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"We are free!"
Condensed
from ‘One Mans Revolution’
No I never believed in God. Never for a
minute believed he could exist. Not until...
It was December 1989. Unrest and rumours had been flying around Romania all week
and the foreign radio broadcasts (our only source of good information) reported
violent showdowns in parts of the country.
My room-mate, Ion and I, were in ‘the cave’ – our name for the miserable
'Workers Block' where we lived communally. Ion - Romanian for 'John' - kept on
telling me: "Miti, something is going to happen, believe me!" We had
heard that today in Bucharest, a large meeting had been called where our leader,
Ceausescu was due to speak.
We listened to a small battery radio but all we could hear was patriotic music!
It was strange, why just music all the time? ('Ceausescu's funeral music' Ion joked, not knowing
for a second how close to the truth he was).
The music was interrupted to tell us that the Minister of the Armed Forces had
committed suicide! We began to argue about it, Ion thought Ceausescu had killed
him but I said No, that couldn’t be right.
Suddenly the music stopped again and a lady announced that at any moment now 'we
will be in live contact with the Communist Party building in Bucharest,
where comrade Ceausescu will make an important speech'. We listened but all we
could hear on the radio was a strange, deep, prolonged murmur, like a chant.
What was it saying? We strained our ears... (a microphone was on, picking up the
sounds..)
Suddenly we heard his voice - Ceausescu. But it was unusual, saying:
"Comrades, silence please.. "
In the background, the chant was still there...
"keep order please. Silence comrades, what's there......"
The contact broke and music followed again.
Ion and I resumed our argument: 'No, Ceausescu couldn't have done it, it must be
something else, maybe elements of the army ....'
Again the music stopped abruptly and a voice broke in - this time not a
well-educated radio announcer, but someone with an accent like us, a worker...!
"He's gone, he's gone, the Dictator has gone! Good men!, Good men! - We
are free!, God has turned his face to us again....!!!!"
The news exploded into our reality.
For a second or two we were both paralysed. Then we just burst out shouting for
joy, and then we were half crying, half laughing, hugging each other. We stood
there embracing in our 'Cave' while new voices on the radio kept shouting loudly
without any formal order, "We are free, we are free...."
I felt spontaneously the need to get out and to shout with all my might.
I dashed downstairs and outside - Already people were pouring onto the streets,
shouting with joy, embracing each other. Every face looked the same, yet
different, for each was radiating a contaminating aura of pure joy.
Long repressed religious feeling now erupted with power and suddenly everywhere
you could see people praying to God, down on their knees praying 'Heavenly
Father', thanking Him for turning His face to us. It was a shock wave that swept
before it the whole era of Communist atheism and penetrated even the hardest
souls. I saw militiamen hugging the ordinary folk where yesterday they would
have been enemies.
I knew then in that second that God truly existed and was acting.
- How long
had the Israelites been held prisoners in Egypt? - How many years had we lived
under that tyrant? -
Along the street I was saluted by unknown people with a 'V' sign, I saw
windows open with TVs sat on the window ledge in order for people outside to
watch. In front of the town hall, people had gathered and were  chanting, holding
in their hands the Romanian flag with a hole ripped in the centre where the
scythe and the hammer would be. Everywhere I could see torn pages from 'The
immortal masterpieces of the Comrade' (Ceausescu) that had been thrown away.
Ships at sea had their sirens wailing, cars and lorries were honking, it was
something words cannot describe.
God had turned our history around within a second. It was so evident for all to
see, it happened right under our eyes, something far beyond any human power.
Over the next days the dictators’ people tried hard to regain power but God
did not abandon us and those who would have pulled us back into the black past
did not prevail.
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Love
thy neighbour
11
January 2002
'Love thy neighbour as yourself.' Here is a well-known command so dear to
Christians world-wide. But who is my neighbour? And hey, hang on a minute! How
about the one who is not my neighbour? We are not all neighbours are we?
Of course we are told by Jesus precisely just who this refers to.
Now everyone knows what 'September 11th' means. It has become a tag, burned deep
into the global consciousness. I don't need to say 'the day the Twin Towers
fell', just simply 'September 11th' and you know what I mean. It's a defining
point, the date that separates the world before from the world after.
Here in Romania too we have another such date, one that means something to
everyone - 'December 22nd'. Whether or not I add the year '1989', it means the
same thing - the point in time when our world changed forever - the day the
Communist dictatorship, itself a tower so strong and lofty, simply collapsed
before our eyes. And so we say 'before December 22nd', or after 'December
22nd'...
Well, before December 22nd the concept of 'neighbour' was defined by the
Communist Party in our country. That ideology had its own criteria for those who
wanted to enjoy this noble feeling of love.
In medieval times the inquisitors hoped to save the sinner's soul by killing the
body. In Communist times, God was made redundant and there was no such thing as
'the soul.' If saving society meant killing soulless bodies then so be it. They
didn't have a Father in heaven to be accountable to, so who was to stop them?
