We Lost All Faith Under Communism. The Sermon on the Mount Brought Me Back - Zoltan Dohi

Most of the time I realize that in my life and in the life of other Christians, the problem is not that we don't know the will of God. The problem is that we don't want to do the will of God. We do it at a certain level, which is comfortable enough for us. But when it's too provoking, too challenging for us, we say, "Oh, that's it."

Before we get into this episode, I wanted to let you know that Anabaptist Perspectives is supported by our listeners, which means we don't run ads and we don't do product sponsorships. To make weekly episodes and to produce a series like Anabaptist Origins, we need the help of listeners who believe in this work. And we still have a funding shortfall for this year. You can get involved and support by going to anabaptistperspectives.org.

So, Zoltan, we're here in Switzerland, but you're from Romania, and we met at a conference here, and I was hearing some of your story and the things God has shown you in your life. And I want to dig into that today and hear more of that story. So let's start at the beginning. Where were you born? What kind of situation did you come from? What was your family situation like? Were you born a Christian and those things?

As far as I know, since the 1600s, all my family on both parts, my father's part and my mother's part, they were Reformed Hungarians from the western part of Transylvania. My parents were not Christian, were not practicing Christianity.

They were going to church maybe once or twice a year, but our home was definitely not a Christian home. It was a dysfunctional family with many issues. And I grew up as this. My first thoughts of suicide came in my mind when I was 10 years old because of the issues we had in our family and what I had in school. For me, it was very difficult to go to school because I had to learn Romanian. I was forced to learn Romanian by the system or the school system. But now I'm very grateful to God for all the difficulties I had in our family and I had in school and that I'm speaking Romanian. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to me to learn English or other languages.

And my grandfather, he was a good example. I heard a lot of stories about him. I didn't know even my grandfather from my father's part, but I grew up hearing these stories. And one of the things was that my grandfather was a Bible-reading believer, which was not a very new thing in those times. Nowadays, it's not that common among the Reformed people to read their Bible. But that times, many of the people were doing that. Even my grandparents, my grandparents from my mother's part, I saw the Bible open at their small table when you enter the house. They had a small table like this one, and the Bible was open all the time and not at the same spot.

So they were reading it daily. And my grandfather, when the First World War came, he decided that he has no enemies among the Russians, and he would not go to fight for this crazy cause. It was the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the Hungarian Kingdom. And he refused to go to fight the Russians. Because of that, he and many other people were collected in a concentration camp. And the plan first was to kill them, to eliminate them, because they were considered traitors to the state and to the king.

And later they decided that they will move them to the front line to pick up the dead bodies and the wounded and help with that kind of stuff. And he survived that miraculously. There were shells flying all over the place and everything like that. A lot of people died next to him. He was also able on the front line to help some people from his own village. Even one of his relatives, he was running with the weapon, but he had no shoes on his feet. And in the Russian winter, that can be enough to die.

Wow. And he helped him to get some shoes and to go on with his duties. And he became a war prisoner. He was sent to Crimea. So he had been captured by the Russians, right? Yeah, he was captured by the Russians. So he had just been reading the scriptures and said, "I can't fight. I don't have enemies." And that's all? Or did other people believe like this? No, I don't know about anybody in his village to do that. That was very courageous. Yes, yes. He was a bold man. What he understood and what he believed, he was standing on that. Because his boldness, he was not very favored by many in the village. They were electing some leaders in the village.

And he was the favorite in many regards, but because of his boldness, he was put aside. And in the church, he was one of the elders. But there were some problems with the money in the church. There was double booking. There were two books in the church. And he was the one who wanted to tell that to the pastor, and he told it. But all the other elders left him alone with this issue. Before that, they were saying, "Okay, we should tell the pastor that this is not good. We should do something about that." They were encouraging him that, "We are with you, and then go on, and you will talk." But when he went, he brought that problem.

