well-known torture facility of the secret police on their assigned day. They were ushered out onto a football-sized field along with many other families who had come to see their beloved husbands and fathers and sons.

“Most of the prisoners rushed out to talk with their relatives from the other side of a long row of tables lined up to separate visitors from the inmates,” Stoyan recalled. “But my father did not appear. My mother and I sat and waited. We waited for a long time. Finally, when our hour of visitation was almost up, another prisoner, evidently a trustee, walked through the visiting room door carrying what looked like a bundle of rags. He strode toward us and laid that bundle on top of one of the tables.”

“My mother took my hand,” recalled Stoyan, “and together we walked up to the table where, only because of the piercing blue eyes staring out at me from those rags, did I recognize this skeletal figure of a man as my father.”

“I took my father’s hand in mine and I put my face close to his. I whispered, ‘Papa, I am so proud of you!’ I was thirteen years old.”

“Mama knew what my father would want most, so she slipped a little pocket New Testament under his wool cap. The jailer saw what she had done. He rushed over and took the little book, and then he summoned his commander. The officer took one look at the book before furiously throwing it to the ground. He screamed at my mother, with a great crowd of people around us, ‘Woman, don’t you realize that it is because of this book and because of your God that your husband is here? I can kill him, I can kill you, and I can kill your son. And I would be applauded for it!’”

Stoyan was remembering something that had happened decades earlier. But he recited the words as if they had been spoken yesterday. “My mother looked at that prison officer and said, ‘Sir, you are right. You can kill my husband. You can kill me. I know that you can even kill our son. But nothing you can do will separate us from the love that is in Jesus Christ!’”

Stoyan said, “I was so proud of my mama!”

After the communist government had transferred his pastor father to the gulag outside of the city, the authorities exiled the rest of Stoyan’s family to a remote gypsy village in a distant corner of the country. The police knocked on the door late one night and gave Stoyan, his mother and his three younger brothers an hour to pack. They were allowed to take two suitcases each. They were loaded on a midnight train bound for a place that they had never been.

At some point on that lonely train-ride, frightened and feeling like they had lost everything, Stoyan’s younger siblings began to cry. They pleaded with their mother: “What’s going to happen to our house? Mama, where are we going to live now? How will Papa know where we are? What are we going to do? What’s going to happen to us?”

Stoyan’s mother had no answers for her traumatized family. All she could do to reassure them was to say: “God will have to provide, little ones.”

Then she led them in singing a hymn. After they finished singing, as the train drew near its destination, a stranger approached the fearful family huddled together and spoke to the mother: “Are you the family of the pastor who has been imprisoned?” (As he asked the question, he referred to the pastor by name.)

“Yes, we are,” she told him.

The man said, “Our church was meeting last night. During our prayers, the Holy Spirit told us to take up an offering, and for me to bring it on this train, to give it to you, and to escort your family to your new home.” He handed her a small cloth bag and lowered his voice to say, “Here’s enough money for six months. We will bring more when this runs out.”

Over the remaining years of his father’s imprisonment, Stoyan’s family was allowed two visits. Each visit was for one hour each time. Somehow, the pastor and his family managed to survive. It wasn’t easy for any of them.

Three times a day, Stoyan was required to report to the local police station. In 1955, the communist authorities expelled him from the university. Stoyan’s father, like every evangelical pastor that the government had imprisoned, had been accused of being an American or British spy. Stoyan’s father was called “a political prisoner.” Because of his family connection, the secret police stamped “Enemy of the Republic” on Stoyan’s university record, and declared him ineligible to graduate. He was then conscripted into military service. There, he received no promotions and was allowed to do only menial work in a supply unit.

More than ten thousand “political prisoners” died in Stoyan’s country during those years. There was little hope that his father would survive his ordeal. Near the end, his guards made one last cruel attempt to break him. They informed the pastor that he was scheduled for execution. They took him outside, tied him to a pole, and offered him one last opportunity to deny his faith. If he would not deny his faith, they told him, he would be shot.

He straightened his back, stood tall and declared, “I will not deny Christ.” The guards became furious with him. Evidently, they did not have the authority to carry out their threat of execution. And, evidently, they had actually been given very different orders. They continued to insult and curse him even as they began to untie him. Then, much to his surprise, instead of escorting him back to his cell, they took him to the prison wall, unlocked a gate, opened a door and literally threw him out of prison without a word of explanation. He was so shocked by what had just happened that he didn’t know what to do.

