I have a small, china vase sitting on top of my bookshelf. At some point I tucked a bit of dried baby’s breath into it. If you turn it over, it says “made in India” on the bottom. Nothing special, you might say? Let me tell you a story.

Let’s see . . . it would have been in the fall of 2002 when I first met her. She was already close to 90 and confined to her apartment. I was just starting out in my work with Russian orphans, and I was living with a large family group of mostly girls. Once a week on Wednesdays we tried to arrange ministry visits to various shut-ins and orphanages to help the children learn to serve others. One week one of our teenage girls showed me the way to an elderly lady’s apartment. She had suffered a stroke and could not leave her home by herself. Her name was Zinaida Fyodorovna.

Week after week, I took my girls (and sometimes boys) to visit Babushka Zinaida. She had been a teacher of Russian language and literature. She loved to talk about her past and enjoyed the entertainment (whether intended or not) of my kids. Wednesday afternoon tea with Babushka Zinaida became a fixture of my life. The children loved going to visit her and were eager to do little cleaning jobs around the apartment before leaving.

As my Russian improved, I was able to carry on more conversations with her and learn more about her history. Born in 1917, she had memories of Russia before it was totally overrun by collectivization, Communism, the Gulag, and gray apartment buildings. She remembered what it was like to grow up in a peasant family in a small village, and to have a wise father who taught her what he knew about God. The hardships in her young life required her to grow up quickly. She was the youngest of sixteen children, ten of whom died in childhood. Her mother was too embittered by her losses to bond with her youngest child, but her father did love her. As a young teenager, she went to live with a relative in order to go to school. Although she at one point tried to leave school to work in a factory, at her father’s great insistence she continued her education and eventually became a teacher.

Then the Great War  – known to us as World War 2 – swept through the USSR leaving a swath of destruction that still has repercussions today. About 25 million Russians died in the was, including Babushka Zinaida’s fiance. Zinaida, a young woman at the time, took into her care several war orphans. She fled with them from Moscow to the village of Zvenigorod, where she kept close watch over them. The people of the village took the children into their homes, but Zinaida carefully made rounds every day to make sure each child was safe, even feeling for them under the blankets at night to make sure each one was accounted for.

After the Great War ended on May 9, 1945, Zinaida was considered a war veteran by the government because of her care for the children. This entitled her to special privileges and benefits for the rest of her life. The post-war years were bleak, however. People were housed in barrack-like structures until Stalin started building five-story apartment buildings, many of which are still standing in Moscow. The people were grateful to have a decent place to live, which was why Stalin, brute that he was, won the hearts and affections of many of the Russian people.

Enforced atheism maintained its deadlock hold on Russian society. Zinaida, like many others, said what she was supposed to say. “But I knew, deep down in my heart, that there was a God. I knew. I looked around at nature and knew that none of this could exist without a Creator.” She said this to me, sitting where she always did by the window. I looked at the trees with their leafy branches swaying in the breeze outside her apartment window, and marvelled at God’s continued witness in her heart throughout the decades when she was required not to believe in Him.

Babushka Zinaida never married, like many women who survived the Great War. There were simply not enough men left to go around. So she poured her life into teaching, living in a simple, one-room apartment like so many others. Life went on until the tumultuous events of the early 1990′s turned Russia upside down and brought a measure of freedom to the country. For the first time in 70 years, atheism was no longer the law of the land. The shackles were broken, and the Gospel could be publically proclaimed without persecution. For Zinaida, however, these were the twilight years of her life. A stroke left her partially paralyzed on one side of her body, which made walking difficult. She had relatives who visited regularly and helped her, but she was still very, very lonely.

I brought her to the place I was living for banquets a few times. She talked about each event for months afterwards. I watched her become weaker and weaker physically, yet her mind and memory stayed strong.

Many times when I visited, I would read to her from the Bible I had given to her. She knew full well the significance of Christ’s redemptive work, yet had a hard time understanding that she could actually know she was saved. She often prayed for God’s mercy and forgiveness, yet did not have assurance that she had received it. As I read to her week after week, I tried to emphasize to her that those who sincerely confess, repent, and believe actually are saved and will go to heaven when they die. I remember one week, after I had read to her and explained these things very carefully to her, that she said nothing, yet the look in her eyes seemed to say that, at last, she really did understand.

I visited her almost every week for three years. The last time I visited her, I paid a visit to the grocery store to stock up her kitchen, to make sure she was taken care of for a while. When I said goodbye in the small, dimly-lit entryway of her apartment, I knew it would probably be the last time.

I called her and sent her letters over the next two years, while I was steadfastly stuck in nursing school. Every time I talked to her she seemed weaker. Then one time I tried to call her and no one answered. The next time, the phone line had been disconnected. By then, the other people I knew who could have checked up on her had all left Moscow. I had to leave her entirely in God’s hands.

She was, to me, a link to the old Russia, the real Russia. She taught me that the light of God in one’s heart cannot be quenched by any power on earth. She taught me much about compassion, service, and love.

During one of our visits she took a vase down from the top of the cabinet where she had kept it for many years. “Here, take this as a gift, to remember me by.”

Yes, Babushka Zinaida, I will remember you.

Related posts:

1. Sunday July 8, 2007
2. Sunday July 15, 2007
3. Thankful Thursday