Once in a church, a teenage girl asked me:
– Where were you born?
– In Karaganda, – I answered.
– Come on! You're joking, there's no such city, – she countered.
I had to show my passport. Her surprise knew no bounds. There was a time when people often said the phrase "Where, where – in Karaganda," and so my native city acquired such a jocular connotation.
So there I was born and raised in a believing family, there I finished secondary school, there I became acquainted with the church, which I began attending a year before the army. At the conscription commission I was asked a famous question, which I suspect was asked more often there than in other cities – no, not "where, where, in Karaganda?" – but another one:
– Are you a Komsomol member?
– No.
– A believer?
– Yes!
– To the North! To the rocks!
Thus the Lord, through the hand of the military commissioner, determined my fate. I was sent to serve in the Murmansk region, not far from the city. In my second year of service, I visited a church in Murmansk for the first time. I missed the morning gathering – couldn't find it. Before the evening gathering, I met and became acquainted with the presbyter. He needed to visit a young family to comfort the mistress of the house, who had moved to her husband from southern lands. Since I had nowhere to go, he took me with him. During the conversation, he told her that if not for God's will, he would not have been in Murmansk for already 18 years. (He had come from Ukraine).
When these words reached my ear, a thought flashed through my mind: "Perhaps I too should stay here?" I was afraid and quickly dismissed this thought: to stay in Murmansk – that was categorically not in my plans!
Before the army, apart from the Karaganda church, I had been almost nowhere. The church there in the mid-seventies had up to 1500 members. If not such a number, then something similar I expected to see in Murmansk…
We entered a small house, thirty or forty people in the hall and… there came that thought again about staying in Murmansk. In short, I lost my peace: I presented various arguments and "proofs" that I could not stay, I argued and resisted. Two months passed this way. In the end I was defeated and convinced that this was my path, and now here I am. All this happened in 1978. In 1981 I married; we have five children and grandchildren.
I was ordained to the diaconal ministry in 1983, to the presbyterial ministry in 1985.
When you feel that you are in the right place, needed, and serve the Lord – this is great happiness! Glory to God! My boundaries run through beautiful places!
