My Mother's Story

Well, good morning, everyone! It's good to see all of you here. Thank you for the very beautiful music, very inspiring, and something which does fit the theme of the weekend. Beverly and I are very happy to be here, and we have spent a couple of days actually getting to this area, because we came through the Lake of the Ozarks. My wife's sister Donna lives in the Lake of the Ozarks, about five miles from the old Tabernacle building, so we went to see her first time in 10 years, and visited there, stopped by the old Tabernacle building, kind of a bittersweet experience. I hardly recognized it. It's there, but so much has changed. All the roads are different, and we came with Peter and Terry Eddington, very good friends of ours. He's the operation manager for media in the United Church of God, and all four of us drove together. So he had old GPS that hadn't been updated in 10 years, and basically it looked like we were going through a field around the Lake of the Ozarks area. But we did find our way here back to civilization.

But we're very happy to see this particular group, to renew friendships. There are people here that I see that I have known from different parts of the country and different places. I won't name all the people, because there's so many of you that, you know, already reacquainted ourselves here, but we're just very happy to see you. Look forward to talking more at lunchtime and through the rest of the weekend.

Afterwards, we plan to stop and see the Sabbatarians who have resettled in Willow Creek. Willow Springs, which is about two hours east of here. And I had gone to Willow Springs Creek. Okay, Willow Springs. This was in the year 2000, the year 2000. It's 14 years ago when they first resettled there. Now, several thousand Sabbatarians have emigrated from different parts of Russia and Ukraine, mostly from western Ukraine, because that's the biggest settlement group of them.

And it's a legal migration. It's part of the Jimmy Carter Human Rights Accord Act that was signed back in the late 70s when Jimmy Carter was president of the United States. And it was signed in Helsinki, and it was a very strange agreement to me when I heard it, because basically in this accord religious liberty was promised to people in the former USSR. That's a simple version of it. I thought to myself, how in the world can you do that? You can't tell the Russians, you know, that their people can worship God how they want.

I thought that that was absolutely a joke. Well, in 1991, the USSR fell apart, basically disappeared overnight, and the Human Rights Accord was put into practice, which allowed for minority groups that were persecuted to be allowed favorite immigration status from parts of the former USSR to whatever countries would accept them. And the United States and Sweden and Norway and Germany started accepting hundreds of these people. And actually, a couple thousand have emigrated to the United States, mostly to Portland, Oregon, Sacramento, some to Seattle. But the Portland group had decided they want to form their own colony, as they put it, their own group. And so several hundred of them moved and bought 200 acres of land near Willow Springs.

And their pastor, they had several pastors, Nikolai Galitsyn, Hansuk, I should say, Hansuk, moved then to this area. And I went to visit him in the year 2000, and they already, the first thing they built on this 200-acre property was a church. I mean, they put things, you know, in right perspective. And the people who were there put, hauled in mobile homes. Then they would work on a standing home, and then they would get rid of the mobile home. So they, over the years, and many of these people were from Portland.

They had already settled to Portland, and then they had come from Portland. Many of these people were the refugees from Tajikistan, who were oppressed by the Taliban back in 1996-1997. You can read about it on my website. I have the whole story. I'm actually going to try to add to it, and then I'll give the URL to, you know, it's a little bit outdated right now. But I told the story about these people who had moved there. That's the first time I had heard the word Taliban, and that was in 1996, because it was a Taliban that was creating all the uproar in Tajikistan. And basically, they said the Taliban were not religious people at all.

They were just people who were activists and agitators, and really there was very little religion connected with them, at least these in Tajikistan. And so a lot of these people settled there, and after our activities here on Sunday afternoon, the edictors of us are going to stop and spend some time with the pastor, who is so happy to have us come here.

I spoke to him a few weeks ago, saying that we'd like to come and visit. He says, well, what's happening down in Springfield? I said, well, we're having a women's weekend, and you know, my wife and I are coming and we'd like to see you. He says, really? You're having a women's conference? You know, that sounds very interesting. Can we come? Well, you know, hundreds of people. He said, by the way, we opened, you know, we just got a little too big here at Willow Springs, and we just started a church in Springfield with 150 people.

So, I said, well, maybe we can talk some business here, you know, afterwards. But I think it would increase our ranks. Unfortunately, one of the difficulties is that these people basically stay to themselves, and their English level of English is very, very low. In fact, they will speak English, in very basic terms, but I can't feel comfortable. I speak Russian to them, because I feel comfortable, and they start chattering more quickly, and that. So, we'll visit with them and see kind of how things are. They have also started to keep the Holy Days, and impartial.

I don't want to get full credit for this, but we did produce a booklet on God's Holy Days, which was translated into Russian, which had a deep impact on them. And one of the big turning points was in about the year 2006, when I gave a sermon in Ukraine about why we keep Pentecost, and that the church was actually not begun on the Sabbath.

The New Testament church was begun on the day of Pentecost. It was a Holy Day, and how important that day was. And they realized themselves that that was not a weekly Sabbath, whatever day it would be. It happens to be Sunday, unfortunately, in some ways. But the church began on the day of Pentecost, and that Christ was the center of the Holy Days, and showed that already we accept the fact that Christ is our Passover, which they do keep, but they don't keep anything after that.

They don't keep the days of them up on bread or anything beyond that point. And one reason is because a number of groups have tried to keep the Holy Days. They sincerely, honestly, saw what was written in Leviticus, and they said, well, this is what Leviticus 23 is, very clear to them that they should be keeping them.

But then people would go overboard, and they would start growing beards. They would start wearing black clothing, and they said, you know, we are Christians. Now, we don't want to go back to Judaism. And that was their reason.

