God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

  Anna showed us her church. It was forbidden to hold religious services in a private home, so Anna had simply closed off one room and put a sign on it reading “Molitven Dom” (“Prayer House”). When she put up the sign, there were raised eyebrows among the village’s few Party members, but no one really objected. After all, Anna was quite alone in this silly superstition of hers, and she was harming nobody.

  Now, however, a preacher was here. Word flew from cottage to cottage. Almost no one in the village had ever laid eyes on anyone from outside Macedonia, let alone from a foreign country.

  Whether this was the appeal or whether there were more religious reasons, I do not know. But that evening after dark it was as if the fields were alive with glowworms weaving and blinking their way across the fields to Anna’s house. We began by teaching them a hymn, and then we told them the Gospel story, for Anna assured us that the younger generation had never heard it. We were singing a second hymn when suddenly there was a loud pounding on the door.

  Everyone stopped singing.

  Anna opened the door, and there stood two uniformed police. They walked to the front of the room. For a long time they simply stood there, running their eyes over the congregation. Then they went to one side of the room to get a better look at faces. Finally, they took out their notebooks and began writing down names. When they had finished, they asked a few questions about Nikola and me and then left as abruptly as they had come.

  But the meeting was not the same after that. Several villagers went home at once. Those who stayed sang with no enthusiasm. When the time came for an altar call, I was surprised that anyone would raise his hand, and yet several did.

  “You have seen tonight what following Christ might mean,” I said. “Are you sure you want to become His men?”

  And still a few insisted. So a little church was born that evening, but it never had a chance to grow. Nikola wrote me a year later that it had been stamped out by the government. For helping us, “Little Uncle” was deported from the country. He is now living in California in the United States. Anna’s Molitven Dom was closed down.

  As for himself, Nikola wrote, he had been summoned to court in Zagreb to account for his part in the evening. He had been reprimanded by the judge and fined the equivalent of fifty dollars but nothing worse. He believed the fact that he was a student had saved him from harsher treatment.

  Why the government chose this particular isolated church to attack while it left others alone, neither Nikola nor I have ever understood.

  ———

  The roads in Yugoslavia were extraordinarily hard on cars. When we weren’t climbing fierce mountain trails, we were fording streams at the bottom of steep valleys.

  But the worst threat to the little VW was the dust. Dust lay over the unpaved roads like a shroud; it sifted in on us even through the closed windows, and I hated to think what it was doing to the engine. Every morning in our Quiet Time, Nikola and I would include a prayer for the car. “Lord, we don’t have either time or the money for repairs on the car, so will You please keep it running?”

  One of the peculiarities of travel in Yugoslavia in 1957 was the friendly road-stoppings that took place. Cars, especially foreign cars, were still such a rarity that when two drivers passed each other, they almost always stopped to exchange a few words about road conditions, weather, gasoline supplies, bridges. One day we were dusting along a mountain road when up ahead we spotted a small truck coming toward us. As it pulled alongside, we also stopped.

  “Hello,” said the driver. “I believe I know who you are. You’re the Dutch missionary who is going to preach in Terna tonight.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And this is the Miracle Car?”

  “The Miracle Car?”

  “I mean the car that you pray for each morning.”

  I had to laugh. I had mentioned the prayer in a previous meeting; the word had obviously gone on ahead. “Yes,” I admitted, “this is the car.”

  “Mind if I take a look at her? I’m a mechanic.”

  “I’d appreciate it.” I had put gasoline in that engine, and that was literally all since I had crossed the border. The mechanic went around to the rear and lifted the hood over the motor. For a long time he stood there, just staring.

  “Brother Andrew,” he said at last, “I have just become a believer. It is mechanically impossible for this engine to run. Look. The air filter. The carburetor. The sparks. No, I’m sorry. This car cannot run.”

  “And yet it’s taken us thousands of miles.”