All the others left him, and he stands alone. And this is why he had to step out from the church. He remained a Reformed person. He continued, probably even more so, to read the scriptures. But he opened his house to smaller groups, non-Reformed believers who came back from the front line. They were evangelized by other soldiers or maybe in concentration camp. And they came home, and they wanted to start a new church. And my grandfather opened his home and said, "Come gather here." Wow.

So during the war, you say he's captured by the Russians.

How did he escape from that? I'm assuming he did. He didn't escape. He was released after five years of forced labor in Crimea. And after that, they released him. And somehow, most of the time on his feet, came home.

You know, I just think of, it sounds like a lot of faithfulness and resilience and steadfastness in what he believed, that he could go through all of those things and still be faithful. Yes, yes. And even more so when he came home, he had an accident with the horses.

They were scared by something. He was training young horses in the cart. And they were scared, and they were pulling him by the string around his wrist. They were pulling him on the rocky streets of the village. And both of his legs were amputated.

And from that on, he lived 40 more years. He raised up his youngborn son because my grandfather was born after he came home from the forced labor from Crimea. When my father was young and his siblings, my grandfather was the one who was teaching them Christian songs, and he was reading them from the Bible every night. And he was teaching them how to pray to God every night. So he was the one who wanted the next generations to be God-fearing and Bible-knowing and God-obeying people. But somehow that legacy, that faithfulness of his teaching got lost because by the time you're born, in your family, that's not there anymore. That's been lost. Yes, that was. Which I guess in the intervening years, there would have been another war, you know, World War II, and then you would have had the Soviet Union, and that would have been the environment you were born into.

Is that right? We were not in the Soviet Union, but we were in the Eastern Bloc. Romania was behind the Iron Curtain, how people understood in the Cold War, the situation. And it was a reality because we were not able to move eastward or westward. We were not well received even in the Soviet Union. It was hard to receive a visa in the Soviet Union. I know that because my grandmother's brother was in another village, which became part of the Soviet Union. And when he died from an accident, my grandmother wanted to go to the funeral, and she was not able because she didn't receive the Soviet visa. Oh, that was unfortunately very common, right, in the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union, when they draw those borders that divide up families.

And that's the environment you're coming into. You know, that's what did that have an effect on why Christianity was not in your home? Or was it something else? You know, I think it's not only for us, but I heard that most from Eastern European people. We are very used to blame the system, very used to blame communism for everything bad in our lives.

Yes, communism was a devastating force. They took our lands and animals and all the tools we needed to work the land. My family, my grandfather had to change his whole system of how he was raising the children. And my father and their siblings had to go to a different kind of school system and learn different skills and jobs. And my grandfather became addicted to the alcohol because of all the pressure he was experiencing during the Second World War, and especially after the Second World War. Romania has to pay war reparations toward the Soviet Union. And literally, it meant that the secret police was coming and was seeking for the last grain of wheat or corn to take it and to send it to the Soviet Union.

And people remained without food, without seeds, what to sow in their land. And later, a couple of years later, they took even the land and the animals and everything what remained. And yeah, that can be devastating. But in the scriptures, in the New Testament, we hear about Christian brothers who received with joy this kind of treatment when their wealth was taken away because of political and ideological reasons.

And my family should be very grateful to God because God spared our lives. There was one moment in the history of my family when they received the news, not officially, but you know, the women are talking behind their husbands. And my grandmother received the news from other women, "Prepare your family because you will be taken away."

They were taking people to the gulag. Those who were wealthier and those who had more land, they were considered gulags. And they were taking them away to the Soviet gulag, forced labor. And very few people came back from there. And my whole family, my father was already there. He was a little child. They were prepared to go. And they prepared clothes and food, everything.

They were up the whole night. And in the morning, they saw that nothing happened. And it was also, I think it was a miracle of God. It was a perfect timing because Stalin just died. And they stopped that project. The new leadership in the Soviet Union, they stopped that project right there. If Stalin would live a couple of days more, my ancestors would be gone. Your family could have disappeared into Siberia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and that I read the Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and just describing what happened for all those people.

