Our small team and family packed our belongings into a van and a caravan and left Scandinavia on a whim, going into east Europe with little support, no back-up plan, not knowing where we would end up, and with no idea of what was going to happen on the way.
If you look at it logically, and especially with a "25-years-later-perspective," you might say that what we did was outlandish and even foolhardy. However I shouldn't call it a "whim", it was more of a "call", and a feeling that this was what we were supposed to do.
Before I get too far let me go back a little in time to explain what led up to this particular series of events.
I had been in South East Asia for seven years. From Thailand and Sri Lanka to Malaysia and Singapore and then back to Thailand - the land of smiles. Perhaps some day I will get around to tell some stories from our adventures there.
Among many other projects I was helping to get Christian literature printed in the Kampuchean language and into the big refugee camps inside the Thai border where a lot of people were fleeing from the infamous Pol Pot's "killing fields". We called that mission "The Healing Fields."
I had no plans of returning to Europe, but in 1989 the Lord spoke to my heart three times about going back to Scandinavia. I'm not the most intuitive fellow, so it didn't sink in until I heard it loud and clear the third time. As it turned out, although I didn't quite understand why, the Lord knew what He was doing.
So after finishing things up in Thailand, we flew back to Scandinavia with a Polish LOT airline. The plane was so old and rickety it couldn't climb very high. I suspect it was a leftover plane from a Russian fleet. We flew right through a big storm with thunder and lightening crashing around us as we passed the Himalayas.
With a re-fuelling stop-over in Tashkent Uzbekistan, and a change of plane in Warsaw, we arrived in Denmark shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. This, we realized later, was the reason the Lord had called us back to Europe.
Missionaries from various churches and denominations had already been operating clandestinely behind the so called "Iron Curtain" for some years, but with the fall of the Berlin wall the floodgates started to open.
Teams found a tremendous spiritual hunger for God after seventy years of atheist Communist rule. Colourful Gospel pamphlets became popular, and missionaries were bringing them in by the hundreds of thousands. When we loaned one of the teams our caravan for a trip, they loaded it up with so much paper that the springs bent, and upon their return the caravan was considerably closer to the ground :-(
I got involved with the logistics of finding sponsors for paper, ink and printing of the pamphlets, doing layout, checking colour separations and stuff like that, as I had gained some experience with these procedures while in Thailand. Therefore, I did not get the opportunity to go in myself.
In the mid-1990's the world was a different place. We didn't use mobiles, the Internet was only just getting started, emails and communications were slow. People were not yet suffering from "information overload". A few years prior, youth could hitch-hike from Europe to India - and they did! There was no "War on terror," and things were at least perceived to be more peaceful.
I'm sharing these stories to the best of my ability from memory. They are without at doubt shaped by my own perspective - the way I experienced them! I guess that's how it is with remembrances, we see and interpret things based on our personality, culture and upbringing, and what impresses us as individuals. I'm sure some of the people involved saw it through another pair of glasses, and perhaps had a completely different view of these events.
Furthermore, what I knew and believed 25 years ago is not exactly the way I see things today. We all learn and grow, and hopefully so did I! I would like to believe that as we pass through life we gain experience and sometimes change our views and become a little bit wiser.
Please bear with me if I happen to get some of the times and places and the order of events mixed up. The chapters are not necessarily in strict chronological order and some of the names have also been changed.
Let me also apologize beforehand if you end up getting bored with detailed descriptions of mechanics. You'll have to forgive God for sending an old motorhead out as a missionary - it must be His fault :-) Trust me, I'm only telling you the half of it! Perhaps He simply used my many mechanical messes to drive me to my knees!
I am a pretty hard nut to crack because of my pride, stubbornness and self-righteousness - I know that - so in my brief yielded moments I have told God to go ahead and take out the sledgehammer in order to remind me that He is God and I am not!
Back to my story...
In the fall of 1994 we had moved up to one of those nice big Swedish wooden houses on the outskirts of Gothenborg, living together with two other families of volunteers.
That Christmas the children sang at homes for the elderly and in various other places around Gothenborg.
During these times I was also starting to learn to get the Lord's leading step by step - see "My Crystal Ball".
It was a learning process, but I figured that even if we got our signals wrong the Lord would not fault us for moving in the direction we "thought" He was leading, so I was simply trying to follow through on what I believed He was showing us to do. My biggest problem was (and still is) that I kept forgetting to ask Him what to do - but that's another story.
In any case, we experienced again and again that once things got started in the direction He was showing, one thing would lead to another and we were swept along with events.
This is the setting. This is where the ball started rolling. The next chapter is about the 1995 United Nation Social Summit in Copenhagen where we were present at the NGO forum.
Chapter 2 ~ 1995 Social Summit and a Miracle Car ( TOC )