By that time, our church had organized a music group; we frequently conducted evangelical events in open squares, at cultural centers, and at stadiums. But preaching in prisons—that was something unusual. Before us lay an unplowed field of God, where we could labor for His glory. The entire group decided to pray about this. After some time, the pastor approached us with a proposal to test our strength in this blessed work. This was an answer to our prayers. The assembly was told of our desire to begin this new ministry, we received the church's blessing, and work began in earnest.
This new, unusual ministry required a complete rethinking of our principles of walking before the Lord. We discovered many of our own shortcomings, which we had simply overlooked before and which now needed to be corrected. Not only did we have to reconsider our personal walk before God, but also the form of our joint ministry. I had to write songs that spoke directly to the contingent we would soon meet. We had to build sermons quite differently, addressed to people from the criminal world. It was a time of special blessings from God. This usually happens: when we begin to give, we invariably receive something in return. Having drawn up a list of correctional institutions in our district, we began to visit them. The administration had been warned "from above," so no one hindered us. One of the first colonies we visited was designated for inmates with tuberculosis.
It was not easy to decide to visit such an establishment. We were warned that the probability of infection was very high. Everyone was afraid, but no one backed away!
It was winter, snow lay on the ground. It was very cold, and more than anything we wanted to sit at home, drink hot tea, and warm ourselves by a warm stove. Moreover, it was Sunday... We set out early in the morning. At 9 a.m., our vehicles approached the prison gates. We passed all required inspections, after which (along with our equipment) we were sent inside. We found ourselves behind the "barbed wire."
Not far away stood a large group of inmates, many of whom were coughing constantly. Suddenly, a young man separated from them and quickly walked toward me. I froze in surprise. Coming very close, he embraced me by the shoulders and, deliberately breathing directly in my face, asked if I was afraid of getting infected. "I'm veeeeery infectious," he said.
Bewildered, I didn't immediately know what to say to him. The answer came "from within." I smiled at him and said: "If God wills it, I'll get infected without your help, but if the Lord doesn't want this—you can breathe on me as much as you like, it simply won't work!" His eyebrows shot up in surprise.
"You're a brave guy!" he said.
"It's not me who's brave," I countered, "it's the Lord who is inside me!"
"Well, well... we'll see..." he mumbled and shuffled back to his friends, clearing the way for us.
Even now, remembering this incident, I marvel at how timely and precise the Lord acts, endowing us with His wisdom and courage.
We set up our equipment on the stage of a large hall, which was packed with about eight hundred inmates at various stages of tuberculosis. They were all coughing simultaneously.
The noise was so loud that we feared even our equipment wouldn't handle it. But God's power manifested itself here too. As soon as we began our ministry, the coughing stopped. Almost no one coughed until the very end, except for some apparently very ill people. It was simply amazing! As soon as we finished the service, the hall coughed in unison.
None of us got sick. And we had been in close contact with a huge number of tuberculosis patients, gathered in a closed room, for more than two hours! God's protection proved far more effective than any vaccine!
