Re: I feel like college is changing my friend
fun times, Dark. I sincerely appreciate the straightforwardness and honesty concerning your perspective on God and such. This is part of the beauty and terror of free will from where I'm standing, and it places so many of those of us who care collectively about humanity as a whole in somewhat of a bind. We can't be forceful, but our beliefs give us an urgency. We don't want to shove Christianity down anyone's throat, but as I've stated before, we feel compeled to share the joy, the peace and all around experience.
If I may, I'd like to share two stories with everyone on this forum and reading this topic. Once again, I'd like to stress that I don't take offense if you decide to ignore all of this and perceive it as utter garbage; you're entitled to that and more than welcome to dismiss it as such. One of these stories is personal; the other is simply one that touched me immensely but which I feel is just as important.
Story 1. The impersonal, but nonetheless important.
Marcel Sternberger was a methodical man of nearly 50, with bushy white hair, guileless brown eyes, and the bouncing enthusiasm of a czardas dancer of his native Hungary. He always took the 9:09 Long Island Railroad train from his suburban home to Woodside, N.Y.., where he caught a subway into the city.
On the morning of January 10, 1948, Sternberger boarded the 9:09 as usual. En route, he suddenly decided to visit Laszlo Victor, a Hungarian friend who lived in Brooklyn and was ill.
Accordingly, at Ozone Park, Sternberger changed to the subway for Brooklyn, went to his friend’s house, and stayed until midafternoon. He then boarded a Manhattan-bound subway for his Fifth Avenue office.
"The car was crowded, and there seemed to be no chance of a seat. But just as I entered, a man sitting by the door suddenly jumped up to leave, and I slipped into the empty place. I’ve been living in New York long enough not to start conversations with strangers. But being a photographer, I have the peculiar habit of analyzing people’s faces, and I was struck by the features of the passenger on my left. He was probably in his late 30s, and when he glanced up, his eyes seemed to have a hurt _expression_ in them. He was reading a Hungarian-language newspaper, and something prompted me to say in Hungarian, “I hope you don’t mind if I glance at your paper.”
The man seemed surprised to be addressed in his native language. But he answered politely, “You may read it now. I’ll have time later on.”
During the half-hour ride to town, we had quite a conversation. He said his name was Bela Paskin. A law student when World War II started, he had been put into a German labor battalion and sent to the Ukraine. Later he was captured by the Russians and put to work burying the German dead. After the war, he covered hundreds of miles on foot until he reached his home in Debrecen, a large city in eastern Hungary.
I myself knew Debrecen quite well, and we talked about it for a while. Then he told me the rest of his story. When he went to the apartment once occupied by his father, mother, brothers and sisters, he found strangers living there. Then he went upstairs to the apartment that he and his wife once had. It also was occupied by strangers. None of them had ever heard of his family.
As he was leaving, full of sadness, a boy ran after him, calling “Paskin bacsi! Paskin bacsi!” That means “Uncle Paskin.” The child was the son of some old neighbors of his. He went to the boy’s home and talked to his parents. “Your whole family is dead,” they told him. “The Nazis took them and your wife to Auschwitz.”
Auschwitz was one of the worst Nazi concentration camps. Paskin gave up all hope. A few days later, too heartsick to remain any longer in Hungary, he set out again on foot, stealing across border after border until he reached Paris. He managed to immigrate to the United States in October 1947, just three months before I met him.
All the time he had been talking, I kept thinking that somehow his story seemed familiar. A young woman whom I had met recently at the home of friends had also been from Debrecen; she had been sent to Auschwitz; from there she had been transferred to work in a German munitions factory. Her relatives had been killed in the gas chambers. Later she was liberated by the Americans and was brought here in the first boatload of displaced persons in 1946.
Later, she was liberated by the Americans and was brought here in the first boatload of displaced persons in 1946.
Her story had moved me so much that I had written down her address and phone number, intending to invite her to meet my family and thus help relieve the terrible emptiness in her life.
It seemed impossible that there could be any connection between these two people, but as I neared my station, I fumbled anxiously in my address book. I asked in what I hoped was a casual voice, “Was your wife’s name Marya?”
He turned pale. “Yes!” he answered. “How did you know?”
He looked as if he were about to faint.
I said, “Let’s get off the train.” I took him by the arm at the next station and led him to a phone booth. He stood there like a man in a trance while I dialed her phone number.
It seemed hours before Marya Paskin answered. (Later I learned her room was alongside the telephone, but she was in the habit of never answering it because she had so few friends and the calls were always for someone else. This time, however, there was no one else at home and, after letting it ring for a while, she responded.)
When I heard her voice at last, I told her who I was and asked her to describe her husband. She seemed surprised at the question, but gave me a description. Then I asked her where she had lived in Debrecen, and she told me the address.
Asking her to hold the line, I turned to Paskin and said, “Did you and your wife live on such-and-such a street?”
“Yes!” Bela exclaimed. He was white as a sheet and trembling.
“Try to be calm,” I urged him. “Something miraculous is about to happen to you. Here, take this telephone and talk to your wife!”
