Translation into English: Nardina Alongi
Bibliographical information from the German National Library:
The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography, detailed bibliographical data is available on the Internet at www.dnb.de
© 2019
Produced and published by: BoD – Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt.
ISBN: 9783749492077
Most people only write their memoires at the end of their earthbound lives, which is perfectly understandable. Mine are a bit different. I was only 42 when I wrote my first book, which amongst other things included a brief outline of my life up to then. At that time I had no intention of writing a follow-up to this book, especially as only ten years have passed since then. The situation seems unusual to many people, but what has happend in my life since 27.11.2011 is also not easy to explain. To cut a long story short, that was the day I turned to Jesus. In other words, I've been a born-again Christian ever since. I would now like to take you on a journey through the first few years of my new life and I hope that reading this might just get one or two of you thinking. The title of this book might surprise some readers, but there’s a very simple explanation. I started working as a writer in 2008. I was doing a lot of walking back then, which was a new experience for me. The result was that I was able to write down the things I realised then as I was hiking around the highlands and the uplands. The title of the book that came out in 2010 was “From A Couch Potato to a Dedicated Hiker, The Story of a Completely Normal City Slicker”. At that time I was mainly interested in showing that anyone can get motivated to become active without spending very much so they can feel better both physically and mentally. This is because hiking is one of nicest leisure activities I know. You don’t need any special skills or talents even if you’re covering a longer distance in the great outdoors. For me, the aim of any hike is to confirm for myself that I have achieved something. And lots of people who have also recently discovered this hobby themselves, or who have always loved nature, will agree with me on this point. But as I said, in this book I also described the life I led as a young person and later as an adult in two different social systems.
Another one of my books appeared on the market about a year later, in which I wrote about all the things I have experienced as I was travelling in 2009. This one year was particularly important for me, because I was able to make four trips abroad in such a short space of time. In some cases, the things I realised on my travels even changed how I see the world. In Denmark, Egypt, South Africa and in the USA I was able to forge contacts with the people living there and get to know their way of life and culture a little better. With the differences between the countries, the views of the people who live in them are equally different. Once the second book, the “Concise Story of a Globetrotter, Travelog of a Quite Common City Slicker” had been published in 2011, the English version of the book came onto the market a year later. This was then followed by a creative break, because I had a lot of catching up to do as someone who had recently become a Christian. I wanted to study the Bible so I devoured a lot of secondary literatury to help me understand the Bible. And I swore to myself that I would only write another book when someone asked me to. I had actually had the idea for a new book for a while. I wanted to write about my experiences, but I kept on pushing this plan back. But I did put up a lot of Facebook posts, because I wanted to share the things I had realised with the people around me. Since 2015 I’ve also had the page “Jesus gibt Leben” (Jesus Gives Life) on Facebook. I collect donations for an orphanage in Cameroon on there. With this it’s just astonishing how much Jesus has also got involved in my life, because of course the idea for this project did not just come from me. That’s the reason I gave the book this title.
In May 2014 someone did actually ask me if I wanted to write a book for him to publish. There were various reasons why the manuscript was not published initially. But I did start writing again. In this book I would now like to tell you what happened in the first seven years of my new life as someone who had become a Christian. Perhaps with the help of my story, one or two people might recognise what happens to someone who devotes their heart and soul to God. Anyone who has turned to Christ is actually a new person and this starts a gradual but positive change for the better in nearly every case. People tell the most amazing stories, in which they acknowledge how much Jesus has transformed their lives. Criminals have even become pastors and drug addicts have become social workers, because these people, who are human beings just like us, are particularly good at recognising the situation that other people who have lost their way are in and showing them how they can escape from misery and despair. God particlulary loves to take unto Himself those who are disadvantage by life. It is even more interesting when people who have made it their job to campaign against Christians eventually recognise the truth because of cetain events in their life and later become a follower of Christ and preach the Gospel themselves. They bring to life the story of Paul the Apostle. For me personally, these facts and the hope that many more people will convert to Jesus are the motivation for me to face God's worst enemies. Proving the existence of our Creator is impossible, because He wants us to find our way to Him through faith alone. It would be easy for God to prove his existence by supernatural miracles. But this would lead to some people only accepting him as their Lord out of fear. But what God wants is for us to come to Him on our own initiative, because of a deeply held conviction and love. My own story is not as spectacular, but it might be worth taking a little look behind the scenes to see the only truth at the end of the day, which is that God loves us and wants nothing more than for every human being to be saved. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve pretty much always been a happy and content human being. God has given me everything I need to lead a full life. He has even blessed me beyond measure because I basically possess everything that an earthly being could ever wish for. I would be happy if I could pass on some of my joy, gratitude and contentment and if I could use these lines to pull some people out of their indifference by giving them hope.
