When Andrew had finished speaking, the pastor stepped forward. “We want to thank you,” he said. “Even if you had not said a word, just seeing you and having you here means so much to us. At times we think that we are all alone in our struggle.”
Andrew was deeply touched by the pastor’s words and by the warmth extended to him from the congregation.
During the next week, Andrew decided to go out into the streets of Warsaw and distribute copies of The Way of Salvation to the people who passed by. He stood on street corners, passing out the booklet, and much to his surprise, nearly everyone he offered a copy to took it. At first when he saw soldiers coming, Andrew would hurry away to another street corner. But then one day he asked himself why he was so scared of the soldiers. Why did he creep away when he saw them coming? After all, soldiers needed to hear the gospel as well. So when he noticed a group of soldiers approaching one day, he decided to stand his ground. The soldiers walked up to him, and he offered them each a copy of the booklet. They took the booklets and looked them over.
“I’m Dutch,” Andrew said in German.
“Dutch,” one of the soldiers replied in German.
But before Andrew could get a conversation started with the soldiers, their superior officer approached, and the soldiers quickly moved on, each grasping his copy of The Way of Salvation.
“So what do we have here?” the commanding officer asked in German.
Andrew handed the officer a copy of the booklet, and with a scowl on his face, the officer looked it over. Andrew’s heart thumped as he waited to see whether he had perhaps gone too far. Would the officer arrest him or let him go?
After several minutes of looking over the booklet, the officer began asking questions about it. For the next two hours Andrew and the officer talked about the message of the booklet. When the officer finally walked away, Andrew was glad that he had confronted his fears and reached out to the soldiers. He was sure that the booklets would have an effect on them.
By the end of the week, Andrew had handed out all the copies of The Way of Salvation he had brought with him.
On the following Sunday Andrew once again found a church to attend. While at the service, he was surprised to learn that there was a shop in Warsaw that sold Bibles. He got the address, and on Monday he set out to find the store.
Andrew walked through the streets of Warsaw until he came to the address on New World Street. He stepped into the small shop and looked around while a man served a customer at the front of the store. A range of editions of the Bible were laid out on the shelves. Some were large editions, with the words of Jesus marked in red ink, and some were small editions, like the New Testament Andrew carried in his pocket. When the customer finally left the store, Andrew stepped up to the counter and spoke to the man behind it. “Good morning,” he said in Polish.
The man responded in Polish, but since good morning was all the Polish Andrew knew, he asked in English, “Do you speak either German or English?”
“English,” the man said.
Andrew expressed his surprise at finding a store selling Bibles in a Communist country. “Are there Bible bookshops in other Communist countries?” he asked.
Andrew noticed that the man was guarded in his response. The man’s eyes darted back and forth as the man made sure before he spoke that no one else was in the store. “Some yes, some no,” the man replied.
After a long silence, the man went on. This time his voice was not much above a whisper, and Andrew had to lean in to hear what the man was saying.
“I understand that in Russia Bibles are very scarce,” the man said. “Fortunes are being made there with Bibles. A man will smuggle ten Bibles into Russia and sell them for enough money to buy a motorcycle. He drives the motorcycle here to Poland or East Germany and sells it for profit. He then uses the profit to buy more Bibles that he smuggles into Russia and sells for a fortune, and so the cycle goes.”
The man’s words deeply impacted Andrew, and as he walked back to the mathematics classroom dormitory, Andrew pondered those words. People were smuggling Bibles into the Soviet Union for profit. But was anyone smuggling Bibles into that country for love, for the love of Jesus Christ, and the love of seeing the gospel spread there?
Finally the last day of the three-week-long youth festival arrived. The day was to be marked by the Parade of Triumph, a large march through the streets of Warsaw by the festival participants. However, Andrew decided to forego the event. It was his last day in Poland, and he wanted to spend the time praying for the people he had spoken with and given copies of The Way of Salvation to during his stay in Warsaw, as well as for the Polish people in general.
Andrew was up early that morning. The sun was just climbing above the horizon to the east as he walked out into the street. He walked to one of the city’s broad avenues and found a bench to sit on. As the golden rays of the sun warmed him, Andrew pulled the small New Testament from his pocket and laid it on his knee. He reflected on his time in Warsaw. On the three Sundays he had been in the city, he had attended a number of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches, where he had been warmly received. He had handed out hundreds of copies of The Way of Salvation in the streets and had talked to countless people, both those attending the youth festival and the citizens of Warsaw, about the gospel. Now he felt it was time to pray for those people, to pray that God would strengthen the Christians he had had fellowship with and stir the hearts of those he had shared the gospel with. Andrew flipped open the New Testament on his knee, placed his hand on it, and began to pray.
Andrew was unsure how long he had been praying when he noticed the sound of music in the distance. The music grew louder, and as he looked down the avenue, he saw that the Parade of Triumph was approaching. Soon a column of young people eight abreast was marching past. The paraders sang loudly and shouted slogans at the top of their voices. Andrew looked at them. These were the evangelists of Communism. But where were the evangelists for Jesus Christ behind the Iron Curtain? As far as Andrew was aware, WEC had never sent a missionary behind the Iron Curtain. And he was sure that that was probably the case for other denominations and mission organizations in the West.