And millions, you know, millions of people just disappeared into these, you know, these Siberian gulag camps. Yeah, yeah. Some of my grandfather's brother's sons, they disappeared there. They were sent before that because they were doing some resistance and they were sent. Oh, I see. Yeah. Awful situation for your family and then also yourself to, you know, witness this.

I just heard about all these. When I was born, the communism became milder and the situation was more livable. But I realized afterwards that the alcoholism and leaving God aside and going to other ways, you cannot blame the system for that. It was their decision. You can decide to be grateful to God that he spared your life, or you can decide to be resentful and bitter against the system and start to drink and curse and do other things.

All the time, it's a personal decision. During these times, there was a revival movement in Romania and Hungary among the Reformed people. And my grandmother, my grandfather's wife, she became part of that movement. And when I was a little child, my grandmother was teaching me Christian songs and scriptures and how to pray. And I never heard her to curse or to say bad things or to do big sins. She was teaching me in the way. And my other grandmother, from my mother's part, she was also a God-fearing woman. And she also was taking me to church as a small child. So there were people who decided otherwise. And I had this kind of people in my family.

But my mother and my father, growing up in communism, they were learning the materialistic dogmas, ideologies. And you had to let that. And then when the hippie revolution or whatever, how you call that in America, it happened, it had effects on them also because somehow under or over the Iron Curtain, the Western music and the Western lifestyle and a lot of things infiltrated inside Romania. Not the best things, again, from the West. And they got also infected. So in their upgrowing and under their formation, they were influenced by these two ungodly ways and ideologies, one from East and one from West. And the Bible remained aside.

Was there a Bible in your home at the time? How strict was the communist government on having a Bible, being religious? Was that part of it? Did they have a Bible? Did you see that growing up? No. There was quite difficult to have a Bible. But when I was 10 years old, it was '89, the revolution happened in Romania.

The system changed a while. It was changing slowly. But the religious freedom was instant in Romania after '89. Interesting. And there was a big flow of Bibles and Christian literature toward Romania. Even before many Christians, those who were serious about their faith, they were able to get a Bible because we had, praise the Lord, a lot of faithful brothers and sisters from Western countries who were risking their lives to smuggle Bibles and Christian literature inside Romania.

My father-in-law, he was a believer during the communism. He came from a different background and made different decisions. And being a believer, somehow the brothers and sisters from the West found out that we can go with Christian literature to that brother. And sometimes in the middle of the night, some brothers woke him up and said, "Can we let these materials here?" And he said, "Of course." He was taking risks.

But because he was bold in his faith, he took that risk. And they were finding all kinds of clever ways where to hide the scriptures.

They were doing some things to their cars to be able to hide the Bible. And you were able to find if you were in those circles, if you were more devout about your faith. But those who were not very interested, they didn't have any Bible in their home. But after '89, a lot of Bibles were printed. And my grandmother bought me two Bibles.

No, one of my grandmothers bought me a Bible and the other grandmother bought me another Bible. This is from my grandmother. Really? So this is the one you got when communism falls and you can get a Bible. What year is this from then? I think it's this is probably 1989, 1990. No, no, no. It was printed in '93. Okay, so not when I was 10 years, but when I was 14, they considered, "Okay, you are old enough.

Wow. You should have your own Bible." And I received this brand new. I was very proud of it. I started very worn. You have read this a lot. No, it is a lot. But I'm very ashamed that when I started to read, when I was 14, I started to read this Bible, I got only like to the book of Exodus or something like that. And I stopped. I stopped reading it. And this Bible stayed many, many years on the shelf without being used, like many other Bibles in Romania after the whole. It was fancy to have a Bible. It was somehow cool, you know? And before that, it was an interdiction. It was dangerous to sell, to buy.

And now everybody wanted to have a Bible because it's some kind of cool or something like that. Was it, "Oh, I can have a Bible that because now that shows we're free and we're like the West, even if you never read it"? Yeah. A couple of years before, to have a Bible, it was dangerous. But now it's cool. We are rebelling against that communism.

