Background
Steve
and Jeanne Cowan and Kathy and I spent 10 days this month with Jesus Hope of
Romania in Timisoara, Romania’s second largest city.
Steve Jeanne and Kathy each had their own tasks interacting with the
children in the orphanage, delivering food to the hungry, visiting the mentally
handicapped and the elderly in Bethany House, and supporting the constructing of
a new retreat house for youth.
My task was
to teach and preach the Bible.
In eight days I taught spoke or preached 16 times:
to a pastors gathering, to a pastors retreat, to six churches, to a youth
gathering and to a couples gathering.
Steve may have had the toughest job of all.
He had to listen to me 16 times.
Jesus
Hope of Romania was founded in 1990 by
Peter Dugulescu, pictured above.
Peter
had been a Baptist pastor in the 1970’s and 80’s under communism. The
Orthodox Church had been compromised by the Communists and the Baptists and
Pentecostals were being watched and threatened. Peter had been arrested,
interrogated, questioned, offered coffee with poison in it, threatened, and had
a bus t- bone his car in an assassination attempt, and later heard from an
imprisoned communist assassin who was charged with killing Peter but couldn’t
pull the trigger. Peter also had church members who were blackmailed into
becoming informants, had his telephone lines tapped and rooms bugged.
Many
of us at CLC had the honor of meeting this humble and courageous man when he
visited us 6 years ago before he passed of a heart attack. Ligia, his daughter has since become president and she’s visited with
us many times.
As
for me this trip was very humbling and very spiritually alivening. Like most of us from New London I am a comfortable, “1%er”, meaning
that I am among the top one percent of the wealth of the world who has never
faced a bullet or poison or loss of anything.
And I was asked to teach these faithful, resource starved pastors.
That was humbling to say the least.
Here’s
Romania between 1945 and Christmas Day of 1989
The
red part of the map was under communist control and the border between east and
west was called the iron curtain, a border with an actual metal fence, land
mines, and armed guards. It was November 9, 1989 that the wall fell, first in
Berlin.
But
a month later Romania was still standing with Nicolae Ceaucescu still holding on
to his brutal Dictatorship.
One
of the many pastors who stood firm in his faith under communism was Lazlo Tokes.
On Dec 15 his wife was pregnant and sick and security police were trying to come
into his church to take him away, but church members formed a human chain to
prevent them from doing so.
The
crowd grew, candles were passed out and hundreds were lit. The crowd was ordered
to disperse but didn’t.
The army fired into the crowd, and a total of 93 people were killed.
The crowd grew and moved to the city square.
At one end of the city square was the Orthodox Church and at the other
end was the Opera house.
I took the picture below from the church so that you can see the size of
the city square.
By
Friday December 22 the entire square was filled.
The picture below is an actual photo taken on December 22, 1989 from the
Opera house balcony.
Peter
Dugalescu, Ligia’s father, was called upon to speak to the crowd.
Ligia who was 17 was crying not wanting her father to go for fear that he
too would be shot.
But he went.
When he stood on the balcony of the opera house, someone from the crowd
shouted “God exists” and crowed began chanting, “God exists, God
exists”.
After 45 years of the Soviet Union’s greatest efforts to stamp out God,
2,000 men and women were shouting “God exists!
Then
Peter said something that I find very moving.
I said to the crowed from the Opera House balcony, “I hope you still
know this prayer”. He
then led them in praying it together.
Instinctively, the crowd, without being told to do so, fell to their
knees, turned their backs to Peter and faced the church at the other end of the
square and prayed the Lord’s Prayer.
On
Christmas Day 1989, Ceacescu was deposed and Romania freed.
Communism not only could not stamp out God, it fell at the hands of God.
A
Big Lesson for Each of Us
Those
who remained faithful to Jesus Christ, through prayer, candlelight vigils,
faithfulness when suffering, with no human power on their side, just living
in their weakness, were actually living in the greatest power on earth.
It was the church, believers all over Eastern Europe, whom God used to
bring down the largest most fearful force in the world.
Jesus is Lord of the earth, not communism, not the United States, not
radical Islam.
The
lesson for us is that God uses us most powerfully when we stick together in
unity and in weakness.
Suffering will happen it always does, but if we persevere we will always
find that Jesus as Lord overcomes all evil.
Therefore
when you find yourself at that place in your life when you are crying out to
God, “when Lord when, when will you DO something!” It is then that you must
throw yourself on the faithfulness of God through Jesus Christ. Don’t
quit.
Never give up.
Jesus is Lord.
45 years of entrenched communism fell in days.
In
your weakness, in your willingness to endure the suffering of Christ, in your
trust in God’s faithfulness to set things right, is your strength.
Resurrection, restoration and new life will come to you, not just in its
final and eternal form but also in some kind of temporal form, in some kind of a
blessing from God for which you will be able to look to the heavens and say,
“thank you God, thank you, thank you, thank you!!”
But you must not give up.
Your pain and suffering when you experience them will feel interminable,
but they are not.
The final word is always God’s.
For
more:
follow on Twitter @jefflampl
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