Achive article 27

Heidi’s challenging but true story

Heidi is about 50 years old with a contagious smile. She tells her story on a sweltering Sunday afternoon as we sit in the shade of a large oak tree in the local park.

“I was born in Hungary when Communism reigned – an atheistic State, into a family of teachers, and I became one too.

When I was 12 a classmate at school, daughter of a Pastor, invited me to visit her church.

I was very excited but when I asked my mother if I could go with her to church she immediately told me no! if I were to go she might lose her job! The years passed and I forgot about the incident until one day when I was digging through a pile of old family records I discovered a baptismal certificate of the Roman Catholic Church with my name on it. When I asked mother about it, she hurriedly took it from me and without any explanation told me not to talk about it again.

I completed my studies and at University met the man who would become my husband. He was from Ghana and my family did not accept the fact that I was going to marry an African. My father said that he didn’t want to see me ever again. But I’m rather stubborn and I married him and we had our first daughter and then a son.

We then left for Ghana. My daughter was a year and a half old and my son, whom I was still breast-feeding, was six months old. When we arrived in Africa, between December and April, the overall situation was tense but acceptable. Gradually the economic situation worsened until there was nothing in any of the shops. You couldn’t buy any food and hunger was all around us. In those days we only had one meal a day made up of corn and bananas which were sold at small stands in the streets. One day, my tiny meal was wrapped in a sheet torn from a book and because my hunger for learning was the same as my hunger for food, in a country where there were no books I seized the opportunity and read it. “Don’t worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” were the first words my eyes fell on, and these were followed by the words of Christ. It was a page from the Bible! My husband’s upbringing had been in a Christian family and so he had some familiarity with these words, but he was now becoming a Hindu and so no longer had any desire to satisfy my curiosity. So concluded another episode in my life.

In the end the misery and hunger were such that my mother sent me money for a ticket to come back to Hungary with the two children. My husband, in order to complete the scholarship requirements which had let him do his University degree abroad, still had to stay and work for 4 years. In actual fact our separation lasted 8 years but it was during this time that I finally had the chance to explore Christianity. Knowing only about the Roman Catholic Church from my baptismal certificate, for the next 3 years I began to satisfy my curiosity for learning following the teaching of the Catechism. We never used the Bible. We studied various commentaries and theological writers and I gave myself wholeheartedly to the study. I passionately wanted to learn but still wasn’t finding what I was desperately (and somewhat confusedly) searching for.

The return of my husband revealed how wide was the gap between us and the difficulties we really had. His own religious search took him further away from the material world and he was less and less interested in the family. Then came our third child and I took on the responsibility for his education even though I was still teaching. It wasn’t easy. I even lost my job when the authorities discovered that my husband was from Africa and that our children were not white.

At the religious level things were not going any better. The Roman Catholic church had discovered that I hadn’t been married in a religious ceremony and convinced me that I had to do it. For my husband, however, this was totally out of the question. He believed that a civil ceremony was perfectly adequate. So between a priest who was wanting to ‘adjust’ the records, friends in my catechism course who were telling me to become a Hindu, I ended up throwing everything out.

At the same time, my two elder children began to attend the church to which I had been invited many years earlier, and members of that church had started praying for me. Right then I became pregnant again, and instead of having just one baby I discovered that I had triplets – 3 little boys!! I had read God’s promise to Abraham that he would become father of a great nation, but I never thought that anything like that would ever happen to me!!

The pregnancy was difficult. I was confined to bed and practically totally alone. I won’t go into the details of what it means to become mother to triplets when you already have 3 children. . . but this was the way God had prepared for me and which He would use to mould my character and bring me to what He had planned for me.

One day one of my older children told me that Christ had entered his life, and his happiness was so contagious that finally I, too, began to go to the church and study the Bible. I, too, surrendered to the Lord. Bit by bit, step by step, everyone of our children has come to the Lord. But life in Hungary was very tough. With their dark skin they were victims of abuse and bullying. So, with my husband, we decided to go to England, to London. And after the first day of school my three triplets burst into the house saying; ”Mummy, there are lots of coloured children in our school, and even our teacher is black!” I found a church near our house and for the first time in my life I went to a worship service and sat next to a coloured lady. She was a Ghanian lady who had married a white English man, and they only had coloured girls (like my own sons) who were just beautiful. Her one grief was that she had just lost a son, but we became very close friends and now my son has become engaged to her daughter and we both go to the same church in London.

What can I say about my life? Really I can only thank God for all these difficulties. They have been many, many, and often I have been discouraged and felt totally alone. But finally I came to Christ and found the answer to all my needs. He has filled every vacuum in my life! It’s true that my husband hasn’t changed, nor has my father whom I’ve not seen again. We live in a very small house with a high rent to pay – 7 people in just 3 rooms, but I thank God for all of this. I’ve learned to depend on Him at every step. I’ve learned obedience and I’ve received so much of His joy. Perhaps by the standards of society I don’t have much, but in reality I have everything that anyone could want from life – peace with God!

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