They just resisted the Holy Days. But after we started telling them that really the Holy Days are about Jesus Christ, for the very first festival of the year is all about Christ. Christ is our Passover. That link was made by the Apostle Paul. He said, oh yeah, that's for sure, you know. And I said, when you talk about Christ starting the church on the Feast of Pentecost, which is very clearly outlined in the New Testament, Christ obviously supported that.

And the apostles and the thousands of people who became Christians on that day obviously kept that day. Christ kept the Feast of Tabernacles. There's nothing that says you shouldn't. And I said, Christ is going to return on the Feast of Trumpets. We don't keep Rosh Hashanah. I said, we don't keep Yom Kippur. We keep the Feast of Trumpets.

We keep the Day of Atonement. And, you know, he said, let's look into these things. And so more and more of the Sabbatarians then are keeping these days. And this group in Willow Springs is keeping them. And we've had people that have gone to Branson for the Feast of Tabernacles. Some of them go over to Willow Springs because they keep the Feast of Tabernacles there, too, which is a couple hundred people or so.

So anyway, we'll find out more with the Eddington's and be standing by for reports on that. It should be very, very interesting.

We are so happy to be able to support Women's Services. Actually, this is a product of people who have been involved with Women's Services, maybe not directly, but one of the products of Women's Services through the Ann Luecker, in great part, has been the weekends, the Women's Enrichment Weekends. We, or WOW. And we are very, very happy to be able to support these. And they have grown This brief history of the Women's Weekends is very well written. I really advise everybody to carefully read it because I'm going to actually post this on our UCG website. It really tells the reason for it.

We get questions from people, what are the women up to type of questions, you know? And, you know, the way the questions are asked sometimes, you know, they really do need to have a very, very clear and proper answer. But I'll just read here just a few things from here because it really does say it extremely well. The primary purpose of these weekends is to create an environment with time away from normal routines in which women actively help one another grow to greater spiritual maturity through sharing valuable spiritual lessons learned one from another, discussing the practical implementation of godly principles, helping and encouraging one another through personal trials and struggles, and developing stronger bonds of unity and friendships.

So you can read the rest of it here, but it just says it so well. And the women will have a lot of very good, interesting presentations. I've heard this presentation from my wife several times now, including this morning, so it is very, very good. So I wanted to cover that, but the question came up in my mind of what should I speak about today? And the first topic I had was, well, maybe I'll speak about something to deal with women in the Bible. And my first topic, and I actually had an outline that I drew up, was lesser-known women of the Bible.

Not the great superstars like Ruth or Esther or Mary, but some of the others like Tabitha and even Lydia and others and their contribution to what, you know, to the cause and to the role that they have in being a Christian. But then my wife said, you know, there's been some women that have asked if you could talk about your mother. I said, oh, yeah, I did talk about my mother at one time, and I gave a sermon about her because I found out certain things about her that were very, very interesting because my mother and father were war refugees who came as slave laborers through Germany, then into the United Nations refugee camp, and came to the United States.

My mother and father both ultimately came into the Church of God, became believers. They both died early in life. My father at the age of 42 and my mother at age 58, but they both died in the faith, and they were very wonderful people. We were, all of us in our family, in, quote, the Church at one time. But I never really fully grasped the story about my mother's and father's life. Both of them died so quickly that we never had a sat down to write these things out.

But I do remember as a child, when I was five, six, seven years old, in the early 50s, when my parents would just be talking about where they came from. And I remember a lot of crying in our home. My parents missing their parents talking about the war, and that's one thing I just could not take as a child. They talked about all the people who died, and all their friends who died, and all the people around them that suffered. And they would cry. And whenever they would start talking about that, that they would, we would just, as my brother and I in particular, would want to run outside and play ball.

We just didn't want to hear that whenever they start talking. And then when Stalin died in 1953 or so, is the first time that they were able to get a letter to their parents in Ukraine. And they heard from their parents. They got kind of a history of what had happened in the past 10 years that they hadn't heard.

They talked about all the members of the family who died. My dad's mom and dad had died. I mean, it was just a terrible story. I just remember gloom and doom in the family. And while we as children felt for our parents, we lived in an environment of just so many, so much sadness that had taken place.

Well, my mother died in 1984, 30 years ago now. And before she died, she kind of told her whole story. She just, she died of leukemia. She was very weak, but she just got up and she just kind of told the whole story. I wish I could have recorded it or written it down, but we were so traumatized because she died a day or so later. That the only information that I had about them, and I had a lot of scattered things, was from another couple that they were very good friends with, that they lived with in the slave camps, that they had escaped from with together to the west.

And this couple moved to Canada, to Edmonton, Alberta. And it's been the closest thing to our family on this hemisphere. Even though I'm not close to them, their kids and I treat each other in some ways, in a distant way, as brothers and sisters, because we have a common parents who came from a common place far away. And in this country, I have no other relatives except for siblings. My parents came to the United States as refugees in 1949. And again, they just talked and talked about the war. And they ultimately came into the faith. After talking to this couple, my wife and I made a trip up to Edmonton. I took my video camera and I taped about three or four hours of talking to them. And they told the whole story in greater detail. And they answered the questions and the holes that I had in the story in a very, very chronological way, which was fascinating to me. And what emerged was a story about tribulation, a story about friendship, of love, of survival, of courage, of liberation, triumph. It's an amazing story about what people can go through. It also became a story of astute spiritual parallels that I have drawn from what happened with my parents and as a result of what they had become and even what they had become in the Church of God. My mother truly was a remarkable lady, even in the Church, because her husband died when I was a freshman at Ambassador College. I was just 19 years old.

