Sweet Slovakia

Greetings from Bratislava!

I apologize, I wrote this 3 days ago, but in the absence of internet service, I forgot to post it.  So this is a double-post.

The first thing you notice about Bratislava is that it doesn’t seem to have the eternally crumbling infrastructure of the rest of the formerly Communist world.  The downtown area is sunny by day and well-lit at night.  The sidewalks and pedestrian area are nicely paved and not terribly crowded, although there are plenty of restaurants, shops, and cafes.  And the Slovaks themselves are light-hearted and open, which is probably the most surprising thing of all.  Communism left many people as scarred as their lands.

So how did the Slovaks survive Communism to flourish so nicely?  I think we heard a clue in the Slovakian National Anthem.  Anushka translated and explained the lyrics, which in part tell the story of a woman digging a well.  She dug deeper and deeper, and deeper still.  Then she looked into the well, thinking that she should drown herself in the well.  But she decides not to do that.  These are strange lyrics for a national anthem, but in it you can see the unhappy scars of Communism that tempted the woman (Slovakia) to kill herself.  Somehow she finds the resilience to survive.

The Slovaks, like the woman, bear the scars of Communism, but have turned their attention from the dim past to the bright future.  Slovakia does indeed have a bright future.  The economy here is the best of all the formerly Communist world.  Of course, economic crisis is global, and Slovakia is not immune, but the youth are not fleeing Slovakia like they are from many other East European countries.  In fact, we have met young people here who have come to Slovakia looking for a better life, instead of going to the west.

Our first evening here was at a local church that meets in a movie theater.  It was a youth prayer group meeting, but like none I had ever been to before.  Youth from all over the city, from various churches, came to the meeting, which had over 100 people.  There was worship in music and dance, there was teaching, and there was prayer, both corporate and in small groups.  In fact, when it was time for small group prayer, the leaders asked the people over 30 to pray over the youth.  That means that most of our team sought young people to pray for.  I found 2 university students, sweet, smiling girls, and prayed for them.  They were very encouraged by my prayer, and thanked me for praying for them.

Later I heard that the churches all over the city regularly cooperate and meet together.  It gave me such hope.  Unity!  I would love to see unity like this in Milan—or even in America.  The Bratislavan churches do not compete with each other.  They recognize that the different expressions of faith and worship are simply a matter of the individual character of each church family.  People are not regarded with suspicion if they go to a meeting at another church.  I would guess that there is probably less church-hopping, as a result.  Because giving people the freedom to visit and learn from other believers conversely will instill in them a feeling of familial pride in their own home church.  Plus the home church benefits from the sharing of prophetic insight and instruction.  It’s really how the Body of Christ was intended to function.

Young people are the most precious resource that Slovakia has because young people have not yet lost their idealism or their positive outlook.  When a country loses its youth, it loses something really valuable.  It loses its future.

If you want to see the most flourishing of all post-Communism, you should come to Slovakia.  There is a sweetness here that will make you want to come back.  I know I do!  God is good!

 

Kebap Shop Breakfast

Greetings once again from Bratislava!

I woke up early this morning, and left the hostel in search of coffee.  I was surprised to see on the streets that there were a lot of drunken people, mostly young people, at 6:30 in the morning.  A few were staggering, but mostly I could tell that they were drunk by the volume of their voices.  I’m not sure if there is something about having lots of alcohol in the bloodstream that renders a person incapable of hearing as well as normal or if it’s just a matter of having spent all night with thundering music.  The drunken people on the streets all seemed to know the places where they could find food, which was mostly kebap/falafel shops.  The first place I stopped didn’t have coffee.  The counter person acted like it was strange to want coffee at such an hour of the morning.

The next place I stopped had coffee and seating indoors, so I sat down to drink my coffee.  A young man entered soon after me and asked for his kebap in English.  While he was waiting to pay, I asked him where he was from.  He said, “Ireland,” with some pride in his voice.  He paid and sat down with me.  He told me about his night, which had been spent with friends drinking in bars.  I asked his name, which was Sean.  He ate only half of his kebap, declaring that his eyes had been bigger than his stomach (something my dad had often said).   I asked him what time the bars close, and he said they close at 6.  He said that he was the “last man standing,” and that if the bar hadn’t closed, he would be happy to continue drinking because “I’m Irish,” (again said with pride).

