Despite this warning, Andrew was certain that God had opened the door for him to make this trip. He had nowhere else to go except forward to the border. Andrew slipped the Volkswagen into gear and drove on. As he drove, he prayed out loud to himself, “Lord, my bag is full of Scriptures that I want to deliver to your children—my brothers and sisters across this border. When You walked this earth, You made the blind eyes see. Now I am asking You to make the seeing eyes blind. Don’t let the guards see a single thing that they are not meant to see. Amen.”
Just as Andrew finished his prayer, the Yugoslav border post came into view.
Chapter 14
Someone to Share His Life With
Andrew pulled his blue Volkswagen to a halt in front of the barrier that blocked the road. Two border guards emerged from the small guardhouse beside the barrier. The guards seemed both delighted and surprised by Andrew’s arrival, and Andrew supposed that his was the first car to stop at the border crossing that day. He rolled down the window, and in German one of the guards asked to see his passport. Andrew handed over his passport, and as the guard looked it over, the other guard asked him to step out of the car. Andrew did as he was asked, and the guard then began feeling around Andrew’s camping gear. In the folds of the camping gear, Andrew had hidden boxes of tracts, and his heart rate increased as the guard ran his hands over the pile of equipment. “Lord, make seeing eyes blind,” he prayed under his breath.
“Do you have anything to declare?” the first guard asked as he handed back Andrew’s passport.
“I have some money, a wristwatch, a camera—”
“Please, take this suitcase out,” the second guard said, cutting Andrew off. The guard had finished with the camping gear and now rested his hand on one of the suitcases in the back of the Volkswagen.
“Yes, certainly,” Andrew said as he reached in and lifted out the suitcase, which he then laid on the ground beside the car and opened.
The guard moved several shirts aside, and there in plain view was a pile of gospel tracts. Andrew could feel the palms of his hands getting clammy. Again he prayed under his breath, “Lord, make seeing eyes blind.”
“It seems very dry for this time of year,” Andrew remarked to the other guard to break the tension he was feeling.
“Not for March,” the guard replied. “Our rainy season is during the middle of summer.”
“Is that right,” Andrew responded. “In Holland September and October are our rainiest months.”
“July is our wettest month,” the guard said.
“July? No, not July. We get much more rain in August,” chimed the guard inspecting the suitcase. The weather now seemed more important to the guard than the contents of Andrew’s suitcase. The guard put the shirts back in place and closed the suitcase, and then the three men fell into a conversation about the weather. After they had been talking for several minutes, the guard who had been inspecting Andrew’s suitcase asked, “So, do you have anything else to declare?”
“Only small things,” Andrew answered.
“We don’t bother with small things,” the guard replied.
With that the other guard raised the barrier. Andrew loaded the suitcase back into the car and drove into Yugoslavia, giving a little wave to the two guards as he left. As he drove on, Andrew thanked God for allowing him to make it through the checkpoint with all of the Bibles.
Andrew’s first stop in Yugoslavia was the city of Zagreb, where he had sent the letter. He found the address the Bible Society in Holland had furnished him and pulled the car to a halt in front of it. As he stepped out of the Volkswagen onto the sidewalk, a man walked up and asked him if he was a Dutchman.
“Yes,” Andrew replied in German.
The man broke into a huge grin and started pumping Andrew’s hand. “This is a miracle, this is a miracle!” he repeated. “I got your letter this morning, although I have not lived at this address for many years. I did not know what I should do, so I came here—not two minutes before you—and now I am talking to you. You are a Christian, right?”
Andrew nodded and invited the man, whose name was Jamil, to ride with him in the car. As the Volkswagen purred along, Jamil thanked Andrew many times for coming.
“Just knowing that Christians on the outside care means so much,” Jamil said. “We all feel so isolated, so alone here.”
Andrew asked Jamil whether he knew of someone who could serve as an interpreter during his visit. Jamil suggested a devout engineering student named Nikola. The two men drove to Nikola’s apartment, and Nikola immediately agreed to help Andrew in any way he could.
That night Andrew marveled at what an amazing day it had been. God had somehow stopped the guards from seeing any of the banned literature he was carrying into the country, guided him to a Christian contact, and provided an interpreter for his visit. He could hardly wait to get up the following morning and see what would happen next.
Andrew’s visa allowed him to stay in Yugoslavia for fifty days, and Andrew got maximum use out of each of those days. He held about one hundred meetings throughout the country, sometimes preaching up to six times on Sundays in churches both in tiny villages and in large cities. Everywhere he went, Christians were eager to learn about what was happening outside of Yugoslavia, as well as what was happening to Christians in other parts of the country. Andrew observed that the Christians in the north of Yugoslavia had more freedom than those in the south and that the Communists were leaving the old people alone but trying everything they could to dissuade the children and young people from believing in “fairytales and Bible myths.”
Sometimes the police took down the names of people who were attending the meetings where Andrew spoke, and Andrew would hear later that some of these people had been arrested or lost their jobs. But it seemed to Andrew that despite the obvious danger, more and more people were at each new meeting.