He nodded his head in mute bewilderment, his eyes bright with tears. He took the receiver, listened a moment to his wife’s voice, then suddenly cried, “This is Bela! This is Bela!” and he began to mumble hysterically. Seeing that the poor fellow was so excited he couldn’t talk coherently, I took the receiver from his shaking hands.
“Stay where you are,” I told Marya, who also sounded hysterical. “I am sending your husband to you. We will be there in a few minutes.”
Bela was crying like a baby and saying over and over again. “It is my wife. I go to my wife!”
Story 2. From my personal experience.
My wife and I and two of our children, the third not having yet been born, lived in an apartment complex a little over a year ago. The place was not exactly the greatest, but not the worst, either. Suffice it to say that we had everything we both wanted and needed. One of the things we had which we cherished above everything else we owned which was physical and material was a braille bible in 36 paperback volumes, given that we still value braille as a form of reading, and the scriptures more than life. It had a special place in our walk-in closet, where it sat upon something that we joked, practically resembled a bookshelf, even though the truth is that it wasn't covered by anything or protected from anything, not even occasional dustbunnies.
On January 26, 2016, we decided to take a nap as my wife was in pain owing to an enlarged liver, sometime around 3 that afternoon. Thankfully, my mother-in-law was there and willingly took care of the baby while I did my best to comfort my wife and make sure she had anything she needed. We fell asleep at some point and were woken up to find our house flooding, thanks to a broken pipe upon the third floor. the people upstairs had gone to work and left their dish washer running, but had no way of knowing that particular pipe would burst on that day. the water traveled from their apartment down through the second floor and thoroughly drenched that apartment, but the torrent continued making its way in and eventually started leaking in massive amounts through their floor, our roof, most noticeably, in our closet.
We lost tons of clothes and other belongings that day, ranging from toys we had just bought as Christmas presents for the children, to pieces of audio and computer equipment, to our bed. The pastor of our church and his entire family came over before we all left and helped us throw tarps and the most protection we could find over everything, but there was just no getting around the fact that eventually the water was going to cover every inch of the place once called home. Dripping wet, the pastor's daughters and my mother-in-law went back and forth between the closet and her van, trying to salvage as much as they possibly could.
All of that to say this: the one thing we should have and could have lost we did not; to this day, that bible stands as a testimony of everything of great importance we have ever had which is material, not damaged by a single drop of water, practically immaculate save for where it has been. Every time I find myself reading it I'm reminded of the words of Malcom Muggeridge in the 80's, "We look back upon history and what do we see?
Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counterrevolutions, wealth accumulating and and then disbursed, one nation dominant and then another. Shakespeare speaks of the “rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.”
In one lifetime I have seen my own countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favorite song, that “God who’s made them mighty would make them mightier yet.”
I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian proclaim to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last for a thousand years; an Italian clown announce he would restart the calendar to begin with his own assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the western world as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Asoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius.
I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of military weaponry more powerful than all the rest of the world put together, so that Americans, had they so wished, could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests.
All in one little lifetime. All gone with the wind.
England now part of an island off the coast of Europe and threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy.
Hitler and Mussolini dead and remembered only in infamy.
Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped to found and dominate for some three decades.
America haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps the motorways roaring and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam and of the great victories of the Don Quixotes of the media when they charged the windmills of Watergate. All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind."
but after thousands of years we still have Christ, or, to put it as Ravi Zacharias does when he quotes these words, "Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace: The person of Jesus Christ. I present him as the way, the truth, and the life." This is what he himself presented himself as in John 14:6, leaving, as far as those of us who have taken Christ seriously are concerned, no other way to interpret such an audacious statement, and wondering, if after the rise and fall of empires, after the many revolutions and collapses of kingdoms and nations and ideals, the one that people have pontificated for this long could possibly hold any grain of truth in it. Those of us who have accepted Christ are ready to stand as the greatest evidence to God's existence, a testament to all he can do and all he has done. If nothing else, my bible, to me, is a symbol of the greatest conviction I've ever carried and wished to present to everyone.
I'd like to, if I still have your attention this far down, conclude with some hopefully humbly asked questions: was it chance that made Marcel Sternberger suddenly decide to visit his sick friend and hence take a subway line that he had never ridden before? Was it chance that caused the man sitting by the door of the car to rush out just as Sternberger came in? Was it chance that caused Bela Paskin to be sitting beside Sternberger, reading a Hungarian newspaper? Was it chance that on January 26 of 2016 my mother-in-law, who would have been gone long before our house began to flood, decided to stay just a little longer and, may have possibly saved our very lives? Was it chance that of everything we could have lost we didn't lose even one of 36 volumes of something we've taken literally from the moment we accepted Christ? Was it chance that two wonderful members of this forum were willing to give us just enough money to aford a deposit on an apartment, chance that that apartment complex did not work and that we now have a beautiful little house donated to us by a woman who couldn't bear to live in it after her husband died, chance that I'm sitting here writing all of this today? Was it chance, or was it God? You, wonderful readers, get to decide.
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