Tarzier Memoirs

Part II   War and Awakening

 

SPIRIT SPEAKS




Lidere, like so many villages deep in the Latvian countryside, was a small collection of wooden houses, log cabins, and two-story barns. Further out one found orchards, plowed fields, and groves of pine and birch trees. Lidere stood approximately 20 km (12 miles) from our house in Druviena. The time was summer, 1917. World War I dragged wearily into its fourth year, but still, names like Wilson and Petain, Verdun and the Balkans, were only words to Latvians. What we knew in our bones was deep hurt from generations of oppression, by Poles, Swedes, Germans, and especially Russians. What we knew was loss and grief. After three years of war, there was not a family that had not lost a son, a husband, a father, a friend. We were desperate for peace. We were ready for a miracle.


The village of Lidere was home to a score of Baptists, officially members of the Riga Matthew Street Church, nearly a day away by rail..Only a major ceremony of baptism or marriage justified such a trip, if it could be afforded. Of course, if people can’t come to religion, religion will usually come to them, at least in peacetime. The Riga mother church had, before the war, sent ministers to conduct services in Lidere on a regular basis—I would later perform a similar service, traveling from Riga to Zilupe and back and sleeping on railway station benches on Sunday night. However, now the front lines cut off Lidere from Riga, and the mother church had suspended any help or contact with the remote congregation until better political times.


The Lidere Baptists felt scattered, alone, perhaps even abandoned by the God whom they had vowed to serve. Baptists tended to isolate themselves in any case, and in return the peasantry called them names and made up stories of secret, filthy deeds under cover of darkness. Especiallyduring the war, feelings ran high in the population. Any excuse was good enough to vent rage. For example, even before the days of the Revival, our father Karlis, a Lutheran in good standing, was singled out as the “Bible Stallion.” The Lutheran Church, rigid and institutionalized after hundreds of years of tenured power, was of little help to the Lidere Baptists. It turned a blind eye to the local populace’s stream of ridicule and gossip. So the small band of Baptists had no official status, temple, or minister. Outsiders, the easy target of resentments and prejudice floating free among the population, they needed to renew their spiritual commitment. They needed solace, and that could clearly come only from God Himself.


A carpenter and housebuilder by the name of Janis Skraba rose to the challenge. With no formal training or degrees, not an ordained minister nor part of the church establishment, Skraba was an unlikely spiritual leader. But he did offer his spacious house for meetings, and the Baptists wasted no time accepting the offer. Skraba’s house quickly became a lively place of community among equals, a place of laughter, song, and the deep experience of prayer.


Released from the bonds of official dogma, the Baptists went on to push the boundaries of spiritual experience. They committed themselves to a week of prayer and fasting at Skraba’s house. I must mention that this happened in the middle of summer, hay-making season. Latvian summer lasts a few precious weeks at best, and as long as weather permits, farmers work twenty-hour days making hay for winter feed. The neighbors shook their heads: the Baptists were off praying instead! Winter, not summer, is the time to find religion! The Baptists expect God to mow the meadow and angels to dry the hay and store it in the hayloft. They’ve lost their minds from too much Bible reading. But by mid-week, continuous rain made the hay too soggy to work. Rumors now followed another line: The Baptists made it rain. They sold their souls to the Evil One.


Meanwhile, the group continued to pray and fast and to thank the Lord for the rain which gave them permission, so to speak, to seek His guidance. Over and over, for hours on end, they sang the popular hymn:

“Showers of blessings
Showers of blessings we need.
Mercy drops ‘round us are falling,
But for showers we plead.”

By week’s end, in a session of profound prayer, one by one they received their request in startling abundance. God Himself spoke through the mouths of the people. The light of Spirit filled them with unbounded joy. Love beyond human understanding replaced their fear and desolation. They were indeed drenched in a shower of blessings!
Although they did not know it then, this was only the first flame of Spirit. Like wildfire, it would soon ignite tens of thousands through the Latvian countryside and eventually reach the churches of Riga itself. When the skies cleared, the transformed peasants fanned out onto the fields and went about haymaking with unparalleled energy. They filled their barns way ahead of the neighbors. Looking through the green lenses of envy and isolation, the population now whispered that supernatural powers, not necessarily benign, had cleared the skies and finished the harvest for the Baptists.


Joy begs to be shared. Skraba’s group contacted the Lutheran pastor, who again was of no help. He merely mouthed tired dogma: God bestowed direct spiritual experience on some people some time in a distant past, certainly not now, and not on a ragtag band of illiterate peasants! Having been dismissed so archly by the Lutheran clergy, they set their sights on the Riga Baptist Church, where hopefully they could tell of the spiritual richness of that unforgettable week. However, German troops were hunkered down in their trenches on one bank of the Jugla River, Russians on the other, making impossible a trip to Riga.


