| Back from the Dead |
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L  indsay Shaw writes of how a former atheist was set on a different path by a near-death experienceTwenty-two years ago Igor Mikhaelov came back from the dead in a Minsk hospital recovery room. Today this former Communist party member is a transformed man, heading up Bible Society’s work in Belarus, one of the new states founded when the Soviet Union finally fell apart in 1991. He has good reason to remember vividly the night in 1988 when he was admitted to hospital for an appendix operation. “It was a Friday night,” Igor says. “There were not many doctors on weekends and after surgery I was left in the patient room without anyone watching me. I stopped breathing and suffered clinical death. “I remember I saw myself in a kind of dark attic with a door that was half opened. Behind it I saw brilliant light. I tried to cross the threshold and saw a silver thread falling downwards. I knew that if I broke it I would never return. I was about to cross it and then I saw red flames.” At least twice Igor’s doctors struggled to restart his heart. “I didn’t want to come back. It was so hard to open my eyes and the light was so painful,” he recalls. But the second time doctors revived him, he promised not to close his eyes again and his heart began to beat without assistance. Igor returned to work as a computer electronics engineer. But his dramatic encounter with death made urgent a search for faith he had already begun. Having lived and breathed Communist atheism as a boy, it had seemed natural to join the Communist Party after he left the army in 1973. “I believed in their values,” Igor explains. “After all, Communist equality was the same as in the Bible except Jesus Christ was removed.” But the reality was often at odds with the theory, he noticed. Hungry for something more, on business trips for his computer company Igor began looking for the then-banned book that it’s now his mission to share. It was in 1980 when he was posted to Helsinki, Finland, for three years that he was first able to borrow and begin reading a Russian Bible. Nevertheless, it was after his dramatic post- operation experience that Igor’s spiritual search became all-consuming. “After this, I realised the soul keeps living after death,” he says. “I sought for a Bible everywhere then. When I eventually got one in 1989, I felt like the merchant Jesus spoke of who had sold all he had and bought a beautiful and expensive pearl.’ Over his summer holiday Igor says, “I devoured it, such was my thirst for God’s Word. Our neighbour in the next apartment at this time was a Baptist pastor and I took all my questions and passages to him. He explained them and I realised the problem was not the Bible but me.” So in 1993, two years after his country became independent, Igor began to work for the Bible Society in the Republic of Belarus. During the 1990s a political springtime permitted the Bible Society to distribute 100,000 Bibles a year. Since then, stronger controls have been imposed and the Bible Society Igor now leads faces tight restrictions on bringing Bibles and money into the country. But Igor is optimistic – and his greatest optimism is focused on the forthcoming launch of the first full Bible in Belarussian for 80 years, seven years after the New Testament appeared. It is something that Christians of all ages are excited about at a time when almost all the population describe themselves as believers and many are eager to re-establish Belarussian culture and language. Translated over three decades, the Bible will be produced early next year. “There is no other value equal to the Bible to unite the nation,” Igor explains. “Many people in our society are hardened and the Bible is crucially important to bring peace into their hearts. “The Belarussian Bible will inevitably change our whole society.” |
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