Sister Zhenya’s Testimony, "The Angel In Wellington Boots"

You asked, how I came to believe, to be baptized. I come from a village, actually a group of a few houses only, far in the Balozi marshes. It is wet and boggy there, walking anywhere was always a problem, the only normal time was when there was a drought in Summer. In Winter the ice and snow were awful, we never went to school much in the Winter, say from November to April, you can see by my writing that I never was much in school. Well there were three things, now I think back, which brought me to God and Jesus.

  1. My brother was killed in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. We went to the kommandant in Riga to get the news. The officer there gave us a medal and a death certificate. As a child I didn’t understand. I asked continually, but where is he, is he OK, where is his body, where is he? The officer said something about that he died “at the front”, I suppose he meant the body wasn’t recovered, and I didn’t understand that. I wanted to know if he was suffering still, was anyone hurting him. I didn’t know much about Afghanistan, even now I am not too sure where exactly it is. I knew just it was far from us, and our men always said it was like hell on earth, fighting men like monsters in huge mountains. The officer kept telling me not to worry, that he was dead, he was not alive, he was not suffering. But I so often asked myself, But how does he know? What authority is he? How does he know what happens to dead people? It was many years later, we were still meeting in the basement at Kalnciema, when I asked Duncan from the audience: So let’s say someone doesn’t know about God and they die, where are they, are they suffering? I was thinking about my brother. Duncan quoted to me from Ecclesiastes and some Psalms, that God says, no, they are not suffering. They aren’t conscious, all is over. I was so relieved. From that day I knew I was in the right place to find the Truth.

  2. To get from our house to the asphalt road was about 10 km. The paths were awful, always muddy. There was a collective farm, and sometimes a man with a tractor would drive to the asphalt road, and he would take us. He only had room for one person in the cab, and you had to almost sit on him. He used to touch me and grope me and I hated him. I used to walk rather than go with him, it was hours to walk. Then one day he drove by and stopped and apologized to me with tears, he said he had changed his life. I didn’t believe him. For about a year he stopped and told me this whenever he saw me. Then we heard he had been arrested for being involved with some church. I guess he had become a Christian. He was taken away and we never saw him again.

   3. We were simple country people. We grew berries and we caught eels, and we would take them to Riga and stand and sell them. I would walk to the asphalt road and get the bus from there. It was so wet and boggy where we were, we wore rubber boots [“Wellingtons”] all the time. I would walk to the asphalt road in my boots carrying my shoes. I had some shoes, I was rather proud of them, but never wore them much. I would hide my rubber boots under a tree which had a big hole under it, change into my shoes, then get the bus to Riga, so I wouldn’t be walking around Riga in rubber boots looking like a silly country girl, trying to sell my berries and eels to those clever city people. As I then thought of them, now I live there myself. Then I would get the bus back, go to the tree, change into my boots and walk home. The tree and the hole underneath it was my little secret. Nobody knew about it, just our mother. I did this so often, many times. Then one day returning from Riga, my boots were gone. But there was a note there, that said something like, I’m very sorry but I needed your boots because I have to walk far through the marshes, so I took them. I am very sorry and will try to return them. Keep looking in this place, you will get them back. And there was with the note a New Testament. I walked home those hours in tears, my shoes got ruined, I ended up walking barefoot. I had lost my boots and ruined my shoes, I knew my mother would be so mad with me. And all I had to show for it was this little book. Remember we were Soviet people. All we heard was the danger of the West, the stupidity of religion and the Bible, we weren’t supposed to have Bibles. After I got over the shock of it all, I started to read this New Testament. I read every word of it. I read on the first page that it was published by some group called Licht im Osten [Light in the East], in West Germany. In my teenage simple country way I wondered if there was some spy from the West, from Germany [we kept hearing in those days how the West had spies around and wanted to bring down the USSR] who had been watching me and was in love with me. Just childish fantasy of a teenage girl. But I wondered what he wanted to tell me, this spy, or whoever this person was. So I read and read the New Testament. I liked the stories of Jesus, I thought Paul and Peter in Acts were great, I thought Mary mother of Jesus was great, I was disappointed not to read more about her after the Gospels. The letters and Revelation got me confused. I still don’t understand some of those bits.

So then I came into contact with the meeting. I went every Sunday, every Monday, and I did the Bible Basics. It all made sense. So I got baptized. I asked Duncan what he thought of me getting the New Testament and who it was who put it there and took my boots. Of course it wasn’t a spy. But I am amazed someone had been watching me in that country place where there are so few people. And I never got my boots back although I checked in that hole under the tree so many times. Who was it? Duncan says it was maybe an Angel. I don’t mind who it was, but I am not sure about that explanation. If it was really an Angel then I would have thought he or she [are there woman Angels?] would have returned my boots. I can still remember all the problem I had losing my boots and ruining my shoes in one day. So here I finish my story, with thanks to God and Jesus.