19

A Prison Sings

The authorities moved Dmitri a thousand kilometers away from his family and locked him in a prison. His cell was so tiny that when he got out of bed, it took but a single step either to get to the door of his cell, to reach the stained and cracked sink mounted on the opposite wall, or to use the foul, open toilet in the “far” corner of the cell. Even worse, according to Dmitri, he was the only believer among fifteen hundred hardened criminals.

He said that his isolation from the Body of Christ was more difficult than even the physical torture. And there was much of that. Still, his tormentors were unable to break him. Dmitri pointed to two reasons for his strength in the face of torture. There were two spiritual habits that he had learned from his father, disciplines that Dmitri had taken with him into prison. Without these two disciplines, Dmitri insisted, his faith would have not survived.

For seventeen years in prison, every morning at daybreak, Dmitri would stand at attention by his bed. As was his custom, he would face the east, raise his arms in praise to God, and then he would sing a HeartSong™ to Jesus. The reaction of the other prisoners was predictable. Dmitri recounted the laughter, the cursing, the jeers. The other prisoners banged metals cups against the iron bars in angry protest. They threw food and sometimes human waste to try to shut him up and extinguish the only true light shining in that dark place every morning at dawn.

There was another discipline too, another custom that Dmitri told me about. Whenever he found a scrap of paper in the prison, he would sneak it back to his cell. There he would pull out a stub of a pencil or a tiny piece of charcoal that he had saved, and he would write on that scrap of paper, as tiny as he could, all the Bible verses and scriptural stories or songs that he could remember. When the scrap was completely filled, he would walk to the corner of his little jail cell where there was a concrete pillar that constantly dripped water—except in the wintertime when the moisture became a solid coat of ice on the inside surface of his cell. Dmitri would take the paper fragment, reach as high as he possibly could, and stick it on that damp pillar as a praise offering to God.

Of course, whenever one of his jailors spotted a piece of paper on the pillar, he would come into his cell, take it down, read it, beat Dmitri severely, and threaten him with death. Still, Dmitri refused to stop his two disciplines.

Every day, he rose at dawn to sing his song. And every time he found a scrap of paper, he filled it with Scripture and praise.

This went on year after year after year. His guards tried to make him stop. The authorities did unspeakable things to his family. At one point, they even led him to believe that his wife had been murdered and that his children had been taken by the state.

They taunted him cruelly, “We have ruined your home. Your family is gone.”

Dmitri’s resolve finally broke. He told God that he could not take any more. He admitted to his guards, “You win! I will sign any confession that you want me to sign. I must get out of here to find out where my children are.”

They told Dmitri, “We will prepare your confession tonight, and then you will sign it tomorrow. Then you will be free to go.” After all those years, the only thing that he had to do was sign his name on a document saying that he was not a believer in Jesus and that he was a paid agent of western governments trying to destroy the USSR. Once he put his signature on that dotted line, he would be free to go.

Dmitri repeated his intention: “Bring it tomorrow and I will sign it!”

That very night he sat on his jail cell bed. He was in deep despair, grieving the fact that he had given up. At that same moment, a thousand kilometers away his family—Dmitri’s wife, his children who were growing up without him, and his brother—sensed through the Holy Spirit the despair of this man in prison. His loved ones gathered around the very place where I was sitting as Dmitri told me his story. They knelt in a circle and began to pray out loud for him. Miraculously, the Holy Spirit of the Living God allowed Dmitri to hear the voices of his loved ones as they prayed.

The next morning, when the guards marched into his cell with the documents, Dmitri’s back was straight. His shoulders were squared and there was strength on his face and in his eyes. He looked at his captors and declared, “I am not signing anything!”

The guards were incredulous. They had thought that he was beaten and destroyed. “What happened?” they demanded to know.

Dmitri smiled and told them, “In the night, God let me hear the voices of my wife and my children and my brother praying for me. You lied to me! I now know that my wife is alive and physically well. I know that my sons are with her. I also know that they are all still in Christ. So I am not signing anything!”

His persecutors continued to discourage and silence him. Dmitri remained faithful. He was overwhelmed one day by a special gift from God’s hand. In the prison yard, he found a whole sheet of paper. “And God,” Dmitri said, “had laid a pencil beside it!”

Dmitri went on, “I rushed back to my jail cell and I wrote every Scripture reference, every Bible verse, every story, and every song I could recall.”

“I knew that it was probably foolish,” Dmitri told me, “but I couldn’t help myself. I filled both sides of the paper with as much of the Bible as I could. I reached up and stuck the entire sheet of paper on that wet concrete pillar. Then I stood and looked at it: to me it seemed like the greatest offering I could give Jesus from my prison cell. Of course, my jailor saw it. I was beaten and punished. I was threatened with execution.”

Dmitri was dragged from his cell. As he was dragged down the corridor in the center of the prison, the strangest thing happened. Before they reached the door leading to the courtyard—before stepping out into the place of execution—fifteen hundred hardened criminals stood at attention by their beds. They faced the east and they began to sing. Dmitri told me that it sounded to him like the greatest choir in all of human history. Fifteen hundred criminals raised their arms and began to sing the HeartSong that they had heard Dmitri sing to Jesus every morning for all of those years.

Dmitri’s jailers instantly released their hold on his arms and stepped away from him in terror.

One of them demanded to know, “Who are you?” Dmitri straightened his back and stood as tall and as proud as he could.

