Ten years in Russia - From FSAOF blog:
1993 Captain Sven Ljungholm
Commander, Ukraine – Moldova
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said when presented the
Nobel Prize in 1970:
“We must go out into battle – one word of truth outweighs the whole world “
1992
As
I write this my wife and I are sharing our last week-end as commanding
officers of the Moscow Central Corps, encamped with one hundred seventy
five of the corps’ uniformed young people, the maximum number of persons
the Russian Foreign Ministry resort can accommodate. It’s on the Moscow
River near Camp Victory the setting of the corps’ summer Bible, music
and fellowship camp programs the last two years. Many of our young
people were saved and undertook their recruit classes there.
Included
in the corps young people make up is a first-rate singing company of
sixty members, some who are also included in the Corps Cadet group
numbering almost one hundred, the national folk dance troupe of twenty,
and the fourteen member timbrel brigade.
The
repeated phrase my wife and I have shared this weekend is; God has done
an incredible work in the lives of these young people - where were they
a year ago? – And how did God direct the other four hundred uniformed
soldiers the Army's way?
It
was just 19 months ago since our first Moscow SA meeting, and 12 months
ago today that General Eva Burrows presented us with the Moscow Cental
Corp's new standard with the tricolours our soldiers had come to
treasure, but this time with Blood and Fire spelled out in Cyrillic
fonts. And with it, the pulpit cloth with the SA crest in its original
Russian design incorporating the Orthodox cross. More than five hundred
Russians, young and a bit older, have been ‘baptized’ into our sacred
Moscow fellowship beneath its colors.
How did God bring them together - and to what end?
Often
in these last months my thoughts have been thrown back to the times
when I visited my retired Salvation Army officer grandparents as a
child. I explored every inch of their small retirement quarters in
Sweden, and often my “exploration” included their tiny darkened closet.
There, seated on the floor, I would sift through their memorabilia,
items collected and saved from a lifetime of service, items precious
mostly to themselves. Their greatest treasures, perhaps because it
represented all that they had salvaged when fleeing Russia in the
company of a handful of other pioneer officers in 1918, were bound up
and kept on the corner shelf. The closeted items included a wooden
bonnet box, some rubles, a tri-coloured prayer rug, an icon removed from
the wall of the army hall in Moscow, grandfather’s Russian Bible, a
Russian SA song book, and grandfather’s brittle paged diary.
As
an eight-year-old boy and again the following two years when I visited,
I read my grandfathers diary from cover to… well to page 46 at least,
where halfway down the page his entries halted abruptly. I sat and
closed my eyes and dreamt that I too was a part of the brave bands whose
victories he recorded; I too stood on Gorky Street in Central Moscow,
as a Salvation Army officer, and like him, led ‘poor Russians’ to
Christ. They were wonderful victories - he praised God on every page;
for the opportunity to serve, and each page ended with a special
uplifted prayer, speckled with ‘hallelujahs’ and ‘Slava Bogu’ (Praise
God) for those who came, sought and found salvation. As I matured the
diary and its sentiments became ever more meaningful, challenging and
inspiring.
End Part Three
Sven Ljungholm
Liverpool
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