Okay. Yeah. It's reacting to what they had experienced, even if they never even read it, you know, read the Bible. Yeah. So I want to dig into that a bit where, okay, you get this Bible. Communism has fallen. You start reading it, and then your Bible goes onto the shelf, and you go on and do other things in your life. Like, you just weren't interested in Christianity then. Like, did you believe in God at this point? What's going on in your spiritual life?

I was undecided to believe or not in God. But I don't want to blame anybody again. I'm just stating the facts because I did not saw the faith alive in my family, between my parents. I saw that my grandmothers, they have faith and they are.

But I told that this kind of faith is for old people, especially old women. This was my understanding. Because in the school system, I was taught evolution, materialism, and then all kinds of stuff like that. And again, the Western influence, we started to have more and more entertainment, more and more cartoons and movies. And it was very interesting that the best of those was on Sundays when there was church time. It's very interesting that the communists were doing the same. The communists were making all kinds of programs for the youth on Sundays with the specific idea to not to distract them from the church. Sometimes they put an interdiction to the youth to not go to the church, but many of the young people were rebelling against it, and they were going in secret.

But then they started another way, and they said, "Okay, you can go to church, but we have all kinds of games and shows and movie theaters, everything." But everything was on Sunday. And they realized this is more effective than putting an interdiction. And when the fall of the communism came, we started to have more and more TV programs.

The best part was on Sunday. And many times I decided I would not go with my grandmother to the church. Rather, I stay home and watch cartoons or watch Disney movies or something like that. So that is such an important point because here communism is trying to keep people from going to church, and yet they're realizing it's more effective if they just distract them. Yes, yes.

There's a lesson there for us for sure because we live in a very distracted world, right? You know, with the internet, smartphones, TV, whatever. It's more and more distracting. Yeah, it's easy to just, you get distracted and you go, "Oh, I don't have time to read my Bible," but we have time to be on our smartphone and say, "You can even go to church." But it's very sad when I see in many places young people sitting in the church on their smartphones. Yeah. You can be there physically, but not be there spiritually and mentally and with your heart. It's good enough for the enemy.

That's sobering that you saw a similar thing happening with what communism tried to do with distracting the young people, and then you see the same thing with Western entertainment and so forth. Yeah, capitalism is more effective, or how they call it democracy, but it's actually capitalism. It's actually some kind of mixture of some kind of Babylonian system. And it's more effective than communism. It's incredibly distracting, or like the entertainment side of things, I mean.

So for your own story, it sounds like it wasn't necessarily you're just, you hate Christianity necessarily. It's just, it didn't fit into your life. You were distracted. First, I was not hating Christianity, but later I became a hater. Okay. What changed? Like, why did you start hating it?

I tried to understand. I was never thinking about this. This is the first time I am put to that situation.

One of the things what I hated in my family is that they were telling me lies.

We had this celebration on December 6th, St. Nikolaus. We are Reformed. We are not celebrating saints, but this somehow came into our culture. And the kids were receiving gifts from St. Nikolaus. And the communists said, "No, no, no, it's not St. Nikolaus. It's Father Christmas or Father Winter or something like that." Okay, we don't care. The kids were caring about the gifts.

And my parents told me that this figure is the one, this mystical figure, Santa Claus, in Western culture, he is the one who is bringing the gifts. And I believe that. I believed that for so long. And when I was in school, in my class, nobody believed in Santa Claus. It was only me.

And I said, "How can you not believe? I saw his letters. I communicate with that figure." Of course, it was my parents, my mother doing that. And when I found out that it was her, I felt like a treason. And I was very, very sad. And you made me a clown in front of my classmates. Everything was a lie. Everybody knew that it was only me who was swallowing that lie. And the problem was that when Christmas came, they were saying that Jesus is bringing the gifts. So on December 6th, it's Santa Claus, but at Christmas is Jesus. In other families, it was some angel or some other figure. So we had two separate figures.