Anyone who has read my first book knows that I grew up in Marienberg, a small town in the Ore Mountains. Whilst my parents were God-fearing people, their faith had its limits. In our town churchgoers like my parents were often jokingly referred to as “U-boat Christians”, because they only turned up at church twice a year, at Easter and at Christmas. I am still firmly convinced that they both believed in God and showed Him the respect He deserves. But they never managed to teach us children the true faith, because they never got to know God personally during their earthly existence. In other words, they were not born-again Christians. For my sister and for me, it was often not easy to maintain a good relationship with God. As children we were always outsiders, because we had to go to church and of course at the time we felt that this was something we were being forced to do. Even in the Protestant town of Marienberg there were few believers and even fewer people who had found Christ. Being forced to do something soon leads to rejection. That is definitely one of the reasons why my sister doesn’t want to have anything else to do with God today. What’s also important is the fact that we grew up under Socialism. However, whilst the church was sort of tolerated at that time, basically anyone who believed in God and declared this openly was labelled as an ignorant simpleton and subjected to ridicule and pity. Some devout Christians even had massive problems, because they were denied a place at university for example. Most citizens of East Germany were atheists, because it just made life easier. In schools and throughout the educational system, a view of the world that rejected God was systematically developed and taught, which regards all scientific achievements and advances as the result of human intelligence that has grown up over the years. There was no place for God in many people’s minds, because then they would have had to admit that there really is a Creator, who has control over everything that happens to us and around us. Human beings would no longer be at the centre of everything that happens. Personally, I always had the feeling that some people were scared that we would then be worth less, even as the most intelligent creatures on the planet. In the Age of Science, many of my “modern and progressive“ fellow citizens claim that humanity has created the enormous leap forward in every field of science we know over the last few hundred years using its own initiative and with the potential to find things out it has acquired itself. There is no longer any space for stories full of miracles, like those that can be found in the Bible. The most that anyone then believes is that Jesus Christ actually lived on this Earth and helped people.
I should also add that some of my thoughts were also very similar up until the day of my conversion. I had no idea how all of the miracles in the Bible could have actually happened. From a human perspective, a lot of things are just not possible. Many people think: “Miracles are not in fashion any more and contradict the things we know today that are based on science.” But we just cannot forget that nothing is impossible for God. He is the spirit that created everything out of nothing. None of us would exist without God, let alone have feelings like hatred and love for oneself. Some non-believers do at least admit that even today they don’t have any plausible explanation for how the universe was created. But they are firmly convinced that this mystery will be solved by humanity one day. God openly shows His existence in some situations, especially in spontaneous healing. These miracles cannot be explained by the non-believers and their rational thinking either, but they would not admit to the world that only God is capable of doing anything like this however much you paid them. The Lord does not reveal Himself to everyone in the same way. He chooses the people He wants to trust or those He wants to share knowledge with. The Creator would never prove to an atheist that He actually exists. First of all, He doesn't need to do that and secondly God would never support someone who mocks Him. I also used to find it hard to describe God, because I didn’t know how I was supposed to define His existence. Accepting a spirit as real is not easy, if it can’t be perceived with the human senses. Most people are made up of a well developped body and a soul, which they use to perceive a wide variety of sensations. However, God’s Holy Spirit is the big difference and this affects everyone differently. God looks into people’s hearts and knows precisely how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking. If He notices that someone is trying to get close to Him, then He will find a way to reach them. I would never have talked so freely about our Creator, even just a few years ago, because I was always scared of being labelled as an idiot. But I hadn’t turned to Christ then either. God works in everyone, but people don’t often want to accept this. You only have to think about how often life has changed by chance in a way that you were not expecting. And if you then reflect on this and understand that this coincidence was just you being steered in the right direction, then you can get an idea of how God works. Even people who have turned to crime as a result of terrible circumstances in their lives can feel a small part of God’s presence. They know precisely when they’re doing something wrong, because their conscience tries to stop them. But the less they are bothered by a bad conscience, the less influence God has on these people. I have been thinking about these sorts of things a lot over the last few years, because at the end of the day I would like to understand how God is a positive influence on our own lives. As I did this I remembered lots of little indicents that I found very strange when they happened, but which I dismissed as lucky breaks at the time.