And he died at age 42. A lot of it had to do with the suffering he had gone through in a work camp and a concentration camp in Germany. And my mother died at age 58 of acute leukemia, just very, very quickly. But in the meantime, before that, my mother was a well-known and well-beloved widow in the Church, who lived three miles from Church. There was a morning church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and people just migrated to her home every Sabbath after services because she just had always things for them. She always had potlucks at the house, and she was just a very giving, lovely lady. There was never anyone's birthday, a birth or wedding that wasn't acknowledged with a gift by my mother. I'd like to tell you about the story, about how this happened, because it is truly an amazing story. It begins with Operation Barbarossa, which was Nazi Germany's attack on the USSR. My mother lived in Ukraine, 70 miles or 50 miles south of Kharkov, which is Ukraine's second largest city, I believe, in the east. And my father was a teenager who lived in western Ukraine. Actually, at that time, it was Poland. Poland was sliced by a third after World War II, and where he grew up was a Polish city. In fact, the name Kubeck is not a Ukrainian name in particular. You don't see too many Cubics in Ukraine, but if you go to a Polish telephone directory, you know, like we were at the feast in Poland in Krakow, turn to Cubics, there were just pages of them, like the Smiths. But it's not particularly a Ukrainian name. So we have two Poles here. We have Vincent Koviak and I, who were at the feast together in Poland. And you're not outnumbered, but there are two people of that nationality here. On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa began with three million German soldiers crossing the Russian-Ukrainian frontier.

3,300 tanks and the initial blitzkrieg just destroyed and devastated city after city. The Germans were met with very little resistance as the Russians pushed and pushed their way past Kiev and pushed their way all the way to Stalingrad. It was a Napoleon-like invasion where they got pretty far, but it didn't end up good in the end. Through the occupation, it lasted from 1941, and then ultimately they were pushed back in 1944 and 1945. They forcefully and methodically deported millions of Ukrainians to work in German factories. Among them was my mother, who was age 16. The Germans would come into a town, go to the courthouse, you know, the army, the tanks and everything, and go to the records and notify all the people in the village that we want these young people to show up at the train station on the state, which would be a short week or two, that they were reported at the train station to be sent to work in Germany. And it was very strictly enforced. My mother was in that group from Kharkov, and my father, who was 17, now they didn't know each other at that time, was from another group that was in western Ukraine. And my parents then, who didn't know each other at that time, were sent to work in work camps. My mother worked in a camp in a work factory that made boots, and my father worked in a factory that produced jams and conserves. That's where he worked. They had, each one had a very good friend. My mother had a girlfriend, Dusia, was her name, and my father had a friend, Walter, who he had gotten to know when they came to Germany. The two of them, then, in spite of how difficult things were, double-dated each other. My father and my mother, they double-dated for a couple of years. Even though it was a camp, and life was terrible, and so forth, there was still social time at that time. They weren't treated very well. They had to work, they had to wear a special big yellow sticker that had a big letter O on it to stand for Ost. They were Ost Arbytors, East workers. They weren't allowed to walk on sidewalks. In town, they had to walk down the middle of the street. They were just treated very, very badly. The way that the Soviets treated people, they had a class system of how they had high regard for Americans and the British. If any Americans or British were captured, they were treated with a certain level of respect. Russians were treated like slave laborers. They were treated very, very badly. Just very, very obviously, they were the Ubermenschen, the lower men. The Germans felt like as the master race, they tracked more with the British and Americans. My dad remembered one time when a paratrooper came down, he was black, and the Germans surrounded him, just basically shot him. They had no time for those kind of people. So it was just interesting. These are the types of things that they saw and they lived with as young as teenagers. Before my mother left her village, which was one year after the war began, she had already experienced some of the German cruelty.

The initial air raid of her town, which is actually a good-sized city, about 50,000 people or so, was strafed, bombed, and our family home was destroyed in the bombing. 700 people died in that initial attack. My mother was herding cows from the field. She was 15 at that time, and she was herding cows from the field, and she went under the cows for security. And she was so traumatized that even to the day of her death, she still had the, she still trembled from the horror of that moment.

But that's only the very first of the bombings that she had endured, because there were a lot more to come where she was in Germany. One cannot understand the present-day mindset, even to this very day in Russia and Ukraine, without appreciating what those people went through in World War II.

The war was savage and costly between the Germans and Russians. In fact, to the Russians, that was the only war that was fought in World War II. They hardly say much about the American contribution in World War II, because there was so much damage and so much savagery in their area that the West had not experienced. Soviet casualties were unbelievable. 15 million military deaths.

Americans 500,000 or so for both Japanese and Western European war theaters. So they had 30 times as many men killed. Civilian casualties were another 15 million. So 30 million people in that country perished in World War II. That's on top of 30 million that were killed by Stalin before that.

Can you imagine the trauma that that nation has gone through? Losing 60 million people between the 1930s, the years of the Gulags, through World War II. Stalin, at the very end of World War II, said, I want to win this war at all costs. And he threw men. The last two weeks of the war, one million men died in pushing the Germans back to Berlin. Battle deaths numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Of those who went into the service at age 19, only one in 100 returned.

Even the German generals marveled how little respect the Soviets had for the human life, for human life, as they threw men in frontal assaults over and over again with little regard for just the devastation that was taking place.

Half of Soviet housing was destroyed, and even to this day you can see the effects of it.

And in certain cities, building a house is illegal because so many of the living quarters after World War II were made into high-rise, huge block, ugly apartments. And for example, in the city of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, it's illegal to have a home within a city limits. You must live in multiple dwelling housing. And the people are traumatized to this very day.