We didn't receive the gifts on Christmas from Santa Claus. He was a different figure and different date. And his was his date. And we received the gifts from Jesus. And I said in myself, "If they were lying to me about Santa Claus, they are lying about Jesus too." And I said, "Okay, I will not believe in either."

And if there is no Jesus, there is no God. The whole biblical narrative is falling apart. And because the whole Bible is about Jesus, I understood that as a child somehow or I felt that. And if there is no Jesus for me, there is no God for me anymore. And that's why I hate Santa Claus. I think that Santa Claus, it's an incarnation, an image of the devil because it distracts kids from God. It's a replacement. It's a kind of anti-Christ in my understanding. And I never told any stories like that to my children or any lie. I decided I will never lie to my children. I will be very honest, very straightforward with them in every regard.

Because I don't want my children to feel what I felt and to experience some similar things. This was one of the things. Then as I grew up, I started to get in more and more kinds of sins. And from my upbringing, from my grandparents, grandmothers especially, and from what I heard in the church, I knew that that's not good.

That's not. And I started to hate the whole, not only the whole ethical system, but also the church, the scripture, and God. Because I knew that I am condemned by the whole system. And then after a couple of years, I started to fight actively against Christianity. I started to try to convince all my Christian acquaintances and friends to renounce Christianity, to not go to church. Even those who went to seminary or theology, they wanted to become a pastor.

I tried to convince them not to do that because it's foolish. It has no sense. And I felt more and more hatred against everything that was Christian. I think that the enemies infiltrated my mind and heart on deeper levels. Before I got converted, I was cursing God. It's not a common way of speaking in many languages, but I'm telling many people that we Hungarians, I think we are some of the worst nation on the face of the earth. And some of my Hungarian friends got offended. "Why are you saying that?" And I said, "Give me another example of any nation with any language whom they are cursing God more than us Hungarians."

And I was on the top in that regard. Even my unbeliever friends were saying to me, "Do not curse that much. It hurts our ear." They were not believing in God, but it was awful to hear even for them. And I was not realizing what I'm doing. I was amazed when I'm cursing, but I was doing that. And later I understood that I was somehow in a bondage with sin. Somehow the enemy took control over my tongue, and I was immune to feeling any sorrow for that kind of thing. It's like you viewed Christianity like a fairy tale in a way.

But yeah, not only like a fairy tale, but some kind of ideology which wants to rob me of my favorite sins, my things. So not just a fairy tale, but something that's going to mess up your life or. It wants to interfere with my life. Yeah, that's the word, interfere with your life. Yeah.

But somehow that changed, obviously. Because now, okay, so your Bible sits on the shelf for years and isn't read, but I look at it now and it's clearly been read a lot. So somewhere. This is my third Bible. I was not using it when I became a Christian. I started to use other Bibles, but after the second one was destroyed, I said, "Okay, I will take this from the shelf." It's also a good relic and good memory, but it can be used. Yeah, but what changed? You started reading the scriptures again or you come to realize God is real now? I mean, you're an atheist, you know? And so how do you change? Many things changed, but very slowly.

Some people have very fast conversion. Mine was quite slow. One of the reasons, it came also from the Bible, especially from the Sermon on the Mount. I heard in one sermon when I was a child that you shall ask and you will be given and you shall knock and there will be open. And I said, "Okay, I will try to do that." As a small child, I didn't understand the depth of that statement. And I was asking some specific things from God. And it was not happening. It didn't happen anything.

And I felt like a fool. And I became more bitter. It was around when I was 12 or 13, something like that. And I said, "This is another lie from the Bible. This is not true. This is not working."

But when I was around 20 of my age, I was traveling.

I was traveling because I wanted to have more experiences in my life. My mother was overprotective with me. I'm his only son. And I started to rebel against that kind of situation. And I was traveling without money because I was also rebelling about the mentality of the people around me who said, "Oh, you can have fun and you can travel and have experience only if you have money. If you don't have that." Our family was not poor. We were quite good situated, but we were not wasting money for crazy stuff like traveling. We were buying properties, land, and doing this and that, but not this is a fancy thing.