I think the story of our trip to Denmark in 1992 is pretty weird. We wanted to spend the New Year with friends there, so we set of from Magdeburg in two cars and then just kept heading north on the motorway. Back then we were so wet behind the ears that we never wrote down the address of where we were staying or even had an atlas in the car, and we didn’t have a satnav or a mobile then of course. That meant that we were totally reliant on our friends, who did know they way. As often happens in situations like this, we lost sight of each other a few hours later, due to the bad weather and the poor visibility. However, we were already in the middle of Denmark at the time, so we had already been on the road for over ten hours. Just as we had decided to give up and drive back to Germany, our friends appeared ten meters to our right driving their car down a hill. Things like this don’t just happen, God shows people the way. Another example; my partner and I wanted to visit a friend in Hamburg. On the way there I put the address somewhere safe in the car, but then I couldn’t find it when we got to the historic port. I could only remember the street she lived in. We asked the first person we bumped into as we walked along whether she knew my friend, and it was her neigbour who was on the way home, so she just told us to come with her. Later on we found out that this street is several kilometers long. So we would never have found the right address by ourselves. In this case the timing was perfect – we were in the right place at the right time.
And there’s one more example; we - my partner and I – wanted to meet my parents one weekend in Rangsdorf. They had rented a bungalow there. When we arrived in the small town, we couldn’t remember the name of the street the bungalow was in. To start with, I didn't think this would be much of a problem, because I thought that Rangsdorf couldn’t be that big. When we got to the town and asked a man where the bungalows were, he thought we would laugh at him and would be a bit annoyed when he replied that there were more than a thousand bungalows in the town. In this case, there was basically no chance of finding the right one. We still tried and eventually met my parents, because my mum looked out of the bungalow’s window at exactly the same time as we were starting a final lap around the village of bungalows, before we headed back home in failure. Another time we wanted to meet up with some friends at a lake. But again this time we didn’t know exactly where their bungalow was. We then found them right on the bank of the lake, because they were just going swimming at the very moment we arrived there. With all of these incidents, don’t forget that there weren’t any mobile phones at the start of the nineties, so we couldn't communicate that easily if we had lost sight of each other. But of course I must also admit that we weren’t very streetwise as we went through life. Another great story happended to me while I was studying abroad in Odessa. It was on the morning of one of the exam days, when all of my flatmates were pacing backwards and forwards around the room still very stressed, because they were so wound up. We had got up far too early and so I didn’t know what to do with all this time I had. So I sat on my bed and quickly learnt another poem in Russian. You can imagine how astonished I was when I was asked to recite this particular poem during my exam. There were a lot of other poems to choose from. I’m sure that everyone has similar stories like this they could tell. God lending a helping hand with events is something that often happens. Lots of people then say it was a coincidence that they were in the right place at the right time. The situation only seems weird to them when the coincidences happen one after another, because nobody can really be that lucky.
I often enjoy telling my clients the story of how I ended up in my current job as a social worker. My aim when I tell it to them is to show that commitment of any kind is worthwhile and that you should just try everything to be successful. You should never give up, even if the situation you find yourself in seems hopeless, because you think that anything humanly possible you could try to get yourself out of the unfortunate position is just pointless. If God is at your side to support you, He really will find a way out for us. After I finished university I was working as a teacher in Leipzig. It wasn’t the right job for me. Whilst I really liked working with young people and I loved discussing things with them even more, I didn’t enjoy anything else very much. So one day I prayed to God: “Please give me a job I like, preferably a job as a social worker!” I did believe in God at that time. But I didn’t actually think that He answered prayers and directly affected what people do. At the time I was a normal, sinful and not always honest person and I tended to imagine that God would judge me for this one day when I died. But I also told myself that I still had a lot of time until then and that things wouldn’t be all that bad. I also comforted myself with the thought that there are a lot of people whose behaviour was much worse than mine. That's how I soothed my guilty conscience. But I still wasn’t happy with the way I was acting. I would never have realised that God really exists now and always and could see my weaknesses even at that moment. This is mainly due to the fact that Christians who haven’t repented, who sort of believe that God exists, but have never turned to Jesus Christ and so have not been reborn, do not have a genuine relationship with God, so they don’t realise what He’s doing directly either. I left Leipzig in the summer of 1995, because I wanted to start a new life in Magdeburg. Exactly six months after my prayer I got the job I had asked God for in my prayers. The timing was perfect, because the position came up just when I was still looking for a job in Magdeburg. The colleague who had been working in the service for young migrants until then moved to a different job in pregnancy counselling at the same place. The director of the local Worker’s Welfare Association (AWO) in Magdeburg had to find someone to take over from her very quickly to secure continued funding for this position.