My wife and I have led three youth group tours of the Soviet Union back in the days of Y.O.U.

And the impressive thing in the touring that we saw was the huge memorials that were built for the war and for the dead. The most impressive memorial, probably the newest one, is in Moscow itself. It's a huge statue to Nike. I thought Nike was just a brand for tennis shoes, but it's the goddess of victory. And this huge statue right in the middle of Moscow, World War II memorial to Nike. In Stalingrad, there's a statue that is impressive, too. It's been on the cover of the Plain Truth magazine. The mamaya of Kurgan, Mother Russia, the sword, a huge thing on the tallest hill in Stalingrad, which we walked to the very top of it and to the stake and find shrapnel from that. That is a hill that was fought savagely by the Germans and the Russians, where the ownership of that hill could take change three or four times in a day.

It's amazing to us how the Russians and the Soviets would honor their dead, but they dishonored people in life. In real life, they treat them like dirt, but after they die, they treat them with the greatest respect, with the greatest of statues. Probably one of the most touching statues to us, it was a smaller one, not a statue, but a cemetery, was in Kharkov, my mother's hometown, near where she was. It was a cemetery. It looked just like normal, and I saw these stones.

Then you walk by each stone, and each stone was for 14,000 dead. It was one after another, after another. You walk out of there just being absolutely deflated. It makes civil war, it makes American wars, it makes all this look smaller in comparison. When my parents came in the church, one thing that they said to us as kids, we have, you know, because the booklets we got back at that time talked about the Great Tribulation and so forth. Guess what, kids? We've already gone through it. We have gone through the Great Tribulation, which they really had. When you hear and when you see what they have gone through, it is something that we have said. These are the types of things that will happen in the future. This is what they had come out of. After my mother died, I found in her personal items a number of communications with her parents. One was actually a letter that she must have clung to all the days that she had. It was a letter that was written to her a year after she was a slave laborer in Germany from her brother. These are two short letters, and one was from her sister. But it kind of gives you an idea of what environment they were in. June 7, 1943. This is from my brother Victor to my mother Nina in Germany, and he was back in Ukraine.

Greetings, dear Nina. In the first lines of our short letter, our family greets you. Are you all right? You write that you are getting lonely living on foreign soil, but you're not the only one separated from their family. Many people are finding themselves in this condition.

Nina, we are not receiving your letters. In 1943, we have received only two postcards from you, one dated January 20th and the other dated February 8th, which we received in June. You are writing and asking about your brother Alex. We've not heard from him in two years.

He actually returned. All my mother's brothers actually returned from the war safely. This Victor, he writes, he continues, if we will live, we will meet you again. The weather has been good for growing. The gardens look good, and we will have things to eat in the winter. Now, their house was destroyed, but they lived in a root cellar, and they survived several summers. Now, from 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, by living this root cellar and growing gardens.

The Russians came in February, but the Germans returned in March. On the front where we are, there's been no shooting, but in May, many people in the neighboring villages died.

The land is covered with blood, and the end of the war is not in sight. We're tired of talking about the war. It's almost like a weather report, except that it's a war that's going on.

This Uncle Victor then was conscripted right after that and was sent to work in artillery. We had a family reunion in Ukraine in 1988, and he talked about the last push towards Berlin. He got pretty close, you know, in that. He talked about the horrors that took place in pushing the Germans back at all costs. Stalin wanted to push them back and push them back all the way to Berlin.

Nina, you said that you'd like to see the flowers in the homeland again. That would be good, but now the land has been ravaged by the war. I think of you often of your cheerful smile and your kind words to us, my loving sister. Mom and dad and your sister Tanya work on the collective farm, but I work on the railroad. Please write to us how you are eating and are the Germans good to you. We have not been receiving your letters. Please give greetings to your friends with whom you're working. Then another letter came to me. This was after my mother died from my aunt Tanya. My dear nephews and nieces, your mother had a hard life. In the years of the war, our village changed hands six times between the Russians and the Germans. The oldest and youngest were evacuated, but Nina stayed behind where all the fighting took place.

I still remember one moment when your mother was leading a cow home and had a frightened look on her face after the Germans bombed our town. Then the Germans took our village and took Nina to Germany. So back to the story now in Germany. Here my parents are dating each other about 1943-44, and then all of a sudden one day my father is arrested by the Gestapo and put into a concentration camp. It was still unknown why that happened, but when they put people to concentration camps, they had far harder labor for them. And the foursome, these two that double dating, you know, they were very concerned about my father, Igor, who was now in the concentration camp, as to what's going to happen to him. And my father's friend, Walter, tried to talk to the police and tried to talk about why they never got any kind of an answer for them. One reason that they had people as workers in these concentration camps was, as the war was coming to an end, there was a lot of ordinance dropped, and there was incessant carpet bombing of the cities of Germany. And the British would be bombing all night long. Then all day long, the Americas would come and bomb. And the town where my parents lived is actually a good-sized city called Magdeburg. It's about 50 miles west of Berlin, and about halfway between Berlin and what was the border of West Germany for many, many years.