It finally dawned on him that he had been released. He began to walk. Much later, he found his way to his family’s new home. It was a Saturday when he arrived, and no one was home. He then found the church and discovered his family and other church members praying for him at the altar. After a joyous reunion, he was finally able to preach again.

One Sunday, a few months later, an elderly woman asked the pastor for help. He did not know her. She told the pastor that she had a diabetic son—a son who had recently gone blind and was now close to death. He needed medication to manage his agonizing pain. Unfortunately, as a believer, there was no way for her to get that medicine for her son. Stoyan’s father promised to try to help acquire the medication. And eventually he was able to do that.

When he took the medicine to the old woman’s apartment, she led him into the bedroom to introduce the pastor to her son. She was grateful for the medicine, and she wanted the pastor to pray for her son.

When Stoyan’s father entered the room, he got the shock of his life.

The blind, invalid, middle-aged man lying helpless in the bed before him was the prison guard who had spread human waste on the pastor’s breakfast toast every morning for the first nine months of his imprisonment.

“Oh, Lord! Do not let me fail you now!” Stoyan’s father prayed beneath his breath. Without identifying himself or saying anything that might give away the connection, the pastor granted his former tormenter forgiveness in his own heart, helped the old woman administer the medicine to relieve the man’s pain, prayed for her son, and then returned home awed by a new and deeper understanding of God’s grace. In fact, he was so overwhelmed by God’s grace that the experience changed his life and the lives of his family members.

By the time of his father’s release from prison, Stoyan had completed his military service. He had found work in a foundry and had started pursuing his theology studies through a correspondence school. His goal was to become a pastor himself. His plans were delayed, however, when the police broke into his apartment and destroyed his books and the sermons he had written.

By 1962, Stoyan had completed his correspondence degree and had become a pastor himself. That led to his firing from the foundry, after which he earned another theology degree by correspondence.

By 1966, he had acquired two illegal Bibles in his national language. This gave him the idea to start a underground center for smuggled materials in his home. Over the next two decades, he translated over twenty Christian books. The authors of those books are well-known: Corrie ten Boom, David Wilkerson, Billy Graham. Stoyan organized an underground publishing network. The details of his work and the methods used by his organization to print and distribute thousands of books throughout Eastern Europe still remained a secret when I met him in the summer of 1998.

He told me that the secret police had suspected his activities. One time, they had even arrested him and thrown him in prison. Unlike his father, however, his imprisonment lasted months rather than years. The authorities would have kept him longer if they had caught him in possession of illegal religious materials. But they never did.

Stoyan told me hair-raising tales of close calls and miraculous escapes. One time, he received a last minute warning that the police were waiting for him at his house. He left his wife in the woods overnight with a carload of books so that he could arrive home innocently empty-handed. Another time, a police officer actually sat on a stack of Bibles wrapped in brown paper while he directed a squad of his men on a futile, hours-long search of Stoyan’s house. By the time I had listened to Stoyan for two full days, I wished we had a month to talk.

I was struck by the progression that I had observed on this trip.

In Russia, I had found a wary and weary people who were still hiding their stories—not only from the world but from each other.

In the Ukraine, I discovered believers celebrating a spring-like freedom. They were starting to tell their stories openly, and they were doing that with joy.

Now in Eastern Europe, where fallen walls no longer cast shadows, the curtains had opened so wide that citizens were again free to cross their countries’ borders. Here, believers, like Stoyan, seemed to bask in the sunshine. They were beginning to reflect on the experiences and memories of seasons past.

Despite decades of extreme hardship, Stoyan’s stories were joyful and hopeful. He was convinced that people flocked to Christ in greater numbers during difficult days of persecution because that’s when they could recognize how God sustains and strengthens His followers through times of trouble. He said that he had learned that family is the believer’s greatest reservoir of faith and resistance in the face of persecution. And he explained that, surprisingly, freedom had brought a new set of challenges that had blurred spiritual battle lines.

As my interview with Stoyan drew to a close, I knew that it was going to take a long time to process the wisdom, insights and conclusions that this one man had drawn from his life-treasure of faith experience.

When I mentioned that to Stoyan, and thanked him for his time, he smiled modestly and replied, “I thank God and I take great joy in knowing that I was suffering in prison in my country, so that you, Nik, could be free to share Jesus in Kentucky.”

Those words pierced my soul. I looked Stoyan straight in the eyes.

“Oh, no!” I protested. “No! You are not going to do that! You are NOT going to put that on me. That is a debt so large that I can never repay you!”

Stoyan stared right back at me and said, “Son, that’s the debt of the cross!” He leaned forward and poked me in the chest with his finger as he continued, “Don’t you steal my joy! I took great joy that I was suffering in my country, so that you could be free to witness in your country.”