The group was again pushed to their one choice, to ask for divine guidance. In prayer, Janis Skraba received another vision. The group should be patient and wait. They would be making the trip to Riga in the winter, in three horse-drawn sleds. Skraba saw three horses pulling sleds through the snow, one brown, another black, and the third dappled black and white. The dream mapped out a route, first to the mother church on Matthew Street, then to the Golgotha Church on Hospitalu iela.


They discussed the dream at length. Someone sensibly pointed out that the front stood between them and Riga. Moreover, they owned brown horses and black horses, but nobody had a dappled black and white horse. Surely Spirit was off this time. Meanwhile, harvest time ended, and snow blanketed the rolling Latvian countryside. The Russian army collapsed and retreated east, and the German army occupied the whole of the Baltics, including the Vidzeme region where the group lived. When the road to Riga opened, they hastened to embark on the long-postponed visit to the mother church.


The Skraba group made the trip in three sleds, pulled by three horses. One horse was black, another brown. The third horse that showed up at Skraba’s house on that morning, on loan for the trip, was a dappled black and white horse. Reaching the city two days later, they visited Pastor Janis Inkis at the Matthew Street Church. Fortunately, Inkis exceeded their wildest expectations. He prayed with them, listened to the story with tears, and would eventually join the Revival and become one of its leaders.


Their next stop was the Golgotha Church. Pastor Aboltins, too, was deeply moved and prayed to share the group’s loving energy. He encouraged them to continue their direct contact with God and offered the support of his church. The group had never been to Hospitalu iela and the Golgotha Church, but they needed not ask for directions. They literally arrived with Godspeed. The route had been clearly shown them in the vision, so long ago it seemed but a dream.


Skraba’s group in no time swelled to more than one hundred members. They soon founded their own church, the Revival Baptist Church. Even before they became an established congregation, though, they had to share the news of what they had seen and felt. Groups from that movement made their way on horse-drawn carts around a 60-mile triangle in central Latvia, between the towns of Lidere, Velena, and Gatarta. They were not sophisticated evangelists. They were simple people who told their story with genuine emotion and tears in their eyes. On their way to Velena they would come rest their horses at our farm. Why our farm? It was conveniently located, and Father had by now joined the movement. By his authority as one of the Tellers at the Tirzieshu Brethren Assembly, he invited the Baptists to speak to our family, as well as any neighbor who cared to join in.


In our despair following the loss of our father, we welcomed any source of comfort, so we embraced the Revival with the innocence of newborn babes. Today we have a name for the phenomena that started in 1917. They are called “charismatic gifts,” a word found in the Bible in Corinthians I, Chapters 12 and 14. But to us these were completely new and unexpected happenings. Our mistake was to accept anything that took place as coming directly from God. We did not know how to discriminate God’s Word from that of man, to separate wheat from chaff. We thought that those who had received spiritual gifts of prophecy, visions, and speaking in tongues, had a direct line to God, and that anything they said was Gospel. Eventually disturbing and misleading phenomena surfaced in our meetings, as the group tried to elicit the supernatural to reinforce its faith.


One current of thought out of the Skraba group was that the day of salvation had ended and that after 1922 no one would be able to accept Christ or be saved. Whoever was willing to listen was urged to flee from the approaching Antichrist rule on earth. Brazil was chosen as the safe haven for the Bride of Christ, the Bride being, as a group, those who believed with all sincerity. This choice was based on the book of Revelation, Chapter 12, though other currents of thought played a part, especially a popular book by Austrian Stefan Zweig, who called Brazil “Land of the Future.”*


I must say that the chaff held nuggets of real grain. Several of the revelations later proved correct. I especially remember a vision received by Janis Skraba, during the group’s visit to Velena church. We were all deep in prayer when Skraba began to speak. A map of Latvia unfolded before his eyes. A hand covered the map and pushed the Red Terror to the east, setting the country free. Along with this hopeful message, Skraba also received word that the protective hand would last only a season, and then the Terror would return. True to the vision, Latvia was free for a sweet two decades after the signing, in 1920, of the Treaty of Riga. In 1939, the Baltic States were forced to ask for Soviet “protection” from the Nazis, and less than a year later, Communist Russia’s tanks rolled in again. God had indeed withdrawn His protective hand.

Seeds of Spirit

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