Well, my father was in prison, and the reason that they had these workers was, after a bombing the next morning, they would send these prisoners out to pick up any unexploded ordinance. Because they used these people, in case the bomb blew up, it wasn't so bad if it was a Russian or Ukrainian that would get blown up. But that was their job. And so my father was on these crews that went into the rubble. They would pull people out, but importantly, they would go there to find any unexploded bombs. Well, Walter saw my father. He would see these columns of workers go and work in the rubble, and he would kind of see my father sometimes and throw him some food, you know, just kind of just leave a loaf of bread or, you know, probably not a loaf, but probably just some bread for him because my father was starving. But at one point, Igor became separated from the prisoners, and Walter said, Come on with me. And Walter grabbed him, and he walked away from the line of prisoners and took him to a friend's home in an apartment where they took care of him for a little while. Then from there, it was very, very dangerous to harbor fugitives like this. My father went out to a farm in the country where he stayed the last couple of months as the war was winding down. And he got a job on the farm, and actually it worked out pretty well because he was able to get food and give it to Walter, who would come by, and he would give it to the girls. And so they had more food to eat. But things were becoming very confused at the very end. And the farm that he was on was a German who was running it. He was just wanting the war to get end, you know. He wasn't interested in turning anybody in. He just wanted things to come to an end.

The bombing just before liberation was intense, day and night, day and night. And all the people were ordered into bomb shelters, including the slave laborers. Now, the Germans had first priority to enter the bomb shelters, and they were zigzags. They were built all across the ground. And they were built as zigzags because if the bomb shelter got a direct hit, just the people in that section would be killed. It wouldn't send waves all the way through, but people would just be killed in that section. So with a direct hit, it would be minimal damage as compared to something very, very serious.

And so my parents, you know, the three of them, would be going into the bomb shelter almost every night. The Germans first, the sirens would go off, and they would be going into bomb shelters. Sometimes, if they couldn't make it, they'd have to sit outside, you know, and just take their chances.

And my mother said that after a while, it got to a point of where they didn't even want to go in the bomb shelter. They just didn't stay outside. It was like watching the fireworks. It was just a sense of denial, like, this can't really be happening. We're not being bombed. But they were bombed day and night. And finally, liberation came. Finally, everything came to an end. The Americans rolled into town. My dad remembers so well. American motorcycles and trucks and cars and everything is coming into Magdeburg, smiling happy American soldiers with candy bars, hams.

That's one thing they seem to remember, you know. All this food that they were just throwing at the people. And he said how joyful an experience it was when finally liberation came. And this happened in April of 1945. But there's one interesting story as part of the story that I'm telling you of destiny and how God works with people and how God has his own plan, I feel, with individual lives. My mom, my dad, and you too as well. I truly believe in destiny and how God directs us. My father and mother, as I said, came into the church. And they invited this one family from about 100 miles north that we got to be good friends with, the Frank Muehlbauer family. They had daughters who were twins that went to Ambassador College and we used to get together with them. My father was quite an accomplished artist and he made quite a few sketches of things that he saw in the war that he later made into full-blown paintings. He was really a talented artist. Frank Muehlbauer and his family were at our home and Frank is looking at this picture of a farmhouse and he looks at it and looks at it and looks at it and says, what is that? My dad said, oh, that's the farmhouse that I was staying at after I escaped from the concentration camp.

And I kind of helped the farmer with chores that needed to be done. Frank looks at it and says, you know something? I know that place. I've seen that place. I said, oh no, there's no way. I mean, there's lots of farmhouses. So they're comparing notes and Frank said, you know, I was a sniper.

He was a 21-year-old sniper in the American army. He said, I was sent to guard a particular farm because there was some suspicious activity at the farm where people were basically moved into the farm. They moved out and back and forth and we didn't know what it was. And I had orders that if there was any suspicious activity to shoot, to shoot where it was, and he says, for a couple of days I had this guy in my gun sights who was with all these, with all these oxen. And they compared the exact location. Frank Muehlbauer was a sniper. My dad was a fellow working there on the farm. And they verified that. In fact, I went back to his daughters just a few weeks ago to verify the story because it sounded like a too good to be true type story. But she gave me his unit, the division that he was in, and the family has talked about it since. This has been the object of so many spokesman's club speeches. And it was so interesting that both my dad and Frank Muehlbauer were in the same spokesman's club. No, years later. One who was about to kill the other one in the war decades before that. They were so happy now, my parents, as the Americans came to liberation and they thought their problems were over. What a happy moment. Unfortunately, they were not. Because after a few more days, all of a sudden they don't hear American voices.

They hear Russian voices. So what's all this about? Well, as you might know from history, that before World War II ended, there was a conference in Potsdam. It's called the Potsdam Conference, where an agreement was made that no matter what the British or Americans gained, or what the Russians gained, that Germany would be divided a particular way after World War II.

And even though the Americans swept in through Czechoslovakia, and they swept all the way into Berlin, East Germany became what it did with the borders being pushed back to the Oder River.

And so what happened now is the Americans withdrew and the Russians came in. These young people, and they are 19, 20, 21 years old here. My father was the oldest in 22, and my mother, she's had three, she was 19 years old, are treated as war criminals.

They're treated as traitors. They're treated as collaborators. And they put them instantly into transition camps, and they were interrogated day and night. And they really had no choice. They were grabbed by the Germans, and they were shifted to Germany to work. Then life became very difficult for them.

They said, what are we going to do now? And my father gained the trust, and this is several months now in this transition camp, he gained the trust of the people that he was working with to work on detail outside the camp. One of the jobs was to collect horses. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but he was able to go out a certain way. So he went all the way to the border, which is 50 miles away, and talked to guards and said, I have a foursome that would like to, you know, we go to freedom. Can you please provide a way for us to get out? It was rather common that if you bribed enough people that you could get out. The guard said, okay. I said, here's what it's going to cost you.

