Daniel from Moldova is a hulk of a guy: big, quiet, unassuming. He has a gaze that can pierce you. He is as they said, typical of his culture – strong, direct, and blunt. He looks like he can fight a bear with his barehands, and i woudn’t be surprised if he actually did. I tried to jump on his back one day, and he didn’t even budge. He is an ox. He is an agriculturist, and when he talks about farm, and planting, you realize that he knows quite a lot about it. The technology, the plants he has, and the many things that agriculture imply. He speaks with a thick Russian accent (or Moldovan), and we joke about him and another Russian to be part of the KGB, or the Russian mafia. And he would only smile whenever we would do that.
Then at their regional presentation (here at our 4-week conference), Daniel sang. You wouldn’t know that he has a fine tenor voice. You couldn’t have guessed that he can sing with such tenderness and such poignancy that it can bring tears to your eyes. He said the song he was singing was an old Russian song, and that Christians know this song. Then he began to tell us that this song was sung by their congregation the night 150 policemen and their hunt dogs, and bulldozers came to destroy their place of prayer. This was during the communist years, a time of terrible persecution – about 18 years ago, when he was still a teenager. Before the building was to be razed down to the ground, they asked the police to allow them to sing and to pray. This was the song they raised up to cry to God.
He sang the song in Russian. He said it talked about the love of God. We did not know the words he said, but we understood what the song was about. It was in his voice, it was in the way he strummed the guitar, in the way he closed his eyes while he sang it. There was a sweetness in his voice, and sensitivity in his fingers as he sang. It harkened to a past that was filled with peril, but with such sweet joy. We were there with him as he surely thought of that night when their building was destroyed, knowing that what they have can never be broken, nor destroyed. As he sang it, I felt the visitation of the Lord as the hushed audience listened with rapt attention. It was a sacred moment.
There are a lot of things we can never understand. There’s a lot of things that we can never know, but one thing is sure: the Lord our God is an infinitely gracious God, and He has raised us to be His children. And no matter where we are: in the heart of a metropolitan city, or in a tropical paradise, or in the fields of Moldova, He is never too far to be out of reach, and never weak so as not to transform us and lift us up in our time of need.
Thank you for that moment, Daniel.
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