I visited Russia recently on a cruise and as part of the trip we got to meet with WWII veterans. Hearing what they had to go through during the war I just had to write it down and pass it on to anyone who will listen. The war has left so many dead that, in the former Soviet Union republics, virtually every family was touched by it. Many families lost their fathers and mothers to the war. Others were wounded or captured. The list is long. This is a small attempt to preserve their stories so that we may remember the burden of war.

Raissa

“As soon as the war started, I volunteered for the army. I wasn’t drafted, I went of my own will to defend my motherland. I was sixteen years old. First, they placed me in a nursing school to learn how to bandage the wounded. After a month of training I was sent to the front – to Stalingrad. I arrived there when the city was under siege. Above us the Germans were flying bombers. They dropped bombs, railroad tracks, barrels… anything they could to shock the people below. When I arrived, the city and everything around me was on fire. It all burned. The tanks burned, the buildings burned, the wheat fields burned, even the water burned. A large oil tank spilled into the water and it burned. Imagine me, a little girl of only 16 years being there. I was scared and confused. I simply sat down and cried.”

“There were many wounded. My task was to find those people who were alive and to get them to a field hospital. Mostly, I had to drag them across the battle field on top of a trench coat. When I said I was little, it wasn’t just age. I’m not very tall, nor very muscular. These guys I had to drag across the field were tank operators. They were from Siberia. They weighed up to a hundred kilograms (200 lb.) and I was all alone trying to get them to the hospital. When a tank was shot and there were wounded people or survivors inside, they would open and close the top hatch of the tank. This is how I found them. I remember trying to climb a tank and having trouble doing so. The man inside was also very heavy and I couldn’t have lifted him out of the tank if it wasn’t for a couple of men inside who helped me. He was severely burned. His hip was shattered. When we finally got off the tank, we sometimes walked on three legs, sometimes walked on our knees and sometimes crawled our way off the battlefield. I did get that man to the hospital though.”

“At some later point, our army was surrounded and I was captured along with many others. The Germans brought us to a barn where they kept the POWs. They didn’t care of you were a man or a woman. They just pointed me toward a cot padded with raw wet hay. That was my bed. In the morning, an angry german woman came with an angry german shepherd. She brought us out to work. She would sick the shepherd on us and keep it within centimeters of us on the leash. I was afraid. It seemed that the dog would just devour us. The woman was just as angry. She made us carry buckets full of wet sand that weighed forty kilos (80 lb.) each to the road that the germans were building. Just so that we wouldn’t die, the germans fed us an awful mixture. They would take flour and dump it into water just enough to make the mixture look glue-like. That’s what we would eat. We were constantly hungry. Many of us were swollen from hunger.”

“Eventually, the germans put us on a train headed for Germany. We were riding in a wooden car and a few of our guys would knock out the planks in the bottom of the car and offer anyone willing to jump down onto the train tracks. Of course, the train was going at full speed and it was very dangerous. Not everyone jumped. I did. When I landed, it was very scary, I was between huge train wheels and the train cars were passing overhead. I tried to lie motionless until the last car passed. When I stood up, I was free from my german captors but I was deep behind enemy lines. The Germans occupied everything around me. But what can one do? I somehow had to survive…”
[Raissa did not go into detail about her life within enemy territory.]

“The Russian army eventually liberated the territory where I stayed and I once again joined the front. I made myself a promise to go all the way to Berlin, to Reichstag. I went through Poland, Czech Republic and reached Berlin. When I finally stood at the Reichstag, I bent down to the ground and picked up a piece of shrapnel. With it, I scratched on the wall of the Reichstag: ‘I will remember’. And I remember until this day.”