A suit, a watch, and a bottle of vodka. He said, if you're going to provide those three things for me, he said, because I will take the suit. I will give the bottle of vodka to the next guard, and then the watch to the other one. So that's the deal. And then at midnight, the changing of guards will get you across the border. So my dad comes back from the detail that he was in, and said, we've got to escape. Their particular, this compound, their place was facing the street, and so they were able to get out. They were able to actually get on a transition train, and get to the border. And they had with them their only hope of salvation was a bottle of vodka, a suit, and a watch. Not knowing if the guard would betray them, the guard could take those things and just shoot them. He could do anything. And so the foursome then was, they came to the guard.

He took it, bribed the other two officers, and they started across the border. They started making a rustling sound, and some other guards heard them. But they were now already on the British zone side. And they started shooting at them. And of course, they were too far gone, but they shot. My mom and dad said the foursome, the four of us just ran and ran and ran. We must have run a couple of miles until we felt that we were safe. And now finally, they were safe.

They found some money. They found a purse that had some money in it, just out of the blue, which then provided the money to take them to the United Nations refugee camp in the city of Hanover.

And they got to Hanover, went to the camp, and the big news that day was, the Americans have dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. So this was August of 1945.

And my parents were accepted to this camp. Walter and Dusia, who were there, they asked a Canadian soldier if he could put a personal ad into a Western Canadian newspaper, a personal ad saying, this is your cousin or this is your nephew Walter. If my uncle, so-and-so, if you're out there, can you sponsor me to Canada? Sure enough that Uncle related the personal ad, and he did sponsor Walter and his family, or Walter to come to Canada. And Walter told my dad, he says, well, he says, if I get to Canada, I'll see what I can do about getting you sponsored. But my parents really had not the luck that Walter did. My parents tried to find asylum in Australia, in Brazil, in Canada, but they had no sponsors. They had nobody that knew them in any of these countries. So while Walter and his family went in 1946 or so, my mom and dad lived in the camp of 46, 47. They were married in 46. I was born there in 1947, in October, 48 is going by. And finally they came to the point of saying, you know, I think that we'll just go home. Because that's one place they could go back to, going back to Ukraine. And they were corresponding with my dad's parents and saying that we're coming back. And they already were all set to leave where they lived, and they went to the train station, about to board the train, me, my parents, back to Ukraine. And as they're at the train station, the people that occupied, who were occupying the place where they had lived, said, a letter has come for you. A letter has arrived for you. And says, I suppose that you want to read it. And so my dad opened it up with a letter from his dad, was saying that if you're thinking about coming back to Ukraine, don't, under no circumstances, come back. That people like you are treated as traitors, as collaborators, as people that worked with the Germans against us, and they're actually killing some of the people that are coming here. And if they find out my dad was Ukrainian, that you married a Russian bride, because my mother was Russian, my dad was Ukrainian. So if they find out that you married a Russian bride, you're dead. And so my parents were just about to get on the train, said, okay, I guess we're not going. And they came back to the camp. And then my grandfather worked out with a neighbor who had a relative in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was a University of Minnesota professor, to help sponsor my parents to the United States. And so in July of 1949, the three of us were on a troop ship back to Ellis Island and came through Ellis Island and ultimately became Americans. It was quite a change to become an American, because I remember my father and mother had to become naturalized. It was so different than what it is now. In order to become an American citizen, you had to know the English language. Now it's considered abusive to, you know, ask people to learn English. Press one for English, you know.

Back then, you know, you had to know English. I remember my dad and mom learning English and talking in really broken language, trying to beef each other up, because they had to know a certain basic level of English. And it was when I was three years old, I remember them having to understand the structure of American government. I remember I learned about the executive branch, about the legislative branch, about the judicial branch. I was three years old, because my parents had this big chart up on the wall. They had to learn these things. They had to learn. They had to know who their senator was. They had to know who their representative in Congress was, because all this stuff, they had to go through all this information. And my parents finally became citizens. And it's interesting in the citizenship process at that time, when you became a citizen of the United States, you had to say, I am now a citizen of the United States that will be loyal to this country. I'm just paraphrasing it. And I will renounce any other loyalties to any entities, kings, emperors. You know, it just went on and on that way. If you've seen any of these old immigration or immigration documents and naturalization documents that have been part of our history for years, that when you became a citizen of the United States, you can't say, well, I could be one of Israel, too, just in case. Or I'd like to be one of, you know, Australia, just in case. I'd like to be one of Japan, just in case. You had to literally renounce. No dual citizen ships were allowed. I grew up living as a person who I didn't know English until I was five or six years old. My parents were very, very good to me. They were just tremendous as far as tutoring me, finding tutors to teach my brother and myself, to speak Ukrainian, to write Ukrainian, to understand history, and so forth. But my mother told me that she never felt comfortable with a church that they were in. Now, one thing is where they had lived before in Ukraine, my mother in particular, they grew up in an atheistic society.

Then when they came to the United States, they were expected to be part of the Orthodox Church.

My father was on the Board of Trustees, and he had done a lot of work for the church. He had done a lot of construction work and a lot of decorative work for the church. But I remember my mother, she was always very quiet. She just never accepted and never fully was what I got into the church.

Then, when I started listening to the World Tomorrow program at age 15, I was listening to it. I began to share these concepts with my mother. I used to talk to her about what I was learning because it was so interesting. The very most interesting thing to me at first was that Christ's birthday was celebrated. The observance of Christ's birthday was observed 2000 years before Christ was born. I thought, what in the world? How did that happen? Then I learned about the Sabbath. I said, well, that's obvious. I even talked to my priest. I was very active in our church. I really was active.

