A Father's Heart is Turned

My brother Roman, my father Sergey, and me.

I would like to share something to encourage all those who have experienced pain and hurt due to broken families and divorce.

When my twin brother and I were 6 months old, our father divorced our mother and left us. Only once in ten years did he come to see us and that was only when he was drunk. So we grew up in a fatherless home.

When I was thirteen, I got saved and began to follow the Lord. Growing up, I realized that I had a deep sense of loss because I did not know my father. Even though I knew God was now my father, I still suffered because of the loss of my earthly father. He still lived in the same town, but I had only seen him once after many years. I had no feelings for him and I think this was because I always felt like he was just a stranger like any other man on the street.

When he found out that my brother and I had become Christians, he didn't care. When we asked him to turn to the Lord and repent, he said that he had nothing to repent of. So at that point I can say that I actually gave up on my father.

But God had His own plans and He prepared a special surprise for me and my brother. It was on May 3rd of 2008, the day of our birthday, that my father came to church in our home town of Slavyansk. My mother was there working that day and she said when she looked out and her eyes fixed on him walking up to the church door, he was looking so desperate and broken that she hardly recognized him. He came to say that he wanted to see his two sons (me and my brother).

When my brother came to the church to see him, my father began to cry and ask for forgiveness for leaving us and letting us go through life without his help. He said that the past several months had been a nightmare for him because he had had a terrible bout of depression that kept him awake almost every night and made him nearly lose his mind. No doctors could help him and no medicine had been good enough to cure his depression.

Right there at the church, in private conversation, my brother led our father to repentance. Our father went home a totally different person than when he came. He has had no restlessness since that time. He began to come to church after that and went through a discipleship course along with his current wife. I can testify that since this time my father has been baptized and is walking with the Lord as a new person.

It had been twenty-nine years since our father had left us. God gave us the best gift possible. He brought our father to the Lord Jesus Christ on the very day of our birthday. He really does turn the hearts of fathers to their sons and turns the hearts of sons to their fathers.