On May 1, 1957, Andrew and Nikola drove into Belgrade, the capital and largest city in Yugoslavia. The Communist May Day celebration was well under way by the time they arrived, and the city was brimming with people. The hotels and restaurants were full to capacity, and Andrew thought that he and Nikola would have to sleep in the car for the night. However, they made contact with a local pastor, who invited them to stay in his apartment. The following evening Andrew spoke at the pastor’s church.
When he arrived at the church, Andrew found the place filled to the brim with well-dressed, urbane people. After the pastor introduced him, Andrew stood on the platform and began to tell the crowd stories from the gospels. After he had said a few sentences, he would stop and let Nikola translate his words into Serbo-Croatian. As he spoke, Andrew noticed a banging sound. He wondered for a moment whether it was the secret police breaking their way into the building to arrest him and those in the congregation. However, moments later he saw that the banging was coming from the side of the sanctuary where several men had removed a door so that the people who had overflowed into the choir room next door could see and hear him speak.
After presenting the gospel, Andrew then asked those in the room to raise their hand if they wanted to commit their life to Christ or renew a previous commitment to Him. To his surprise every person present raised his or her hand. Andrew decided that the people must have misunderstood him, and he asked Nikola to explain the serious step they were taking. Then he made a second appeal, this time asking those in the room who wanted to commit themselves to following Jesus Christ to stand. Everyone in the room stood.
Amazed at the response of the people, Andrew began to talk to them about the need to pray each day as new Christians. Andrew noticed many faces light up around the room at this suggestion. But when he told them that they would also need to read and study their Bibles each day, he seemed to lose the attention of the audience. People fidgeted in their seats and were no longer looking at him. Confused, Andrew asked the pastor what the problem was.
“Prayer, yes, that we can do each day,” the pastor replied. “In fact, I like what you said about the need to pray. But reading the Bible… Brother Andrew, most of the people in this room do not have Bibles.”
Since Belgrade was such a cosmopolitan city, Andrew had expected most of the people who attended the meeting to own Bibles. “How many of you own Bibles?” he asked.
Only seven hands went up. Only seven people out of all those in attendance had Bibles, and Andrew had already distributed the Bibles he smuggled into Yugoslavia. Later that evening Andrew and the pastor worked out a plan whereby the seven Bibles could be shared among the members of the congregation for individual reading and for studying in small groups.
That night as he lay in bed in the pastor’s apartment and thought about the situation with the Bibles, Andrew felt pricked in his heart. In the West anybody could buy and own a Bible. Why, many people owned two or three in different translations or versions. But this was not so behind the Iron Curtain. Andrew prayed and promised God that he would do whatever he could to help alleviate the situation. He promised that when he could get ahold of Bibles in the languages of the people behind the Iron Curtain, he would smuggle the Bibles to the people.
Andrew was sad when his fifty days were up and he had to leave Yugoslavia, yet he left the country with a clear sense of calling. It was clear to him that God wanted him to smuggle Bibles into Communist countries and distribute them to weary Christians. But this mission was so different from anything else Andrew had ever heard of that it made him feel very alone. As he drove back toward the Netherlands, he began to wish that he had at least one person who shared his strange calling—a wife perhaps? “Yes, a wife is just what I need. I will be thirty next year, and I would love to have a wife to share my life with,” he told himself.
After he arrived back in Sint Pancras, Andrew continued to think about how amazing it would be to have a wife to share his calling and mission. Then one day, in the middle of his morning prayer time, the answer began to unfold. Suddenly Andrew saw before him the face of a woman named Corrie van Dam. Corrie was a pretty, blonde young woman who had worked at the chocolate factory with him five years before.
Andrew had always been impressed with Corrie’s Christian faith and warm personality, two things he was sure would have attracted her a husband long before now. Still, he had to know for certain whether she was married or not, so he took his father’s old bicycle and rode into Alkmaar. During the years that Andrew had worked at the chocolate factory, Corrie’s parents had often welcomed the workers into their home for coffee and cake after a youth rally. As a result, Andrew knew the way to the van Dam house—or at least to what had once been the van Dam home. When he arrived there, he learned that the family had moved to Amsterdam. As far as the new occupants of the house knew, Corrie was just finishing up her nursing training, and they thought that she was not married.
Andrew’s hopes soared as he drove the Volkswagen into Amsterdam. He found his way to the van Dams’ new address and knocked on the door to their house. Upon opening the door, Mrs. van Dam was delighted to see Andrew. Andrew soon learned that Mr. van Dam was very ill and that Mrs. van Dam assumed he had come to visit her husband before he died.
And so began an unusual courtship, with Andrew visiting Mr. van Dam twice a week but spending as much time as he could with Corrie. He found her to be just as attractive as ever, with a mature faith and a peace in spite of the impending death of her father.
In late October 1957, Andrew received a visa to enter Hungary. He had applied for the visa so long ago that he had almost forgotten about it. But before he left for Hungary, he decided to ask Corrie to marry him and to let her think and pray about her answer while he was gone. However, on the day he had chosen to ask Corrie to be his wife, Corrie’s father died, and Andrew got caught up helping to make the funeral arrangements.