  The mechanic only shook his head. “Brother,” he said, “would you permit me to clean your engine for you and give you a change of oil? It hurts me to see you abuse a miracle.”

  Gratefully we followed the man to his village a few miles from Terna. We pulled behind him into a little courtyard filled with pigs and geese. That night while we preached he took the engine apart, cleaned it piece by piece, changed the oil, and by the time we were ready to leave the next morning, presented us with a grinning new automobile. God had answered our prayer.

  We drove into Belgrade on the first of May, 1957. May Day, the high holy day of Communism. There wasn’t a bed or a seat in a restaurant to be found in the entire city.

  Nikola and I would have slept in the car that night if the pastor of the church at which we were to speak had not taken us into his own home. And it was in this church that we had the experience that has shaped my ministry down to the present moment.

  Nikola and I stood on the platform facing a crowded room. It was so full that we did not even have room to put up the flannelgraph with which I illustrated my stories of the gospels. Halfway through the service someone started hammering. The next thing we knew, they had taken a door right off its hinges so that an overflow crowd in the choir room could hear. These were not the solemn-eyed country people I had come to love, but a sophisticated, fairly well-dressed city congregation.

  Well, after the talk, Nikola and I gave an altar call. We asked that everyone who wanted to commit their life to Christ, or who wanted to reaffirm a previous commitment, raise their hand.

  Every hand in the room went up.

  Surely they hadn’t understood! I explained again how serious a step this was. I made the conditions of discipleship under a hostile government painfully clear. And then I made a second appeal, this time asking the people to stand.

  The entire congregation stood.

  I was astonished. I had never seen such readiness. Carried away by their spirit, I launched into an enthusiastic description of the daily disciplines of prayer and Bible reading that turn newborn children in Christ into mature soldiers in His ranks.

  I was outlining the plan for Bible study that we had been taught at the Missionary Training College when I noticed a change had come over the room. For the first time people in this responsive congregation were not meeting my eye. They were looking at their hands, the pew backs, anywhere but at me.

  Puzzled, I turned to the pastor. He, too, seemed embarrassed as he told me through Nikola, “Prayer, yes, that we can do each day. I like what you have said about this. But Bible reading . . . Brother Andrew, most of these people do not have Bibles.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. I had got used to the idea in rural churches. But in educated, cosmopolitan Belgrade?

  I turned to the congregation. “How many of you own Bibles?” I asked.

  In the entire room seven hands, including the pastor’s, went up. I was stunned. I had long ago passed out the ones I had brought with me. Now what was I to leave with these people so eager to learn, so needful of guidance in the hard walk they had chosen for themselves against the millions marching the other way?

  With the pastor we worked out a system of Bible-sharing: a schedule of group study combined with individual use, so many hours on such-and-such a day for each member. But that same evening a resolve was born in me, a resolve that has burned brighter with each passing year. That night I promised God that as often as I could l
ay my hands on a Bible, I would bring it to these children of His behind the wall that men had built. How I would buy the Bibles, how I would get them in, I didn’t know. I only knew that I would bring them—here to Yugoslavia, and to Czechoslovakia, and to every other country where God opened the door long enough for me to slip through.

  11

  The Third Prayer

  Driving through the countryside of Western Europe on the way back to Holland, I tried to evaluate the trip I had just finished. I had been gone more than seven weeks. I had traveled nearly six thousand miles, held nearly a hundred meetings, established scores of contacts for future work.

  Most important were the conversions, hundreds of them. New Christians, men and women and children who were actually living in the Kingdom of God while at the same time living under a government that said there was no God. What was their life going to be like now? It was hard, leaving these friends to face pressures and sacrifices that I could only guess at.

  As for my determination to bring them Bibles, in the clear light of this May morning it looked a lot harder than it had in the flush of conviction that night in Belgrade. In 1957 there was not a single Communist border over which you could take books of any kind—let alone religious books! How was I to get them in? And how was I to distribute them once inside without endangering those who helped me? Which country needed them most? Which should I try first? All these questions bounced back and forth in my mind as I rolled mile after mile across Europe, ever closer to home.