More thoughts about good and evil:

If God would allow any unbelievers to enter heaven it would be worse than hell for them. How can those who detest prayer and praise to God bear to remain eternally in a place which does this continually? If they felt uncomfortable for only an hour in chuch doing this, think of the eternal discomfort if they had to do it forever. Or, to put it more strongly, since heaven is a place where men will bow in worship to God, how could it be loving for God to force men to go there when they do not will to worship God? It seems more congruent with the nature of divine love not to compel men to love Him against their wills.
Surely no one wishes to go to hell, but some certainly do will it. God refuses to coerce anyone into loving Him because forced love is rape. But He demonstrates a tough love by allowing people to go their own way. If God’s perfect and steadfast love has failed to win them, what could possibly change their minds? Hell is simply a place where the unbeliever is no longer bothered by God pestering him with His love.
Geisler & Brooks, “When Skeptics Ask”

I think I have heard this notion a thousand times and yet every time it strikes me how simple it is. Hell is not just a place of physical pain. The biggest punishment one can endure is the eternal absence of God! C.S. Lewis correctly stated: “The gates of hell are locked from within.” If God Himself cannot convince someone that love is the only true thing that matters then who could? People lock themselves up in hell and hate God for it when they have refused God’s call and willingly chose the absence of God.

What I wish to talk about today are the gods of the past. Before many knew the one true God, people on Earth have worshiped countless others. There were the Sumerian gods, the Egyptian gods, the Greek gods, the Roman gods, the Chinese gods, the Indian gods and so on and so forth. Perhaps looking at this multitude one might become confused and say: “Well… where are all of these gods now? Aren’t they “dead”? How is the Christian God any different then?”

Implied in these questions is a statement about the nature of gods in general. Because we have so many gods that have been imagined, worshiped and ultimately forgotten, one might consider that our current “fad” with Christianity is just another echo of the distant past. This is the type of statement I frequently see on popular atheist websites, or in some of the more recent peer-produced media. Typically, it is thrown out as a challenge… to show that the Christian faith does not stand up to even the simplest of tests.

Fortunately, this question is not difficult to answer – it is a simple exercise in logic. Let’s walk through it then…

Many people think of the spiritual world as a bi-polar entity. There either is one or there isn’t. Either there are gods or there are no gods. From this perspective, the conclusion about Christianity seems obvious. We observe that Christianity involves a God; We also observe that there have been many gods in the past and that they are all dead; thus we conclude that the Christian God is just a figment of imagination and will “die” with the rest of the gods. Simply put – there is no God!

But let’s look at what we just said more closely. Many people might be convinced by the logic of the argument and I agree that the logic is correct. However, the problem is not with the logic… it is with the assumptions that we set up to derive our conclusions. What is wrong is the statement: Either there are gods or there are no gods. This statement actually does not encompass Christianity! Everything we know about Christianity says: There is ONE God. And this quantity qualifier matters! So the correct statement about the world should instead read: Either there are many gods, or there is only one God, or there are no gods.

Now that we have teased out this subtle difference let’s look at the huge impact it has on the conclusions we draw about our world. From the onset the Jewish and Christian God has claimed to be the only one. If this is to be true, then all other gods must be ‘dead’. If even one single god of the past is true, Christianity would be false. What do we observe? Every other god is indeed dead! Does this prove that Christianity is true? No, certainly it is not enough to prove Christianity. But in no way can we conclude that the imagined gods of the past disprove Christianity. On the contrary, it goes hand in hand with claims by the Christian God about His being – He claims to be the one (and only) unchangeable I am!

In conclusion, this is a very good example of how starting with incorrect assumptions and then using flawless logic will still lead us to incorrect results. We can arrive at disparate conclusions given even one false statement. I think, in general, it is good to consider such exercises in logic as they also strengthen the faith once we determine where such statements fall short.

I hope this post to be one of many containing bits of wisdom gathered from books new and old. I wish to share what I have learned in the past year.

Francis De Sales writes:

Honors, dignities, and rank are like saffron, which thrives best and grows most plentifully when trodden under foot. It is no honor to be handsome if a man prizes himself for it; if beauty is to have good grace, it should be unstudied. Learning dishonors us when it inflates our minds and degenerates into mere pedantry. If we are demanding about rank, place, and title, then we not only expose our qualities to examination, judgment, and condemnation but make all of them base and contemptible. Just as honor is an excellent thing, when given to us freely, so also it becomes base when demanded, sought after, and asked for. A peacock spreads his tail in self-admiration and by the very act of raising up his beautiful feathers he ruffles all the others and displays his own ugliness.

What a statement! True honor is not earned by touting your deeds loudest in the crowd. It is not earned by demands that others acknowledge your work. True honor does not boast, it is simply evident from the humble thoughts and deeds of those who possess it.