In the name of the greater good they built a tower of hatred, perpetual hatred
instead of perpetual love. That was the deal, love for hate. Hatred was as
always, a tremendous generator of energy. A force. The Kingdom of God upside
down. Oh, Jesus said somewhere in Luke: I have come to bring fire on the Earth
and how I wish it were already kindled. Communists fast got the idea.
The fire of hatred had to be kept permanently alive by their propaganda
machinery. We were urged by the Party organs all time to be vigilant, for Satan
- alias 'the enemy of the People' - might be hiding in just about every person,
and especially those we naturally love. No wonder that in time, the acid of
suspicion fully corroded our ability even to love ourselves, let alone others.
When, at the end of the world war two, the curtain was finally raised on the
Nazi stage, a cupboard full of corpses was flung wide open and the whole world
could see the naked truth. Not so with the communist stage. When the curtain was
finally raised by the Lord on December 22nd, the corpses were already long gone
and the traces wiped clean in a process that continued long after the overthrow
of that criminal regime.
They had time on their side.... All except for the children....
The state orphanages shocked the civilised world with their horrific images of
skin and bones ghosts. A huge wave of sympathy and compassion was triggered by
the awful pictures on television screens, and fast turned into an avalanche of
generosity from the western countries. To help the most needy, aid convoys from
all over the continent, and in particular from Christian organisations in
Britain, became a permanent feature on our roads, and exerted a great pressure
on our government to take action, both to adopt adequate laws and to reform the
derelict orphanage system. Now things are far better because of you, and because
our country is slowly becoming part Europe.
But many times we saw how aid from the generous hearts in your country was
diverted from the intended receiver into other pockets - those sharks of
transition who have built such great fortunes that now their opulence is
squashing those of us who can barely make ends meet. These fiendish ticks
proliferated at a fantastic rate after December 22 - in the police, political
parties, the government, the army and the church. Yes the church!
The seeds of corruption in the established church were planted long ago in
accommodations with power and privilege before December 22nd. The tentacles have
never been uprooted since and like all corruptions, manifest now and then in
many ways, all of them ugly.
I hope this doesn't sound like sour grapes but on 30th of November last year,
four evangelists from the Evangelical Alliance church here in Tulcea went to the
nearby village of Niculitel to present the film 'The Greatest Story Ever Told',
about Jesus’ life. Despite the fact that they took every legal step necessary
to present the film at the cinema, the local orthodox priest tolled the church
bells as hard as if the 3rd world war had broken out. The four evangelists were
surrounded by about 300 villagers, who with eyes full of hatred, beat them so
savagely they barely escaped alive. An accompanying TV reporter shared the same
fate and also had a camera smashed.
Ironically it is in this same village where the remains of four Christian
martyrs who died 1600 years ago have recently been found.
The orthodox priest's superior was interviewed the next day in the papers here
in Tulcea. He declared that all the blame should go with four evangelists who
went to preach in a village where believers are 100% orthodox! Sounds
ridiculous doesn't it?
Now this is Romania not Indonesia. I wonder what a Moslem would say to say to
see Christians accusing other Christians of proselytising!
Wasn't Saint Paul a proselyte? Aren't we all proselytes for the Christian faith?
Why then is this word so hated in my country by the Orthodox church? It is used
like a bullet by those hard core leaders who bear a Kalashnikov in their souls
not the commandment I have begun this article with. We pray in the church for
our Lord to turn hardened hearts into sensitive ones. Oh, how the road back from
enmity to compassion is complicated and difficult.
But with God everything is possible:-
The pride of Romania
I have been writing these lines from the home of a person dedicated to helping
the street kids. The Pride of Romania she should be. She has been working with
the lost in the tunnels of Bucharest for many years. Her name is Natalia but she
is known to everybody around as 'Tely'.
Yes this out-of-this-world sister took Jesus' word seriously. She entered into
their underground world to let them know Jesus loves them. An unbelievable
story, to leave behind the comfort of a warm house and enter that tough
subterranean environment to save souls for Christ!
There is a boy with me in this room, her last success story. He is a bright boy
of 23 who was on the street from age 10. He was abused as a child and later
became drug addicted, going through all the dire trials of that life. The scars
on his skin are telling signs of his past existence in the underworld. He missed
love and affection badly, but now he is praising the Lord Jesus all time for
rescuing him.
And what an extraordinary rescue operation this is. What amazes me is the fact
Tely had a visa granted to go to the USA (a priceless thing here in Romania) but
she gave it up for this work of the Lord. Yeah, I thought she was crazy at first
but soon I discovered what a great soul she is. She is working now with the
street kids here in Tulcea, sustained by gifts and a small business selling
Christian embroidery to the west (anyone interested?). A person who really seeks
the interest of others first, she is the engine of a remarkable charity work, a
person modelled on Jesus and a blessed example to our Emanuel church here in
Tulcea. Someone filling the gap between faith and deed, between saying 'Love thy
neighbour' and doing it.
Miti
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