And I was traveling on my own without money. And I was not having food. I was coming backwards from Odessa nowadays to train. And in a Romanian city, I was very hungry. And I saw some grapes which were ripe, just good for eating them. And there was a very low fence between me and those grapes. It was somebody's property, obvious. And I was thinking I should take a couple of those grapes. It would be delicious. But it came in my mind what I heard in my childhood, "Do not steal." And I became very angry. And the thought in my mind was, "Who invented this stupid thing to not steal? When you are hungry and the grapes are there, you should take whatever you want.

You should not care about these stupid rules or laws or whatever." But I was shy and the shame and the possible complications convinced me not to do that. But I was saying in my heart, "Whoever invented this rule to not steal, he should give me what I need without putting me in the situation to steal." And I was going on with these thoughts in my heart.

And a couple of hundreds of meters down on that street, I was not sure where to turn to get out from that city. And I asked somebody for the direction. And he explained me. He was very kind. And I wanted to go on my way. And he said, "Wait a minute." He was calling his wife. And his wife came with a plate full of grapes.

For me, it was a spiritual experience. I was like struck by lightning. And I realized that somebody heard my thoughts. And not only heard, somebody who heard my thoughts, he's reacting. He's answering my thoughts. And that time I realized that what I was misunderstanding, because I was asking in my childhood fancy things from God and for my desires, but it wasn't my needs. But this time, and many times it's not me who decides what are needs and what are only some fancy desires in my life, what I really need. This time, somebody over me, some higher being heard my thoughts and reacted and gave me those grapes.

I wasn't able to come over these thoughts. And then later, a lot of other things happened. That is so interesting though, that you remembered those things you had heard as a child, right? You shouldn't steal. Ask and you'll receive. And at your current point in life, you don't even believe in God at that point. This is just, this is a fairy tale. This isn't real. But is that the starting place where you start changing how you think about God, about Christianity? Like what happened after that?

This was a point when after many years, I started to reconsider my stance relating to God's existence. I started to think that at that point, that maybe there is some higher being. I was not calling him God. I was not sure about his character, if he's good or bad, if what kind of person he is, or if he is a person or just a law of nature or some force, you know, all these agnostic fancy stuff, ideologies.

But I started to reconsider my stance regarding the existence of God. And I started to be sure that there is some kind of God, some kind of being or force or intelligence or anything like that. So at that point, you say, "Okay, there might be, you know, maybe there is a God," but that's a long ways from becoming a Christian. You know, so somewhere in there, you need to take that step back to Christianity. And what did that look like for you?

For me, it was a sermon on the radio. I was living in another city far from my parents. I tried a lot of crazy things, but I was bored. I was quite bored a lot of times. And once I was in my room in the campus and turning the radio for looking for something interesting, and I heard that somebody is preaching on one of the radio stations.

It was in Romanian, but it was quite interesting. I let him do his job, and I started to listen. He was preaching about Jesus, about his person, about his character. And he was preaching based on the beatitudes, based on what he was teaching to his disciples about how they can be happy, how they can have a blessed, a fulfilled life.

And all those words were amazing for me. I realized that this is a different dimension. This is another world. This is something extraordinary. And that night, we went out with my friends to drink in a bar. And with the beer on the table, I started to share with them that, "Hey guys, we are so stupid.

We have a lot of things in life, and we are still miserable. We are depressed a lot of times. We are full of resentfulness and hatred and everything. Jesus was alone, was poor, does not have any wife or girlfriend. Even his disciples treated him sometimes very badly. His nation was against him and everything like that." Whatever I heard in the sermon. And he was living a fulfilled life. He was happy. He was not resentful. And he was teaching others. And a lot of people listened to him. And we are here with our beers, and we have some money in the pocket. There are a lot of nice girls in the campus, and we are miserable.

What's wrong with us?