A few months earlier I had sent unsolicited applications to all of the charities in the town, applying for a job as a social worker. This wouldn’t even be possible at all today, because the training I had received as a teacher was completely different. But at that there still were not enough trained social workers in the east of Germany, because these courses have only been available at university since the Berlin Wall came down. My boss had remembered that she still had my application in her desk drawer. I was well suited for this job with my qualifications. As well as this, in Leipzig I had already had a lot to do with ethnic Germans resettling back to Germany, because they were living in a home near our school. These people are the descendants of Germans who had emigrated to Russia hundreds of years ago, who today mainly come to Germany from that country or from Kazakhstan. It was also a really big advantage that I can speak Russian. Nearly all of the first few migrants who came to Magdeburg came from Eastern Europe. This meant that I was able to communicate with them very easily, which was one of the reasons we always had a lot of people coming to us for advice. And all of a sudden it became clear to me why I had studied Russian for five years. Since Germany was reunified, there were basically no more jobs for Russian teachers in the east of the country. The people had had enough of having to learn a language they didn't like for decades. But in my new job I suddenly needed it again. God can foresee every situation and already knows today what will be needed in a few years’ time. That’s why He made it possible for me to complete my A-levels in a roundabout way and then successfully finish university. Lots of things happened on the way there, which were little more than a surprise I barely noticed at the time. Today I know that even back then God intervened in my life very frequently to support me.
I have been working for the AWO as a migration advisor since 1996. Before I start talking about the day I was reborn, I’d like to go back a few years for a moment. I live in a city, which is characterised by the fact that there are hardly any Christians still living there, as a result of the forty years of re-education of people in the GDR. Of course we’ve had freedom of speech in this country, but Magdeburg has always been a working class town, where it definitely wasn’t easy for anyone to live openly with their faith. As I said, I grew up in another area and so I was confronted with faith in God even as a child. At the end of the 1990s the Lord put me into a community that was made up entirely of non-believers. Sometimes I wonder what the point is. But perhaps He just wanted me to exert some infleunce on all of these people, so that He can use me to get them on the right track eventually. All of my relatives and friends are still non-believers today, who in some cases even massively reject any form of religion. But our tolerance always extends so far that we treat each other with respect and accept that other people have free will. My children have both been baptised, although the rest of our relatives definitely thought this was pointless. I always had a vague feeling that the Creator exerts an influence on our actions and how we live our lives. He even does this with people who will not find their faith for a few more years. Many people are now already being prepared for the task they will be given later. As a so-called Christian in name only, who describes herself as such, I only went to church at Christmas. Today I know the reason why. In all of the churches I had attended to worship up until November 2011, there was a liberal pastor preaching. These are spiritual people who are not born again Christians and who also don’t believe that the Bible is the word of God. It will always be a mystery to me how someone can work in a job like this when they don't believe that Jesus sacrificed himself to save us. These people preach humanism and not the Gospel. We should have compassion for all of the creatures on this Earth and do no wrong. Whenever I hear a sermon like this, I might as well just look at the local paper. What’s inside is exactly the same. These pastors have never mentioned what really matters when it comes to spreading the Gospel. I have never heard the word Hell in a sermon. The advice that we must turn to Jesus Christ if we want to receive eternal life with God is the most important message for humanity of all. So at this time I was a believer but I didn’t know Christ. I felt the same way as my parents, who had never heard of the need to be born again, if you want to spend eternity in Heaven. But even so, I am still fairly sure that they are both now with God, as they died at quite a young age but always led a God-fearing life on Earth.
However, my conversion and the preparation for it were a miracle from God. One day a stranger appeared in my office. He was looking for a friend who was a foreigner, although it was not someone I knew. This young mean introduced himself like this: “My name is Robert. I am a teacher and a missionary.” I found this openness very impressive. I wondered what could motivate someone to be so at ease with his faith. He just couldn’t have known anything about the person he was meeting. I could have just as easily been someone who rejects God. My curiosity was aroused, and I chatted with this young man for a while longer. Normally that’s as far as things would have gone with this one meeting, but God’s plans often seem different from what we imagine. One of the services we offer young people at our migration centre is learning German. At the time a student was teaching the young migrants. On exactly the same day that Robert had left his visiting card behind, the teacher informed us that he was moving to Berlin. Freelance staff can terminate their working relationship at any time and without stating any reasons. But this left my colleague and me with the problem of finding a replacement teacher overnight. This person needed to be suitable for the role and have the right qualifications. But they would only get a small payment for this challenging work, because our budget is very limited. My colleague was at a loss, but I remembered the young man who had left his visiting card behind. I wrote Robert an e-mail the same day and asked him to come in for a chat. He did actualy appear and so our situation was saved. But what I hadn’t realised at the time was that this young man would turn my whole life upside down. God had sent him to me, because He has plans for me, which even go as far as writing this book. Before I was born again I would never have thought about helping others find their faith, but today the situation is completely different.