  No, I corrected myself. Not home. To Witte, certainly, but in one of those strange flashes of self-knowledge, I realized suddenly that Witte was no longer home to me. That was why I’d been driving so slowly, stopping so frequently to check my maps, talking crops with every farmer I met.

  With a start I realized that ever since I had left Yugoslavia, I had been dawdling, stalling for time against the inevitable moment when I would be alone again in my bachelor’s room. After Papa’s death I had moved out of the house and into his little room above the toolshed. It had seemed such a practical idea—the room had a separate entrance, and I could come and go without disturbing the household. But the effect of the move had been to emphasize how very much alone I was.

  It was a loneliness, furthermore, that I now knew was to be a permanent part of my life. At a rest stop in Germany I got out my Bible and opened it to the back cover where I had recorded God’s hard answer to a prayer that I had made. I sipped my coffee and remembered the night in Yugoslavia when I had made it. I had been feeling lonely that evening too. “Lord,” I had said, “in a year I’ll be thirty. You made a helpmeet for man, and somehow I have not found my own. Lord, I’m going to ask You for something. I ask You tonight for a wife.”

  I’d noted the specific prayer request in my Bible: “April 12, 1957, Nosaki. Prayed for a wife.” Beside the notation I had left a place for an answer.

  And five days later the answer had come. In my Quiet Time I had suddenly known—with quite uncanny certainty—that Isaiah 54:1 was God’s reply to me. I flipped excitedly through the pages of the Old Testament and read, “The children of the desolate are more than the children of the married.”

  Again and again I read the words, trying to apply them to myself, trying to rejoice in God’s will. I might feel desolate, but He was going to give me more “children,” spiritual children, than I could ever have as a flesh-and-blood father. I had written the answer beside the request.

  But now as I drained my coffee cup beside a field of spring flowers, I knew that spiritual children were not at all what I had in mind. I wanted real, live, noisy, running-and-jumping children, with sticky faces and wooden shoes to mend after the fights. Above all, I wanted a wife, a living, loving human being who would make my life one fabric, instead of this patchwork quilt of places and people based nowhere, instead of this heading home to no one.

  Suppose I asked Him again, right now? Suppose I just opened my Bible anywhere, just let my finger fall where it would, and took this new verse for His real answer? I had always laughed at people who looked for guidance this way. But it was a glorious spring day when anything could happen, and so I closed my eyes, opened the Bible at random, and plunged my finger down on the page. When I looked down, I could hardly believe my eyes. My finger was pointing to Isaiah 54:1. “The children of the desolate are more than the children of the married.”

  I told myself I must have creased the Bible open to that page from reading it so intently before. But it was no good. Thoroughly chastened, I recorded in the back of the Bible the repeated question and the reiterated answer.

  “I don’t like the message, Lord, but at least it’s clear.”

  I loaded the portable stove back into the car and started up the motor. It was a long way back to Witte, back to the little room and solitary confinement.

  The actual homecoming was no better than I had imagined. I sat up in the living room until late at night, telling the family about Yugoslavia. Then when I could put it off no longer, I made my way outside and up the ladder. The little room seemed damp and clammy. There was mildew on the bedsheets, my desk was white and chalky, the new wallpaper was peeling. But then, it had always been wet there on the polders. It had never bothered me before. Why should it strike me now with such distaste?

  Over the next six weeks I threw myself into speaking, writing, praying for the vision of my next step behind the Iron Curtain. I visited the Whetstras to tell them about the heroic job the little VW had done. I wrote a new series of articles for Kracht Van Omhoog. I paid a visit to Karl de Graaf and the prayer group in Amersfoort. In general I kept busy. So busy, I kept telling myself, that I wouldn’t notice how lonely I was.

  In July I gave it up.