That's amazing. You said that, and you're not even a Christian yet. You're saying this in the bar. Basically, I was preaching to my friends. What did they say? Oh, they said, "You are crazy. You are too drunk. You're drinking too much. Let's go."

That's amazing. So what then? Did you go to church then? Did you like, how do you take the next step? No, I remained stuck with the idea that this Jesus is somehow different from us. It's not like us. And until then, I was reading books and listening to guys, smarter guys than me, to learn something, to grow in my knowledge and in my character and anything. But I was growing in the wrong direction, towards hell. And now I realized, "Hey, I should listen to what Jesus has to say." And how can you do that?

I know one of my colleagues from the school, from the university, he was a new believer. He was a very zealous Christian. I made fun of him a lot of times. And I was sorry later when I became a Christian that I annoyed him a lot of times. But I knew that he's going to church. And on one of the occasions, he was going to church, and I said, "Hey, can I come with you?"

He was not sure if I'm joking or I tried to make fun of him or what are my intentions. I was not a very good and honest person. I was very mean with people. And he said, "Yeah, if you really want, you can come." And I went to the church. I was very scared because it was an evangelical church, not a reformed church. And it was new in many regards. I stayed there. And when the meeting was over, I asked my friend, "Can you provide me a Bible?" And he came up with Gideon's New Testament. He gave it to me. I was very thankful. And I went back to the campus. And whenever I had time, I started to read.

My roommate started to make fun of me, but I fought back very, very strongly with the words. And I was even showing other things to them if they don't let me do my stuff. But especially when there was nobody in the room because I was not interested in word fights with them, I started to read the scripture, the New Testament. And once when I was reading it, somehow the thought came in my mind and my heart and my soul that if there is a God and if he has a revelation, this is it.

This is it. And I was so happy and so amazed also and so afraid also by this discovery. Is it real? I had it all over the time here close, and I was not realizing that this is the revelation of God.

I continued to read. And one of the shocking events was when I got to the point at the beginning of the Matthew, the sermon on the mountain, when God was, Jesus was teaching to show the other face and to give the other cloth and go the other mile.

Exactly in that time in my life, one of my roommates stole my greatest treasure, my camera, which I received as a gift. And he stole it. He sold it for some low price, and he bought alcohol when I was not in the campus.

And I came back. I was very angry. I wanted to revenge. I wanted to recover the camera, the money, anything. And I made a lot of steps in that direction. I wanted to go to the police with all the evidence and to make sure that they will punish him somehow. I did not want to do the dirty job myself because I knew that this will become ugly. But I said, "Okay, I will not do that kind of stuff, but I will bring him to police." And when I was reading these words, it was making me angry, very angry. And I was saying, "Jesus, how you can say this? How you can command these kinds of things to your disciples?

I would like to do that, but you don't know what kind of world we are living in. You don't know how these guys are. You don't know how this campus is. This is a jungle. You will not survive here only by force. You have to show strength. You have to intimidate others. You have to prove your point and to make all kinds of steps to survive. If I will do what you are saying to me, they will take everything from me. They will think that I'm stupid and they can do whatever they want with me."

And in a way, I was afraid of the consequences. What if I obey his words? But I was not able to sleep. And after a couple of days of struggling in my heart, I said, "Okay, Jesus, I give up. I give up. If you said so, I will do this." And I did it. I went to the roommate. He moved to another room because he was afraid of the consequences.

And I said, "Hey, I want to talk with you." We sat down and I said, "You know what? I'm destroying all the evidence I have against you. I will not go to the police. I don't want to recover anything.

You hurt me in my feelings because I tried to be a friend with you and you did this, but I forgive you and I don't have any request from you." And he started to have some tears in his eyes and he was asking, "Why?"

And I said, "You know why? Because I also was forgiven. Jesus died on the cross for me. I was forgiven and I want to do with you what Jesus did with me." And after that, for a couple of days, I felt that I'm the most happy and the most free man on the whole face of the earth. I felt such a deep peace and such great joy.