I worked with a priest. I was an altar boy for 10 years. I would talk to him about these things because I was learning them and I really wanted honest answers. I wasn't heckling him or making life difficult for him. I had a good relationship with my priest. I was the head of our youth group at that time. He knew me and we could talk about these things. He never had an answer. The answer he gave about why we kept Sunday with the same stock answers that are given. I would talk to my mother about these things and she really kept them close to her. She was afraid of my dad. She just said, you know, I come around to these things but you know, I just don't feel comfortable going on my own. But I would talk to her about these things for a long time. My mother then ultimately came into the church when I was applying to college. My father wanted so badly for me to go to the University of Minnesota to become a mathematician, be an IT, anything with IT. But when he saw that I was interested to California College, that was not something that he was really happy with. He knew enough about it but he wasn't very happy with it.

He was distraught. But I would talk to them about these things. I went to my very first church service and then they saw that I was going to church services. I would go to church services on Sunday with them and Sabbath as well. But after Sabbath services, when I came home, they wanted to know everything that was said in services. I mean, out of interest, not out of, you know, being nasty about it. And I remember that I would go almost in real time with my notes because my brother and I together would go to services and we would tell them about all the things that we had learned.

And there were so many sermons that were on doctrinal exposition and they explained things, prophetic things that my parents found so very interesting. Finally, something happened. My dad said, I want to talk to the minister, who was Sherwin McMichael at that time, who was going to spokesman's club that night, but he said, I'll go to your parents. He was up with my parents till about two or three o'clock in the morning, talking to them about the things that our church taught.

And my parents says, we will now start coming to church. To me, it's an amazing story of conversion. My mother was so happy, you know, we, as a whole family, that now we're driving to church, you know, every Sabbath. But I thought there was destiny. I thought there was protection of my parents, even to the point of where, at the very last second, when things looked like they would be going back to Ukraine, and we would be swallowed up in a land where we probably wouldn't have even survived to this day, where we came to the United States. Had the truth given to us. And my mother, kind of holding a beacon of hope and light in the family, even to my dad, in her quiet way. My mother was a very determined person. She was very, very intelligent. But she was also a person that didn't rile up things. She had wisdom about her and how she worked with my dad. My mom, actually, I would say her character is very similar to Beverly, my wife. You wonder what my mom is like.

It's Beverly. Very determined, knows exactly what she wants. Extremely faithful to God and to her family. And my mother, then, was a person of very high reputation in the church. Her highest status in life, in society, was to be a cleaner of homes. Because my dad died just a few months after he took his first Passover. And a lot of that I attribute to World War II with the beatings and the suffering that he had gone through there. My mother remained a widow. She was 40 years old until 58 when she died. Again, her status was not great, not a great leader. She was happy for her sons, but she was not a person of great status as far as the work is concerned. She never rose to being more than just one who had a little business of cleaning homes and had people that were, that she has a regular route of homes that she cleaned. But there are many spiritual parallels that we could look at, and I just want to tell you a few. Because I truly believe that we are on a journey, that we don't even know what it is, except to say, it's part of my prayers, thy will be done. It is saying basically, God, you have a will, you have something that you're doing.

And quoting the scripture in Ephesians 2, that does not be unwise as to what God's will is, is to know what God is doing with us. And I know that I take a look in our journey in the church to coming to understanding the first truths that I would give my life for, because I was very involved in the church that I was in before, but they were not telling the truth. They were not following the Bible. It was just fraud to me. I could not be a good Orthodox person, as much as I was involved with the church, and as much as I was wanting to, you know, be supportive. And my mother as well, in her way, she said that I don't believe this. But when she became a believer in the truth, after having been raised an atheist, and then lived through Orthodoxy, because I was imposed upon her, when she was liberated by the truth, she became truly a beacon of hope and light to others. But here are some of the few spiritual parallels that you might want to write down.

It's through much tribulation that we enter into the kingdom of God. Every time I go and think of Mom and Dad's experience in life, it is terrible. And yet, in another way, I look upon it as joyous in that they were survivors. She talked about all her friends that died and who were killed. Talked about her girlfriends that wouldn't make it out of the bomb shelters.

My dad, who talked about all the people at the concentration camp where he was in, where they were even afraid to make friends, because they may not be a friend the next day, they may be dead. So you're very cautious about what relationships you did. But I'm thankful to God that our family made it. Acts 14, verse 21. Acts 14, verse 21. When they had preached the gospel to that city and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, saying, we must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God.

We don't promise when we preach the gospel that this is liberation from what the world may throw at you. We tell them about the kingdom of God that is coming that ultimately will be liberation, but the road there may be strewn with hardship, with trials, with a crosses that you might have to bear. And what you might be going through in your life, whether it's personal, whether it's family, or whether what we've gone through in the church. We have gone through a lot in the church.

But the divisions that have taken place as to the great, horrible things that have ripped apart my emotional side with the loss of friends. But, you know, in retrospect, to look upon it is something that's just been prophesied. Through much tribulation, we will enter into the kingdom of heaven, into the kingdom of God, because God is with us, and God is working with us, and there is a destiny. And I am a believer in my role currently right now that we have a great work that this church has to do with God, who has chosen certain people to do a particular witnessing and warning work. And it will be done. And I'm saying, God, let me open to me an understanding of what I need to do, but I understand that it's me really trying to understand more. What I need to do is understand what you are doing, and to use my energies, times, and talents, and to manage the work of others into doing that. Show us, direct us into what needs to be done.

I remember my mother saying that when they looked back on their lives, they saw one hand of God, one miracle after another, that led that family to where maybe they were even pre-chosen or predestined for this time now, back when they were first put on the train that took them to Germany, to their life in the concentration camp, to the terrors that they suffered with the Russians, to coming to this land, the United States, to coming into the church as something that God had foreseen a long time ago to the present. We are not just accidents who just kind of stumbled and bumbled in here, and God has got a lottery going. He's working with people.