  “Lord,” I said one morning, sitting on the little iron fold-down bed in my room over the toolshed, “I’ve got to pray just one more time about this bachelor life You plan for me. Now I know about those children You promise the desolate, but Lord You also promise the desolate a home!” I quickly found the verse in Psalm 68, as though to refresh His memory: “‘God gives the desolate a home to dwell in.’ It isn’t that I don’t thank You for this room above the toolshed, Lord. Just because it’s dark and dank and mildewy and—doesn’t mean I’m not grateful. But, dear God, it is not a home. Not really. A home is where there’s a wife and children—real ones.

  “Lord, Paul prayed three times for release from the thorn in the flesh that was bothering him. And You refused him. I have prayed two times for a wife. I am going to pray once more. Perhaps You will refuse me a third time, too, Lord, and if You do, I shall never again bring up the question. I’m going to write it here in my Bible.” I opened the Bible to the back cover and scribbled one last notation, “Prayed . . . for . . . wife . . . third time . . . Witte, July 7 . . . 1957.” Then I closed the Bible with a snap. “Some people, Lord, are built for the lonely walk. But not me, please. Not me.”

  It wasn’t until September that anything happened that I could interpret as an answer. And then one morning in the middle of my prayer time, a face suddenly floated in front of me. Long blond hair. A smile that made the sun come out. Eyes never twice the same shade.

  Corry.

  Corry van Dam.

  The thought of her had come to me so unexpectedly, so completely independently of what I was thinking at the moment, that I wondered with a leap of my heart if the thought was God’s, if He were showing me the beyond-wildest-dreams answer to my prayers.

  But how could it be? Friends and teammates though we had been, I had never once considered Corry fair game for dating. She had been a child. Still in her teens.

  But that was—how many years ago—four years since I had left the factory for England and she for nursing school. Why, she was grown up. She had doubtless finished school and married by now. From being a little girl barely out of her pinafore, Corry suddenly became for me a very adult woman who—if she was not already married—was choosing this very moment among a crowd of pushy, clamoring suitors.
/>
  Within the hour I was in Alkmaar, driving down the street where Corry’s folks lived. We had often come there after the youth weekends. And Mrs. van Dam would serve coffee and cookies, while Mr. van Dam draped the ceiling with smoke from an enormous meerschaum.

  I didn’t know exactly what I’d do when I got to the house. Just look at it, I guessed. Make sure it was still there. Or go to the door? “Mrs. van Dam, I wonder if you would give me Corry’s address.”

  But suppose it was Corry herself who opened the door. “Hello, Corry, are you married? If not, will you marry me?”

  I reached the house before I’d settled on a plan. And right away I saw that I wouldn’t need one. The shutters were closed over the windows, the garden high with weeds. A lump gnawing at my stomach, I drove on to the factory.

  No, Mr. Ringers hadn’t heard where the van Dams had gone. Corry? Why, she’d taken her training at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Haarlem. Might still be there, for all he knew. No. If she was married he hadn’t heard about it. His eyes twinkled as he answered my questions.

  “It’ll be a lucky man, Andy, who marries that young lady!”

  It was wonderful how much urgent business I suddenly discovered in Haarlem. Bible stores to visit, church invitations I had inexcusably neglected, people to see—a wonderful city!

  From a filling station just outside I telephoned Saint Elizabeth’s and held my breath while the receptionist looked up Corry’s file. “Yes,” the voice came back, “she’s a final-year student. Miss van Dam—” my sigh of relief stopped her for a moment—“Miss van Dam is living in a private home this year away from the residence.”

  She gave me the address and told me that the apartment was the top floor of a private house in the nicest section of town; the owner was a wealthy elderly woman, the lady at the hospital said, who gave the apartment in return for having a nurse in the house. After a search, I found the street and quickly spotted Corry’s windows high up under the eaves. The whole house was built like a miniature castle. Corry’s room opened onto a balcony topped with a tiny peaked turret.