And I was thinking in my heart that this was worth it. There is no money on earth with which you can buy this freedom, this peace, this happiness. And I started to understand, and it was the Holy Spirit, obviously, who made me uncomfortable with the whole situation and convinced me to try the words of God and to make these decisions. And I was convinced that obeying God is the best choice in my life.

Yeah. And in between this and that, starting to read the scriptures and going to this in between, there were some evangelical meetings, evangelization meetings, I'm sorry, in the church. My reformed friend took me to a Baptist church and a Lutheran pastor was evangelizing.

And me, an atheist or now an agnostic, half-agnostic guy, was listening every night to the message of the cross, the message of the sacrifice of Jesus. And one night when I started to go home, I started to talk with God after many years because when I was a little child, I prayed, but it was more like a formal prayer. But now I started to talk one-on-one with God and I said, "God, I know that you love me. I cannot understand why because I'm such an awful person. I would like to love you and to love others, but I don't know how. Please teach me. Please, if you want me, please accept me and work, do something with me."

And God started to do many, many things with me and in me especially. So again, the sermon on the mountain was a stumbling block for me like in the childhood, but the Holy Spirit convinced me that I should overcome this. I should obey. I should do what God is saying without being afraid of the consequences, without thinking too much about the consequences.

It seems that is a theme of the story, is the sermon on the mountain and those hard teachings of Jesus, even all the way back to your great-grandfather in the war, say, "I don't have enemies." That's very hard and you're very courageous to do that up to you're struggling with asking you'll receive and say, "Oh, that's just, that'll never, you know, that'll never happen." And then forgiving someone who's taken something from you, this is a theme that ran through your life for many years. What happens after you become a Christian? And I'm thinking particularly on those teachings of Christ, those hard teachings on the, especially the sermon on the mountain. But where do you go from there?

Do you start? I'm sure a lot of things in your life changed. Yeah. Yeah. The first thing what changed in my life, it was the first very obvious thing. It was my relationship with my parents and my sister, with my family.

I understood that the way of Christ is the way of love and peace. And I went home and I said to my family, "Look, I decided to follow Jesus. I am a very awful person. I did a lot of wrong. I rebelled against my parents. I was hating everybody, myself also, but others also.

And I want to beg you sorry. I want to ask your forgiveness for that. And I want to change. I want to love you and others from now on." And this was something strange in the sight of my parents. They thought that I have some medical condition.

I became crazy. They really wanted to call the ambulance and to take me to a mental hospital. Wow. And I was saying to them, "Wait a minute. When I was coming home drunk and when I was saying and doing all those crazy things, you were not taking me to a mental hospital. I was crazy. I was a normal person." Wow. But now when I'm coming home saying that I want your forgiveness and I also forgive you for all that did, because in any family, there are both ways. I have to forgive my parents from the depth of my heart for many things what they did with each other, themselves, and with us children. And now I'm crazy.

How come that?

So they renounced to take me to the, but they were very ashamed that, "Oh, we don't have this kind of religiously zealous people in our family. What we will tell to other people what happened." And when I decided to get baptized, they were even more ashamed. They felt the pressure from the broader community that, "What is your son doing? He's crazy. Why is he leaving his religion?" And I said, "I never left my religion. I was atheist. That's not really a religion. I was baptized as a child, but it was not my decision. It was not a biblical thing. And now I'm following Jesus in obedience in baptism. And I'm starting my religious life, if you want to understand it like that.

And I have no debt to the church or anything because if the church will do in a responsible way his duty, I would not become that kind of atheist." Yeah, now I know that I could become, of course, but that was my thought at that time. That was my reply. It was not totally correct, but that's what I said.

And my parents and my smaller family later, behind my back, they started to boast with me in front of their friends and relatives because they were saying, "Oh, our son is not drinking. He's having a normal life. He's studying at the school." Because the other parents were starting to complain about their children doing crazy stuff. And in front of me, my parents were blaming me, "You are not a good Christian. You are only talking." And they said that. But behind my back, they are very proud of me.