And some He chooses now, some He'll choose at a different time. I truly believe that the audience I'm speaking to right now, He has chosen you, and we need to have that in the forefront of our mind. This whole creation groans in labors, as is written in Romans chapter 8, in verse 22. Romans chapter 8 and verse 22, for we all know that the whole creation groans in labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves, groan within ourselves, eagerly awaiting for the adoption and redemption of our body. This whole world is stinks. Its values, its movies, its music, its education, its attitudes. And truly, when I look at what's right and good and wholesome and proper, I rejoice in that, because that's what we want. And I'm waiting for a time when this whole world will be liberated from that. One thing about my parents that was also interesting is that my father, and of course my mother who followed him on that, Ukrainians, Russians, other people, want to resolve problems in their own way. And even if Ukraine right now is independent, who knows how long it will be independent? I have a feeling it's headed for disaster. Again, I don't know. I'm glad I'm not there. We do work with a lot of people there, work with Sabbatarians there, but it's not good what's happening there.

But basically, we have been called out of the world's politics, and even citizenship.

I still value my U.S. citizenship very much, just as the Apostle Paul valued his Roman citizenship.

But I really first and foremost consider myself a citizen of the kingdom of God.

Ukrainians, after they had come to this country, many of them, many hundreds, thousands of them, as refugees, immediately began to form parties, political parties. This party will liberate us here. There were socialists, there were even communists, there were imperialists, there were all these different groups, and they were trying to get my dad involved with them. He said, come on, be a socialist! Don't you see that that's the way to go?

And my dad said, no, I just don't feel part of it. Now, when I went to summer camp, the kids would say, ah, it's your dad. He's the one who won't join anything.

My dad just never felt comfortable with anything that was worldly. But when he came into the church, he really became a citizen for the kingdom of God.

We can't enter the kingdom of God unless we have a sponsor. Without a sponsor, who is Jesus Christ, we're nothing.

And we realize that we really need to have somebody who can pay the way to facilitate our becoming a citizen or even an alien.

My parents couldn't come to the United States until they found a sponsor.

And they finally did. It was a very roundabout way.

And they barely got one because they had to sit in that camp in Germany for four years before they were allowed to leave. But they finally found a professor, a distant relative of our families from Ukraine, who stuck his neck out for us.

My parents, when they came to this country, they were so thankful about that that they sponsored a number of other people themselves. From Brazil, other friends who had migrated to Brazil, but they wanted them to have a better life. They brought them to the United States, other places. And even one of the Sabbatarians that was living in Portland, I sponsored.

It's not a money issue. It's just a matter that you will put your name up and your assets, that if something goes wrong, you will be there to help them. It didn't cost me anything, except a lot of paperwork. But we had to be willing, not only to be sponsored by Jesus Christ, to look to Him as our great sponsor for the kingdom of God, but our job right now is to be sponsors for other people, to help other people enter into the kingdom of God.

The immigrants, when they came to this country, they stuck to one another. I remember we had three churches in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area that were Orthodox. Spoke Ukrainian, services were Ukrainian. We stuck to each other, and they stuck and just bonded with one another because of the common trauma that they had gone through. Now, we as a church need to stick to one another. There's a loyalty that we have to God, but we also have a loyalty and friendship that we have to one another. Let's not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, because it's that assembling that bonds us, that helps us to encourage one another and to support one another for the great journey that we're on. One of the difficulties with internet is that people think they can become an internet computer Christian. And, you know, it's nice to get, you know, sermons you can sit back in your pajamas, you know, and listen to, and you don't have to get cleaned up and go to church or, you know, talk to anybody. But that's part of worshiping God, is to be with one another.

That church services, meeting with one another, feast of tabernacles, and probably the most touching of all as the Passover service, is we commonly altogether say we need help. We need forgiveness. We're all in this together. We all need to feel that way.

My mother was a marvelous person, as I look upon her life 30 years ago, who died very, very quickly.

She found out she had acute leukemia, and two weeks later she was dead.

Very similar to Denny Luker's death, who just finding out the gravity of his illness, and very quickly died. Her last words with us, and she was lucid to the very end, she said, I'm not afraid of death. I see the kingdom of God. And the number one thing that was of her interest, in special interest, that she wanted us to preach about the boys. And she said, you know, you guys, you know, she talked to my brother to me, if you leave the church, I'm not going with you.

She was just very, very strong about that. But the thing that she loved the most was the kingdom of God. I had given one sermon about the kingdom. It wasn't just all the scriptures, basically, I don't consider it a great sermon, but she loved that. She played that over and over again, because that's what was most important to her, the kingdom of God. It was very practical. It was her future. It was the gospel. It was everything to her. And that's the way we need to be, brethren, ladies and gentlemen. Beacons of hope is not just a generality or just a glittering thought of beacons of hope just being nice. I thought the sermon that was excellent and pointed out the fact that we are there to be a guy, the reference point to the world.

And when we stay faithful in our worship, in our beliefs, in our relationships, in the way we come across, we do become that light to others. They may not see that right now, but they realize that that is a reference point. We all need to be reference points. We all need to be those beacons of hope. I'm looking forward to this conference, which I won't be at.

But I'm looking forward to all the things that you can learn one from another, as I'm certain my wife will be telling us about. But I have really appreciated what the women have done and hope that you will work further. So may God be with you. It's been very pleasant to visit with you and look forward to lunch here and to the rest of the activities this weekend.