He responded: “I am a son of the Living God, and Jesus is His name!”

The guards returned him to his cell. Sometime later, Dmitri was released and he returned to his family.

Now many years later, I listened as Dmitri told his story of his own unspeakable suffering and God’s steady faithfulness. I found myself thinking of a time in Somalia when I envisioned creating some discipleship materials that might help believers in places of persecution, believers like Dmitri. What a ridiculous idea that seemed now. What could I possibly ever teach this man about following Jesus? Absolutely nothing!

I was overwhelmed by what I had just heard. I held my head in my hands. I cried out in my heart: Oh God, What do I do with a story like this? I have always known of your power—but I have never seen your power on display like this!

Lost in my own thoughts, I realized that Dmitri was still speaking. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I apologized, “I wasn’t listening!”

Dmitri dismissed my concern with a small shake of his head and a wry smile. “That’s okay,” he told me. “I wasn’t talking to you.” He went on to explain, “When you arrived this morning, God and I were discussing something; your visit interrupted that. So right now, when I saw that you were busy with your own thoughts, the Lord and I went back to finishing that conversation.”

In that moment, I knew what I had to ask next.

“Brother Dmitri, would you do something for me?” I asked. I hesitated to continue, but his eyes moved me forward: “Would you sing that song for me?”

Dmitri pushed himself up from the table. He stared into my eyes for three or four seconds. Those seconds felt like an eternity to me. He turned slowly toward the east. He stiffened his back to stand at attention. He lifted his arms and began to sing.

I don’t know Russian, so I didn’t understand a single word of his song. But I didn’t need to. The words probably didn’t matter. As Dmitri raised his arms and his voice in praise and sang that song that he had sung every morning in prison for seventeen years, the tears began to flow down both of our faces. Only then did I begin to grasp the meaning of worship and the importance of HeartSongs.

I had come to Russia looking for answers—wondering if faith could survive and even grow in the world’s most hostile environments. Dmitri became one of my first guides on my journey. I began to sense that this journey was not about developing discipleship materials, but about walking with Jesus in hard places. I felt drawn to this life that Dmitri had lived: knowing Jesus, loving Jesus, following Jesus, living with Jesus.

I met many other believers on that trip to Russia. Hearing Dmitri’s story must have inspired Viktor too. He became almost feverish in networking and finding other people who we needed to talk to—unearthing stories that we needed to hear.

After years of discouragement over the lostness of Somalia, these Russian stories of spiritual endurance in the face of persecution filled me with a sense of hope. That budding hope took me completely by surprise.

One morning Viktor arranged for me to meet with a group of his friends—several Russian pastors, some evangelists and church planters, and some elders—a cross section of his church. I listened in wonder as these believers almost casually recounted being sent to prison for “five years,” “three years,” or “seven years” and being “beaten,” “forced to sleep naked in a cold, damp cell” or “having nothing but moldy bread and boiled cabbage to eat for months.” These same men shared joyful memories of “the time when my wife and son visited me in prison,” “when I was placed in a cell with another believer who could encourage me as I encouraged him,” and “how the church cared for the needs of my family while I was in prison.”

When we stopped to eat lunch, I gently scolded the group, saying: “Your stories are amazing. Why haven’t they been written down? Your stories sound like Bible stories come to life! I can’t believe that you haven’t collected them in a book, or recorded them in some video form. Other followers of Jesus around the world could hear your stories and be encouraged by what God is doing here among those who are persecuted.”

They seemed confused by what I was saying. Clearly, we were not understanding each other. Then one of older pastors stood and motioned for me to follow him. He led me over to a large window in the front room of the home. As we stood together in front of the window, the old gentleman speaking passable, but heavily accented, English said to me: “I understand that you have some sons, Nik. Is that true?”

I told him that it was true. He nodded and then asked me, “Tell me, Nik. How many times have you awakened your sons before dawn and brought them to a window like this one, one that faces east, and said to them, ‘Boys, watch carefully. This morning you’re going to see the sun coming up in the east! It’s going to happen in just a few more minutes. Get ready now, boys.’ How many times have you done that with your sons?”

“Well,” I chuckled, “I’ve never done that. If I ever did that, my boys would think I was crazy. The sun always comes up in the east. It happens every morning!”

The old man nodded and smiled. I didn’t understand his point.

I didn’t understand his point, that is, until he continued: “Nik, that’s why we haven’t made books and movies out of these stories that you have been hearing. For us, persecution is like the sun coming up in the east. It happens all the time. It’s the way things are. There is nothing unusual or unexpected about it. Persecution for our faith has always been—and probably always will be—a normal part of life.”

His words took my breath away. Though I understood what he was saying, I wondered if it was true. Certainly, I had never heard this before. In fact, there was a part of me that wanted to object to his claim. I wondered if the certainty of persecution meant that evil had the upper hand. And, then, I wondered if it was insane to believe that faith could actually flourish where persecution always is normal and ordinary, like “the sun coming up in the east.”

I had always assumed that persecution was abnormal, exceptional, unusual, out of the ordinary. In my mind, persecution was something to avoid. It was a problem, a setback, a barrier. I was captivated by the thought: what if persecution is the normal, expected situation for a believer? And what if the persecution is, in fact, soil in which faith can grow? What if persecution can be, in fact, good soil?

I began to wonder about what that might mean for the church in America—and I began to wonder about what that might mean for the potential church in Somalia.