I was born in Moscow when the Soviet Union was still in existence. I was the second child in the family. I had a brother who was 15 months older than me. My father worked as an engineer and my mom was an architect. I had grandparents on both sides and I was very close with them. My grandpa used to take me to the kindergarten and it was very common for me to stay with my grandparents for the weekend or even for a week when they could take me to the kindergarten.
A Hunger for God
I still remember the story that my grandpa used to tell me before bed of how God spared his life during the military service in the Second World War. He served with the tank troops and one day, when they accidentally got to the minefield, his tank was on fire. He was the only one who survived that day. He managed to get out of the tank under fire, and when he got shot in the leg, the bullet came through. He crawled on the minefield to safety and prayed for God to spare his life. God did! Every time after that story I asked him to show me his leg and the marks from the bullet. This story impacted me as a child to know that, although we never really talked about God in the family, I knew that God was real.
When I was about seven years old, I was walking on the Red Square with my mom and I needed to take something to to trash can. As I approached it, I saw a booklet about Jesus lying in the pile of trash. I wondered who that person was who didn’t want to know about God. Then I thought to myself, “Even if the booklet is from the trash can, I want to know about God.” So, I picked it up and put it under my clothes to hide it from my mom. I knew that if she asked me what I had picked up in the trash, I might have to throw it away because I was not allowed to take anything from the trash.
Salvation
When I came home that day, I locked myself in the bedroom to finally read the story about Jesus. It was made out of a children’s book (comic), so it was very easy to read for a child. At the end of book, there was the salvation praye,r and by the time I got to it, I was convicted that my sins were separating me from God and I needed to repent and be reunited with Him. So I prayed the prayer, and with my whole heart invited Jesus in. At that moment I was overwhelmed by feeling so loved by God. I knew that in my mind I couldn’t understand everything that was happening at that moment, but with my whole heart, I received that love that I had never felt before. I know that in that moment I was saved.
Hungry to Know More
After that experience, I was looking to find everything I could to learn about God and faith. At that time I was in the first grade. Then shortly after my salvation experience, I met a girl who was my brother’s classmate and was a Jew. She could read very fast and had a children’s Bible at home. So, I asked her if she could read to me from the Old Testament and we would gather together in her house to read Bible stories. We both talked about what we had just read and commented on our perception of God and our take away from the story. But at the end of that school year, she and her family were repatriated (moved) to Israel. For a few years, we were writing letters to each other. In her letters, she wrote to me about her new life and that she had gotten into the religious school and liked it. Now she was learning about God in the school, and I thought to myself that I wanted that too.
Seed Planted in the Heart
Then in the middle of the second grade, my father died from a heart attack. My mom was devastated and didn’t know what to do. We all were. But even this tragedy didn’t make me question God and His goodness. I knew that He was good even if something really bad had happened.
In the spring of that year, I overheard a conversation in school between my classmates. They were saying that if you would receive water baptism in the church, God would be with you. So when I came home, I told my mom that I wanted to be water baptized and that she needed to take me to the church. Back in the day, there were only Orthodox churches that we knew of, so the following weekend we went together to the church so that I could be baptized. When we arrived, we were told that I needed to have a cross to put on after the baptism and a godmother who would be with me. Because I wanted to be baptized that day, my mom bought me a cross that she could afford and we found a grandmother in that church who was willing to become my godmother. I still remember that her name was Anna. I got baptized that day, and with a new sense of assurance that God was with me now, I went home.
Around the same time, my other friend in school told me that she was going to the Baptist Sunday school, and I asked her if I could go. I started going with her. That is when I saw a real Bible for the first time. I loved attending there and sometimes I would go by myself because my friend or my mom could not take me. My mom never went to church. She would just bring me and then pick me up after it was over. No one ever asked me about my parents or who was bringing me to church. I was just there and very happy to learn everything. We learned songs about Jesus and read a chapter from the Bible, verse by verse, one after another every time we met there. Then there was a time for a Bible story, and the teacher used a flannelgraph to illustrate the story. I loved it all, and what had been sown in my heart at that time helped me in the next few years of my life.
Difficult Times
At the beginning of the third grade, ( I was 9 at that time), my mom lost her job. We had no income, so my mom sent me to a school where I spent five days a week and was only home for the weekend. My brother stayed with my grandparents that year. The following year, my mom decided to find another place for my brother and I to live so we could be together. Out of all places, my mom sent us to an orphanage so we could be there while she decided what to do next. The orphanage was a place with no hope, no care, no love. That place had a deficiency of everything, even toilet paper. Stealing was a common thing there. Kids and everyone around us seem to be cruel to us. I felt lonely the whole time I was there and I never had experienced loneliness to that extent before. So I talked to God and prayed that He would rescue us from that place. My grandparents knew nothing about it, so two months after we arrived, my brother and I made a plan of escape. We decided that if we succeeded, we would go to our grandparents to stay with them.
My mom came to visit us at the same time we had devised this plan of escape. We told her that if we were forced to stay at that orphanage, we had a plan to escape. She understood that we were serious and promised to come back the next week to take us home. What a relief! God answered my prayer and I was very aware of it. For the rest of the year, we stayed with Mom in our apartment. It was difficult, but we were surviving. My mom didn’t have a job and we only had a little bit of money from the government as a social support, but it was not enough for even a week of groceries. My brother and I had to wash cars and collect bottles to make a little extra money for our living. My grandparents tried to help, but they didn’t know how bad it was for us. My mom was hiding it, and we were not telling them to protect mom from social services.