Then he raised his voice in a prophet-like challenge that I knew would live with me forever: “Don’t ever give up in freedom what we would never have given up in persecution! That is our witness to the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ!”

Those words from Stoyan haunted me as I flew back to the States. Had I given up in freedom what he and others had refused to surrender under the worst forms of persecution? Had I?

I kept hearing the voices that I had heard in the interviews. I kept seeing the faces. So many life stories had been packed into such a short time. I had been at this for less than a month. Was that even possible? My mind was full with all that I had found—and all that I had seen and heard and experienced.

True to form, I opened my heart to my family, then to my colleagues and partners, then finally to the college students who had become our newly-adopted family.

Only a few weeks later, the students gathered in our home. I tried to provide a brief overview of my travels, but soon they were asking to hear the stories. And I began to tell them the stories.

I told them about Dmitri and his HeartSongs. I told them about Katya and her grandfather’s instruction to “be faithful unto death.” I told them about the deacon who was faithful when he hitched his horse to the sleigh to deliver food in the blizzard. I told them about the Russian pastor who had explained that persecution was “like the sun coming up in the east.” I told them that I was beginning to understand that “persecution is normal” for millions of believers around the world.

My recollections included confessions as well. “I don’t know how I have lived to be forty-five years old,” I told them, “without realizing the implications of this. You would think that I would already understand this; I lived in Africa for fifteen years! And I have studied Scripture! I know that Jesus told His followers that they would suffer for His sake. So none of this should be a surprise to any of us.”

“But, somehow, it is a surprise,” I said slowly.

I then told them about the Ukrainian pastor who had chastised me by asking when I had stopped reading my Bible.

The students were broken and convicted to hear about the Russian youth who could recite and reproduce the first four books of the New Testament almost in their entirety at that Moscow youth conference back in the 1950’s. When I offered the sad observation “that the Russian church had lost in its first decade of ‘freedom’ what Soviet believers had managed to hold on to under communism for most of the century,” I think that many of the college students made an immediate personal application.

It was late and time to draw things to a close. But no one seemed inclined to leave. I kept telling stories.

I told them about Tavian and the six hundred songs that he had written in prison—songs that were now being sung in churches all over his country every Sunday morning. I talked about HeartSongs of our faith, and I noted that many people in the interviews had cited favorite music and Scripture as a powerful source of spiritual strength during times of trial.

I played a recording of Dmitri and Tavian singing their HeartSongs. The students wept with me.

I told the students the story of Stoyan and his family—and I told them how his father’s suffering and his mother’s courageous faith had provided a genealogy of faith that had shaped his own remarkable life. And then I told them about my final exchange with Stoyan, and I confessed to those college students that I had felt the need to ask for God’s forgiveness for “giving up in freedom what Stoyan and so many others had never given up in persecution.”

It was even later now. The students, however, refused to leave. Ruth and I went upstairs to go to bed, leaving behind the students who were singing, and praying, and crying.

The students returned the next week with more friends. They asked me to tell stories again—the same stories that they had heard the previous week. Clearly, God has placed something holy in our hands.

I certainly had not found all the answers that I was looking for. What’s more, I had returned home with even more questions. But in Russia and in Eastern Europe, I had found a new hope. It was small, but it was hope.

I had left Africa after Tim’s death wondering how my faith applied—or if it applied—in brutal places like Mogadishu. Ruth and I had gone to Somalia in obedience to Christ’s instructions to His followers “to go into all the world to make disciples.” We did that confidently believing in what the Bible proclaims about the resurrection power of Jesus. Six years later, I had fled home doubting that power—and wondering if perhaps evil was stronger than God.

If that kind of resurrection power couldn’t be found in the world today, I had a problem. If that kind of resurrection power was not present and alive, I had important questions to answer—questions that shook me to the core: What was the point of the last fifteen years of my life? And what was I going to do with the rest of my life?

We had ostensibly set up our Persecution Task Force and designed a set of research goals to help us learn how to make disciples in those places in the world most hostile to Christianity. That was our expressed goal. Beyond that, I knew early on that my quest was much more personal. I left for Russia with a question I desperately wanted to answer: What if what the Bible teaches about the power of my faith is not true today?

Coming home from Russia, however, a different question was in my heart. It was a question that grew from those remarkable, life-giving interviews. It was a question that hinted of hope: What if the resurrection power available to Jesus’ followers in the New Testament is just as real for believers in our world today?

I wondered if that could possibly be true. Driven by that question, my journey continued.