Hot summer night

It’s a heat wave right now in Portland, and I spent most of the day in my “cave” (right) and out of the hot sun, reading my bible (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians), and napping on and off. I’m a rain forest kind of guy as a general rule. This post is not going to be about the weather, but it explains why I’m still up at 10:30 p.m. and why I went out to the local supermarket for a cold drink and a salad to bring home.
Too hot to cook.

So… I also had an ulterior motive.
A friend of mine (we’re about the same age) is the night shift green grocer at this supermarket, and I haven’t seen him since before I left for Japan. He’s also an Orthodox brother, and so I wanted to greet him, find out how his Pascha went, and tell him about mine. Both of us would be away from home for Pascha, an unusual thing for us, he would be in California, and I in Japan.

“Christós anésti!” I said as I tapped him on the shoulder from behind. “Alithós anésti,” he responded, as we shook hands and then, almost immediately, “How do you say it in Japanese?” (We like to learn how to say the Pascha greeting “Christ is risen! Truly He is risen!” in as many languages as we can.)
“Haristósu fukkátsu!” I said, and he repeated it, and “Jitsu ni fukkátsu!” and he mimicked me again. My friend is a good linguist, as are most Orthodox who are fluent in Greek as well as English. Learning Greek, I think, somehow grows your ability to learn languages.

I told my friend about Japan, as he sorted Vidalia sweet onions, removing the bad ones as we talked. A life-changing experience for me, I told him. For us, it was liberating to be in a country where almost everything made sense, and where the people seemed happy, contented and secure. My friend told me about his visit to California, where he had a one-on-one visit with our bishop, Metropolitan, Gerásimos.
“Was it a good visit?” I asked.

We talked for awhile about his visit, and then somehow the conversation turned to how my friend became a Christian. I have known this man for almost twenty years, and I had never heard him give his testimony. It’s not like Greek Orthodox go around giving their testimonies, although I have heard quite a few, all of them inspiring. The testimony I heard tonight is one I want to share because it highlights how the faithfulness of a single Christian can help bring an unbeliever to Christ.

My friend was raised an Episcopalian, left the church as an adolescent, went to college as an atheist, and studied a lot of philosophy there, confirming more or less his atheistic conclusions. Our backgrounds are somewhat different, but I too went to college, minoring in Philosophy, and so we read a lot of the same authors.
My drifting was into the “New Age” religions. I thought that Jesus was God, but that church was rot. My friend had come to similar conclusions about church, but as to God—no such thing.

What happened to him was, after he got married to a Greek Orthodox girl (and he could do that, even as an atheist, because he was a baptized Episcopalian, which doesn’t say a lot for our church at the time!), he and his wife had as friends another couple, a young Orthodox priest and presbytera. They visited each other a lot, and did things together. My friend was honest with this priest and they had many discussions as to why he was an atheist, and unable to accept the reality of Christ and the Church. He had all the answers, and the priest knew that. But one day, the priest said, “Okay, so you know better than to believe in God and the whole church thing! Reason cannot convince you. But let me challenge you with this—would you agree to learn how to pray?” Thinking that this was a joke, perhaps, or maybe not thinking it was a serious challenge, my friend responded, “Yes, I will learn how to pray,” and then he simply forgot about it for the rest of the evening.

Next morning, early, he heard a knock at his door. “Who could be bothering me at this hour?” he muttered as he went to see who it was. He opened the door, and there was the priest, dressed in his blacks, carrying a prayer book, some candles, and an icon. “I’m here to teach you how to pray.”

He went into the living room, cleared off a spot on the fireplace mantle, stood up the icon and lit the candles, showing my friend in effect how to build an Orthodox prayer shelf. Then he made him stand next to him, side by side, showed him how to make the sign of the cross, how to bow, and then recite the prayers and readings of the morning prayer. Discussion had been given its chance. Now it was time for doing.

This went on for a very long time, day after day, and my friend, an atheist still, continued following his friend the priest in offering due praise, glory and petition to God—who he didn't believe in.
The young priest kept coming back, day after day, and they prayed together. After a while, my friend began to experience spiritual attacks. The priest had told him to expect this, but he didn’t believe it. Then they started. He didn’t tell me what these attacks consisted of, but well I know what they could have been. So he answered his attacker, “So you do exist after all!” and found himself believing in the existence of the devil before he believed in the existence of God. Strangely like my own conversion, though he knew what was the right thing to do, he seemed to have no power in himself to do it, to force himself to speak to God and personally confess belief in Him. This is how he got over it…

When he found himself stuck in this strange place, he frantically flipped through the prayer book the priest had left him, hoping to find some prayer to read that might make his petition known to the Father. Near the end of the book, he found a prayer for conversion, composed by John Chrysostom. In the prayer was a phrase something like,
“…rescue me, because the ravenous wolf is pursuing me.”
My friend prayed the prayer for his own conversion to happen, but he still felt nothing, and he let it be.

The next morning, when he awoke, he awoke as a Christian. His each and every doubt gone, his rebellion quashed, his arguments defeated, now his only desire was to get out of bed and make it real. Now, when his friend the priest knocked at his door, he would have something important to tell him.

Glory to God for all things.