Sean works in Bratislava, but travels often between here, Budapest, Vienna, and Prague.  Because he talked so much, I got the feeling that Sean is lonely here.  Perhaps loneliness is something that he is trying to escape with alcohol.  He looked at my cross and said, “You’ll probably feel better than me in the morning.”  Then he stood up and walked out.

I felt bad that I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to share Jesus with him, but I don’t know how much his boozy brain would be able to really understand or accept.  Anyway, I prayed for him.  He is probably my son’s age, and already very much an alcoholic.  It was a sad way to start a Sunday.

Nevertheless, I am looking forward to a very good Sunday because today I am going to kindergarten.  Actually, it is a church that meets in a kindergarten.  The church also runs the kindergarten.  Zuzana is a girl I met on our first night in Bratislava.  We met at that prayer group in the movie theater church.  Zuzana took me to her church, just to show it to me because it was close to where we were meeting, and it was interesting because of the kindergarten meeting there.  To her surprise and mine, the pastor was there—Pastor Ivan.  Immediately I felt a very strong urging by the Holy Spirit to pray for him.  It was a prayer very much led by the Holy Spirit, and it encouraged Pastor Ivan very much.

So when we talked about going to church last night, although I like Anushka’s church very much, I don’t feel like I’ve made quite the same connection as I did at Pastor Ivan’s kindergarten church.  Since it is close to Anushka’s church, and since Zuzana was sitting next to me, I asked if it would be OK if I go to her church instead.  Nobody had a problem with that, and Zuzana was very pleased to hear that I wanted to visit her church.

Most of all, I want to encourage Pastor Ivan, who has had some problems lately.  Sometimes the simple act of showing up can be very encouraging.  I think he will be very encouraged to see me again this morning in church.  And encouraging him will also encourage me.  In God’s work, everybody is encouraged and blessed.  I love working for the Lord!  He really is the best Boss ever!  I often tell people that my Boss is like a Father to me.  God is good!

Gotcha!

Part 1

As promised, here is the story of how I came back to God after 8 years of sincere atheism:

After having had a genuine experience of God (that is, born again, baptized in water, baptized in the Holy Spirit), I suffered a series of setbacks.  I was devastated the day my husband announced, “I don’t believe in God any more, and I don’t love you.”  This was only 3 years into our marriage, and we were already parents of a little boy.  He didn’t move out, but things between us had definitely changed.  He was a workaholic, so we settled into a pattern that kept the marriage together for another 30 years: He would usually say something hurtful to me on his way out the door, and I would cry and despair for an hour or so, and by the time he returned home about 12 hours later, I would be over the hurt, and things would be fairly pleasant until the next morning when it usually happened again.

Thus began a slow decline in my Christian walk.  We had recently moved to a suburb of Dallas and every church that I had tried seemed empty and dead.  One preached about money, money, money, and even posted on a bulletin board in the foyer how much money each person had given the previous month.  Outrageous!  It seemed like we had not only left our hometown, but also the Lord.  Finally, I just stopped going to church.

Not coincidentally, I also began to drink—a lot.  Before long, my drinking was really out of control.  So I was already far from God when both my sisters-in-law lost their babies within 6 months of each other.  Then I read in the newspaper about 3 women in New York City who had thrown their babies out the window.  I decided that either God didn’t exist or He was lazy.  I became agnostic because I wasn’t ready to let go of the idea of God, but essentially, I had.

The final blow came when Phillip, my childhood sweetheart, was killed in a highway accident too horrific to describe.  Phillip had been the only person in my life to show me unconditional love.  With Phillip’s death I became a radical militant atheist.  If somebody tried to give me a religious tract, I would respond, “I don’t want that sh**!”

Looking back, I can see God’s hand on my life because just 3 weeks before Phillip died I had quit drinking.  This was God’s timing because when Phillip died I was so depressed that I wanted to crawl inside a bottle and never come out again.  I would have welcomed death except for the feeling of responsibility to my son, who was 7 at the time.  I had quit drinking because of having blacked-out at yet another party, waking the next morning to find my husband so angry with me that he refused to speak.  I knew that I must have embarrassed him, so I told him that I would quit drinking.  He (having grown up with an alcoholic step-father) said, “I’ve heard that before.”  And I’m sure he had, but not from me.  That statement made me so mad that I decided I would make him eat those words.  I didn’t have another drink for 20 years.

