Violetta Taskar. Three Minutes of Silence
An article by Violetta Taskar about the children of Sacramento Christians perishing from drugs and banditry, and the indifference of pastors and their parishioners.
An Appeal to the Christians of Sacramento
There is a law in this world by which all radio operators cease their work for three minutes and listen intently to the airwaves, straining to hear if somewhere a distress signal is beeping—SOS: “SAVE OUR SOULS!” And all those in distress know: they will be heard, help will come to them, they will be saved. Over our glorious city, for many years now, the SOS signal has not been beeping—it has been thundering. In every conceivable way, our sick, stumbling children, our future, cry out to us: “Save our souls!” But we have forgotten the law of the “three minutes of silence.” We do not hear them. We sing songs of praise and adoration to the great Creator very loudly, not noticing how His great creation is perishing right beside us.
Yet our hymns drown out their groans. We cannot hear them over the roar of the airplanes carrying us away to Africa, India, Ukraine, China, Mexico… We fly off to save other people’s children. That is noble. But at that very moment, our own children are locked inside a burning house, and no one hears their cries. And there is no one else to save them but us. The terrible scourge of this world—drugs—has struck our children.
In Sacramento, the children of believing parents are snorting, shooting up, and swallowing handfuls of this poison. Narcotics are brought right to church parking lots, and they sing in the choirs—stoned; they sit through sermons—high. Their parents either do not notice this calamity or shamefully pretend that there is no calamity. Otherwise, our “holy” ones will excommunicate them, refuse to shake their hand, anathematize them. And I am not talking about isolated cases, not tens, not hundreds, not even thousands, but about tens of thousands of our children.
Five years ago, in Sacramento alone, 12,000 of our fellow citizens were in prison. And that is mainly young people. Today, I cannot even count these children who have fallen into the abyss. And how many more are walking on a knife’s edge and will end up in that prison hell any day now? I am not even speaking of those lying in the cemeteries of our glorious Christian city, those who no longer need our help. It is too late… we were too late.
And no hymns of praise, no evangelizing of Africans and Indians, let alone citizens of our former homeland from which we fled but where there still remain very many laborers in God’s field, can atone for our guilt before those who have passed away and before God. Yet there are still those whom we can and must help.
There is a wise folk saying: “No one is safe from prison or penury.” I would add: or from drugs. And if your house is not burning today, that means nothing; you do not know what may happen tomorrow. So the excuse “it does not concern me, it’s not my problem” can turn into a tragedy for a Christian—for us, there is no such thing as someone else’s grief.
Do not think that I took up this article only with the aim of rebuking. I have concrete proposals for the “fathers” of the churches, for the brotherly council, and for ordinary parishioners. I know that at present there are several rehabilitation homes in Sacramento. There are men’s and women’s rehabilitation centers where the director is Vladimir Cherenkov, a men’s center under the leadership of Viktor Nakhaichuk, who, knowing the catastrophic shortage of such centers in our city, came to us from the state of Oregon, and a center run by Tatyana Galushko.
For a city like ours, this is minuscule, considering the scale of the disaster. But the most terrible thing is that these people are simply suffocating under problems, mainly financial ones. Rent must be paid for the homes, those undergoing treatment must be provided with food, they must be taken to church and to prayer meetings, and gasoline keeps getting more expensive, and the vehicles break down and must be repaired.
For example, Tatyana Galushko and her protégés used to go on the air, with time that Valeriy Kitsen provided to them for free. They told their stories, spoke to companions in misfortune like themselves with words of encouragement, words of faith, bringing them hope. But all the work stopped because the car broke down, there is no money to repair it, and no money for gasoline.
The homes must be furnished with at least some furniture, supplied with dishes, bed linens, kitchen utensils, cleaning supplies. The directors of these homes do not even dream of a salary—everything is done on a volunteer basis. In any case, Tanya Galushko has not received a penny for her years of directing the center. I think the others are in the same position. There are days when there is nothing to feed the young people. And yet in these centers they are told about God’s love and about the loving heart of Christians, God’s children. Hello, Christians! Where is your loving heart?
You want to be like Christ? Well then, be like Him! He gave His life for sinners (note: not for saints). Give one dollar a month. One dollar—not even your possessions, as Christ said to the young man who wanted to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And so we come to my concrete proposals.
Under the brotherly council, a fund must be established to support the drug rehabilitation centers of Sacramento. And this fund must not distribute resources according to denominational lines—of which the Bible makes not the slightest hint—but according to the will of the One God, as members of His One Body. Once a month, all the churches in the city should hold a collection for these centers—one dollar per person (or if that is too much, per family).
Now calculate how many tens of thousands of believers there are in the city. With that dollar we could open dozens of centers for saving our young generation and support those that already exist. Many of those who have recovered become such fervent servants of God that we—“lukewarm Christianity”—cannot even dream of it. They open centers, like Tanya Galushko, who passed through the terrible path of a drug addict, became a psychologist, and now helps free those equally lost, as she herself once was.
And this is not a unique case; I know a great many such examples. On the day the collection is taken for the rehabilitation center support fund, every church should hold a prayer service for these children. It would be best to designate a single day for all the churches, so that the prayer would be powerful and effective. After all, those children who have decided to free themselves from Satan’s influence are subjected to his most ferocious assault, and they need your prayer support. As do those who are still only on the way to this decision. The disbursement of the fund’s resources must be accountable to the parishioners in the form of monthly printed reports.
My separate appeal to the businesses of our city. Participate in creating a fund or in personally helping the centers. Three times in Sacramento, prayer evenings for Israel were held. It was noisy, beautiful, sounded throughout the world, prestigious, especially since, as the Bible says, those who bless Israel will be blessed by God. But what if we move away from this loud blessing to something quieter, but constant. Again, appoint a day, once a month, when all churches wishing to pray for Israel will unite in a single prayer. This will not be so pompous, it will not look like a show, when people stand on stage with shofars and do not blow them, but a soundtrack plays, and all the Jews understand that this is just another performance. So—make the prayers more modest, and give the freed-up funds to the centers for the salvation of sinners. And this sacrifice will be more in line with the Lord’s heart, who laid down His life for this, than showy glorifications.
My dear ones! Everything I have written is the cry of our perishing generation, without which Christianity has no future. The Lord simply compelled me to cry out about this. If you could see the eyes of those who are frantically seeking salvation and cannot find help. Knowing that I made films about these centers, for some reason they come to me. Those I could, I placed in other states, but there is a catastrophic lack of space, huge waiting lists, and I was able to help only a few.
In American centers, one has to pay a lot of money for treatment, and where do these poor souls get the money? Many have been abandoned even by their own parents; in some families it’s “two with a plow and seven with a spoon” and there is no money. So it turns out that in the Christian ocean, the rescue of the drowning is the work of the drowning themselves. If my appeal to the “fathers” of the church and congregation members finds a response in our believing community, I am providing the phone numbers:
Tatyana Galushko:
(253) 389-6734
Vladimir Cherenkov:
(916) 769-4312
Sergey Krikun:
(503) 939-8470
And my phone number:
(916) 745-5646
violetttatasкаг@уаhоо.соm
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