Prison Fellowship Romania

EDITORIAL

Isaia 42:3 

I admit it hasn't been easy to write down these words: I was tempted to enumerate the distinctions, the awards; the certificates (there are many) from the office of Prison Fellowship Romania.

Another though was to elaborate statistics with nice but empty numbers...

In the end I was thinking of confessing a bit about what His Grace and Mercy mean in the life of a being that desperately needs Him.

I ran back over the story of my life, the sequences that make me feel ashamed... I revizualise another way of Prison  Fellowship  Romania  that represents my life and my way of being...

Until the time of Grace and Mercy there were some reference points that were written in my heart like an iron drift-bolt...Childhood, alcohol, poverty, violence...

I was just 6 years old and had to behave as a grown-up. In the morning my mum used to send me to pasture the cow and tell me: "My dearest, it is up to you whether or not we have milk tonight!" And I used to leave the house in sadness, searching for "the greenest" grass with my heart burning thinking of all those boys that were playing.

In the evening I was talking with the cow as an adult telling her: "You realize that I did my best to feed you... Please be kind and give us more milk because we are four kids and a mum, and if dad gets up from his drunkenness..."

Dad! I want to think of him with kindness and without any trace of remorse, but I used to hate him so!

Alcohol destroyed his life (he died in an alcoholic coma). Once, we were walking together in a village on our way to grandmother and I was badly beaten by a bunch of boys. I was crying and yelling: "Daddy, help me!" But beside me there was just a drunkard, in the ditch by the road.

I was in a coma for some time and I kept on crying out: "Daddy, don't let them beat me!"

Another time I was at home with my dad who, because of his drinking, set the house on fire due to a lit cigarette...

He ran out but left me inside, in the flames, to be saved by the people from the village (even now I have a big scar on my left arm..)

Hospital again, coma again and the desperate cry that shattered the doctors: "Daddy help me!" But there was no answer ... At that moment I started to hate and to think of asking God, if He ever came across me: "How come that He is so good with some children who have good dads and so mean with others, like me?

I feel like smiling now as I remember that in the village there was a woman with six children -of several fathers- who was suffering like me. In order to comfort her I used to be brave whenever I met her and say "Don't be sad, when I grow up we will get married and I will take care of you and your children..."  The lady told the story to other people and they laughed a lot about my crazy ideas...

I never had a holiday just to play. From the age of 10 to 14 I was a shepherd during the summer being a "leader" to more than 400 sheep. I tried to make them listen to me (when it was very hot and they all gathered together) using the bludgeon until an old man told me kindly:

"My dear one, one cannot lead by beating. The sheep have to know you and love you. Put some spit on your finger and then stretch the hand so that you can know where the wind comes from and then turn the sheep against the wind and go in front of them and you'll see that they will follow you."

Then I worked at the quarry, in the mine trying, hard to take care of my mum and my three brothers. The hardest experience had poverty as a source. In school I had to think of tomorrow when I was supposed to get the scholarship. There was no food for me, and I had to wait for my colleagues to go to sleep and dream. During the day they threw away the leftovers that I used to pick up to make stores for the next day... It was so humiliating!

I can image people talking about poverty and prison. I look at them with a smile on my face because it is so easy to talk about a movie that impressed you or about a book that you read in your warm bed away from the outrageous wind of boldness and from the indescribable trauma.

People see in prisoners cast-off people, cursed folk that you have to keep away from the people that walk on His Way... Few realise the pain of the bird-trapped-in-the-cage, because the lack of liberty is the most severe illness.

In fact there are three people who have especially influenced my life... 

Charles Colson whose book BORN AGAIN devastated my heart completely. This is the book that I translated seven times, and if I had to do it ten times I would still not be satisfied with the way I did it...

He is the Man of God with a special charisma and a spiritual magnetism, who ‘contaminated' me with the love that comes from above...

 Albert Riezebos, the Christian who is a vivid example for me. He is "my twin brother" but looking at him I feel ashamed for not being like him, feeling small and powerless, wanting, one day, to become his real twin brother. He is the man without whom I could NEVER have understood what GRACE and MERCY mean...

My mum, unknown and unseen by anyone, living in a small village in Moldova.

During long nights she appears in my dreams smiling and gently emboldening me "I love you, my dear one!"

As a child I used to read the whole night, having a gas lamp by my bed. The peasants who came home after midnight with the oxen, from the field or the fair, or those who left home at four o'clock in the morning were talking together when they met "Have you seen? The drunkard's boy reads the whole night... The poor guy, he'll have the same destiny for drinking is genetic..."

Many times we were crying together in the morning and I would comfort her: "Don't cry anymore, my dear mum. Some day I will be rich and this poverty shall end..."

But, look it isn't over and I thank God for His Grace and Mercy, given to me so that I could be able to invest in people. Do not think of money, projects, programs, no, no, no. Only this, 100% is his Grace and Mercy.

I am just a reed in the wind who falters one way or another and who was once Broken...

Constantin Asavoaie