So although I was a radical militant angry atheist, I was no longer an alcoholic when Phillip died.  God allowed me to have my stew in my anger for almost 8 years.  It’s hard to sustain anger for that long, so little-by-little I became less angry at God.

Shortly after we moved to Durham, North Carolina, we visited my childhood home in California for the first time since moving away 19 years before.  I had such good memories of that place and my childhood there that returning to real life in an abusive marriage sent me into the worst depression of my life to that point.  For the next several months I avoided the few friends I had made, and cried through my days.

Then I started having suicide hallucinations.  There were 2 of them.  It was always either taking the big kitchen knife and cutting my throat from ear-to-ear or plunging the knife into my heart.  Both were so frighteningly real that I didn’t know that they were not really happening.  In the middle of doing the most ordinary kind of household tasks (putting wet sheets into the dryer, setting the dinner table, bathing the baby) I suddenly had the knife in my hand and I turned it on myself.  I felt the sharpness of the knife, but no pain, and I felt the hot, sticky blood on my skin and smelled the copper-salty smell of it.  Then I would find myself back where I had been, with the wet sheets in my hands or the baby in the bath tub.  I would immediately run and hide in my closet, terrified.

One day in the closet I suddenly realized 2 things: 1. I didn’t want to kill myself (I would never do that to my children) and; 2. If I ever did want to kill myself, I would never do it with a knife.  And those 2 things led me to a 3^rd realization: these hallucinations were coming from someone, and it was not me.  Given that I sincerely did not believe in God, therefore I also didn’t believe in the devil.  But I was very aware that there was some kind of a presence, and it was not a good one.

I went for counseling, and I worked at counseling with all my might.  I wanted to get over this thing.  Every appointment I talked non-stop about everything that had gone wrong for me in my life.  If it hurt, I talked about it—every angle and every nuance.  It was like emotionally disemboweling myself week after week.  And my counselor offered no help, no insight, nothing.  She might have been a bobble-head doll, just nodding and taking notes as I vomited all the pain of my soul.  I told the counselor that I wanted 2 sessions a week because I shook, unable to sleep for 2 days before each session because they were so unpleasant.  So we went to 2 sessions a week, and that was actually better.  After a couple of months of that, I somehow came out of the depression and the hallucinations stopped.  At that time I quit going to counseling and instead started taking a creative writing class.

One day in the car I heard a Bob Dylan song that I had never heard before.  I only just today learned the name of the song: Positively 4^th Street, and it starts out, “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say that you’re my friend . . .”  As I listened to the song, it seemed that Jesus was singing to me, saying things like, “You say you’ve lost your faith, but that’s not where it’s at.  You have no faith to lose, and you know it.”  It was just like receiving a rhema word, only through a song.  And for a few months I started getting rhema words on billboards and in overheard conversation.  I knew that it was supernatural contact, and I knew that it was God, although I still sincerely didn’t believe in Him.  Now I know that He was wooing me, pursuing me, getting me ready to come back to Him.

To be continued, but until then, here are the lyrics to Positively 4^th Street:

You’ve got a lot of nerve
To say you are my friend.
When I was down you just stood there grinning.

You’ve got a lot of nerve
To say you’ve got a helping hand to lend.
You just want to be on the side that’s winning.

You say I let you down,
You know it’s not like that.
If you’re so hurt, why then don’t you show it?

You say you’ve lost your faith,
But that’s not where it’s at.
You have no faith to lose, and you know it.

I know the reason that
You talk behind my back.
I used to be among the crowd you’re in with.

Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide what he don’t know to begin with?

You see me on the street.
You always act surprised.
You say, how are you, good luck, but you don’t mean it.
When you know as well as me,
You’d rather see me paralyzed
Why don’t you just come out once and scream it!

Now don’t I feel that good
When I see the heartaches you embrace
If I were a master thief perhaps I’d rob them.

And though I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place,
Don’t you understand, it’s not my problem.

I wish that for just one time,
You could stand inside my shoes,
And just for that one moment I could be you.
Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes,
You’d know what a drag it is to see you.