A House With No Heat Or Water
For the next school year, my mom managed to rent our apartment out to some people, and she found a house in the village that we could rent and have some money left for food. That was in the year 1993 when the Soviet Union had already collapsed and many people had lost everything and had no jobs and no income. Our situation was one of many at that time.
While living in that house, we had goats, chickens, and rabbits that the owners left and we made an agreement to take care of the animals. We could have milk and eggs for our labor. There was no heat in the house, but one fireplace that we had to learn how to start a fire and prepare the wood. There was no water in the house, so we had to go to the well to get water every time we needed it. My mom was struggling with depression at that time and it was mostly me and my brother that had to do it all. We didn’t know what depression was, but we knew that something was wrong because our mom slept all the time. Today she doesn’t have any memories of that time.
It was during the time in that village that I felt God so close to me. I was talking to Him constantly out of my heart with no way of knowing what was the right way to pray. I sang songs that I learned in Sunday school while I was walking in the forest and no one could hear me but God! In all of the hard labor that we endured to survive, I knew God was there and because of it, I knew that we would make it. I had hope again and felt His love for me.
Locked Out!
That winter, while my brother and I went to our grandparents for the New Year school break, my mom rented another house that was in a little town and was so much closer to school. She came for us so we could start school before the school break was over. It took us a whole day to travel there. When we arrived, the new house was locked and there was no way to know where the owners were. We didn’t have keys, so we managed to break into the front porch of the house to spend the night and hide from the freezing temperatures and cold wind (-15F). It wasn’t heated, but it was still warmer than the outside. We spent the night there and the next morning decided to take time and ask around where we could find the owners, since my mom had already paid them and we had no extra money to rent another house that month. By the afternoon, it was clear that we had lost our money and the owners had sold the house to someone else. We knew that we needed to find another place to spend the night. By that time I was so cold, I couldn’t feel my hands and feet anymore. While my mom and my brother were looking for a place to stay, I stayed inside and decided to pray and ask God for help. Two minutes after I prayed, my brother came to say that we found a place for the night, and I exclaimed that that was the answer to my prayer, because I just prayed! God saved our lives again because I knew that I could not survive another night out there. I always struggled in the winter with my hands and feet being cold, but never to the point that they were numb anymore.
Bible School Students from Siberia
My brother and my mom returned to Moscow, but I stayed in that village with the grandmother, Lena, whom we had just met. I missed that year of school because of our circumstances, and after I finally got back to Moscow for the next school year, we were still not sure what we were going to do for the income.
We decided to give up one of the rooms in the apartment for rent. The very next day, we had a couple who came to talk to us because they were looking for a room to rent. They had heard from the neighbors that we had been renting it out before. It happened to be that they were Bible school students and had come from Siberia to the Bible school. Two days after they moved in with us, they told us about Jesus and asked me if I wanted to receive Him into my heart and pray a salvation prayer. I said yes. As we began to pray, I recognized that it was the very same prayer that I had prayed a few years ago. When I opened my eyes, Peter, (the Bible school student), told me that the whole heaven was rejoicing right now about me giving my heart to Jesus. I was overwhelmed to hear that, and he read me the scripture from Luke 15:10 to reassure me. I was holding back my tears from learning the fact that the whole heaven could rejoice over me. I didn’t mention that I prayed that prayer before. A few weeks later, Peter and Tatyana prayed with us to receive baptism in the Holy Spirit, and my mom and I got baptized. So much changed after that. Peter and Tatyana gave me my first Bible so I could read it every day. The whole year that they were living with us, I was discovering so much about God. I had so many questions and they were always willing to explain them to me. I got involved in the church and was willing to serve anywhere I could. I wasn’t only saved, but finally, I was discipled. I was twelve years old when it all happened.
My story is the one that is described in 1 John 4:19,15: “We love Him because He first loved us. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.” And Philippians 1:6 says, “He which hath started a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” I am forever grateful to God that He has found me and made me His own!
Revival in Russia Prophesied
Many years later, I was reading one prophecy that was given by Bob Jons about revival in Russia. God told him to gather a million-dollar offering and give it to Terry Law because God was going to use him to bring Bibles and other materials to the former Soviet Union. So they gathered the money and gave it to Terry Law Ministries. The track about Jesus that I found on the Red Square had been printed by Terry Law Ministries. My mother-in-law, Denise Renner, gave everything she had in her wallet to this missionary project when Terry Law was sharing at their church about everything the Lord was doing in the Soviet Union. Someone received the Word from God and was obedient to follow through. Another person was obedient to sow money, and another to print and distribute the materials, and God brought the harvest!!! My mother-in-law couldn’t have known when she was sowing her seed to that ministry that in return, many years later, she would get a Russian daughter-in-law who was saved as a result of the work that this missionary did! We can’t outgive God! Our seed goes farther than we think and makes a full circle to bring harvest back into our life and into the lives of others in a multiplied way! God is so big and God is always good!
My prayer is that God would use this testimony to bring someone into the Kingdom.
The Prayer of Salvation:
Dear God,
I come to You in the name of Your Son Jesus. After reading this testimony, I realize why I need salvation. I ask You to forgive me of my sin that was inherited from Adam. You said that the wages of sin is death, — eternal death and separation from You — BUT the gift ofGod is eternal life through Jesus Christ. And You said if I confess with my mouth that Jesus is Lord, and if I acknowledge that He died to restore my relationship with You — while believing in my heart that You raised Jesus from the dead, — I will be saved (Romans 6:23, 10:9). Right now, I confess out loud, that Jesus is Lord, and I believe in my heart that You raised Him from the dead for me. Thank You for saving me! I believe these things are true and You hear my prayer.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.