As he thought about this, Andrew looked down at the New Testament on his knee. The book was opened to Revelation, chapter three, and he read the verse beside his index finger that was holding the book open. It was the second verse of the chapter, and the words seemed to leap out at him: “Awake, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death.”
The words startled Andrew, and before he realized it, tears were streaming down his cheeks. Was God speaking to him? “Is this what You are saying to me, Lord?” Andrew prayed. “Are You telling me that my life’s work is here behind the Iron Curtain, strengthening what remains?”
It was a crazy idea. Andrew knew it. How could one young, unsupported Dutchman make a difference in such a large mission field? But no matter how he tried to dismiss the idea, Andrew could not get rid of the feeling that God was speaking to him about his future. He was still pondering this when he climbed aboard the train late that afternoon for the journey back to Holland. Was God really giving him direction for his future ministry?
Chapter 12
The Cup of Suffering
Unlike his return from Indonesia, when Andrew got home from Poland to Sint Pancras, this time everyone in the village wanted to hear about his experiences. This was a pleasant surprise, and within a week of arriving back, Andrew had talked at several house meetings in the village about all the things he had heard, seen, and done while in Warsaw. Soon invitations began arriving from as far away as Amsterdam for him to come and talk about the “suffering church behind the Iron Curtain.” Andrew protested that he was not any kind of expert on the subject, but Christians were eager to hear what he had to say anyway. After all, they told him, he had seen and heard much more than they had.
Andrew’s family was also supportive of him. In the time he had been way at the WEC training school, his family had built above the garden shed another room, which Mr. van der Bijl had moved in to. The room Andrew’s father had vacated was the biggest room in the house. It had always been a bedroom, and Andrew assumed that his sister Geltje and her husband, Arie, would want it. But they did not. Instead they told Andrew that he should move into the room. They had decided that he could use it not only as his bedroom but also as the headquarters for his ministry.
Andrew was humbled by Geltje and Arie’s gesture. He was also a little concerned. It seemed to him that everyone else thought that he knew what he was going to do with his life. After all, he had speaking engagements and a “headquarters,” and he had been asked to write a series of magazine articles on Communism and Christianity—and all of this because he had gone to Poland for three weeks to attend a youth festival. Other people might have confidence that he knew where he was headed, but the truth was, Andrew had no real idea what God wanted him to do next. He was sure that God had spoken to him during his last day in Warsaw, but since he had no idea how this calling might work out, Andrew decided he should just keep taking the next opportunity that presented itself and pray that God would show him the way.
And that is what happened, though not in a way that Andrew could have predicted. Just as he finished speaking to a large crowd in Amsterdam, a stout woman made a beeline toward him. Andrew recognized the woman instantly. She had led the Dutch contingent to the youth festival in Warsaw. She planted herself firmly in front of him and got straight to the point. “I don’t approve of what you said tonight,” she announced.
“I didn’t think you would,” Andrew replied.
“You emphasized the things in postrevolutionary countries that we Communists are still trying to change. You should look to the future and realize that we offer many advantages for today’s youth,” the woman said.
“I only spoke about what I saw with my own eyes and the experiences I had,” Andrew shrugged.
The woman pounced on this statement. “That is the point. You need to see more so that you will be able to speak more positively. I am in charge of organizing a group of fifteen people for a fact-finding trip into Czechoslovakia. We’ll be gone for a month. We have educators and communicators, and we need someone with a church perspective. Would you like to come?”
Andrew shook his head. He barely had enough money for the bus fare home to Sint Pancras, let alone enough for a second trip behind the Iron Curtain. “I don’t have the money,” he replied.
The woman looked him up and down with a shrewd look on her face. “I’ll work out the money. If you want to come, say so,” she snapped.
Andrew looked at her. Was she really offering him a free trip to Czechoslovakia? “And you’ll deal with the visas?” he asked.
“Everything is already taken care of. What do you say? Are you coming?”
“When do we leave?” Andrew smiled.
As he rode home on the bus that night, Andrew could hardly believe what had just taken place. He was off on a second trip behind the Iron Curtain. Was this just a coincidence, or was God up to something big?
On a cold November morning, three months after his visit to Warsaw, Andrew found himself standing in Prague, rain pouring down as he listened to their tour guide explaining about yet another wonderful achievement of Communism. He had been in Czechoslovakia for three weeks now, and every day had followed much the same pattern. Andrew and the fourteen other members of the party were herded from one staged event to another while their tour guide expounded on the virtues of Communism and pointed out how much freer the Czech people were now than they had ever been in the past. Andrew doubted this, but it was hard to find any evidence to disprove it. The tour leader, the stout Dutch woman who had recruited Andrew for the trip, kept a particularly sharp eye on him, making sure that he was usually at the front of the group, and counted to make sure that everyone was present and accounted for at least once an hour. She said that it was to make sure no one got lost, but Andrew was convinced that she was worried about his going off and exploring Prague alone. He wished he could, but he did not see how he could do it.
