“We’ve changed our mission statement every month for the last five years,” say Mr. and Mrs. Peterson* who, by their own admission, were called to do an “impossible job.” The job looked possible, though, when their journey began. They had a detailed business plan. They would help Russia’s orphan teens transition successfully into society by establishing a Christian center where orphanage graduates would be taught computer, micro business, basic life skills, and be introduced to Jesus. The center would be replicated, too – adding a certain number of new locations every year, like a McDonald’s franchise.

It looked good on paper, says Mrs. Peterson, but when they started operating the center, they discovered that ”the only thing the kids wanted to do was to drink vodka and play computer games.” What’s more, when the kids started asking why God never showed up to save them from the abuse they suffered, “I became God’s prosecuting attorney,” remembers Mr. Peterson.

Behind the story of every public ministry there is the story of the private work of transformation in the ministers’ hearts. This is a tale of a crisis point in ministry, the voice of God, and the miracle of resurrection.

*A pseudonym used here because this couple ministers in an area where Protestant Christian witness is not welcome

Mr.: A real watershed moment came when one of the kids at the center said to me, “You know, all this stuff you are saying is really great, and I love the center. I love being here. But I can’t live by this reality and these rules in the hell I live in. It will get me killed.” That’s when we started to realize that what the kids were experiencing at the center had no connection to their outside lives.

Over time they began to relate to each other at the center more and more in the way they related to each other in the dorm. So it was getting worse. At some point, we asked them, “Do you believe in God?” And they said, “no.” And we asked, “Do you believe in the devil?” And they said, “We live in his territory. We’ve seen him; we’ve seen demonic manifestation. We’ve seen demons when we’ve been high.”

Mrs.: There was so much darkness in them, at some point we started to really realize that we had nothing to offer. Our orphan kids’ hearts were big, bleeding wounds, and it felt like all we were doing was putting Band-Aids on them, but not stopping the bleeding, not dealing with the infection.

Mr.: Even if we put these kids in a bubble where their world would not touch them, it wouldn’t matter, because their world was always with them inside their heart. The biggest blackness was in their own hearts. They were asking questions that I could not answer, like, “Where was God when I was raped?” “Where was God when I was abused?” “Where was God when my parents left me?” “Where was God when I lived in terror in the orphanage?” And to be perfectly honest, I became the prosecuting attorney against God.

Mrs.: We thought, “God, if you care so much for the orphan, really, where were you?” We were coming to see that our own hearts were in a pretty bad shape, and that the orphans were bringing our own pain to the surface.

Mr.: You can ask questions of God two different ways. You can ask, “Where were you?”– really seeking an answer; or you can ask accusingly, “Where were you!” I’m not sure I was really seeking an answer.

And God began to speak to me. He said, “I have been moving in the lives of these kids. But no one has brought them to Me in a way that I can show them where I’ve been working in their lives. So for everything I have done, they have given credit to another source. They say, ‘It’s luck’ or ‘it’s chance.’ I need someone who will walk into their lives and declare to them that, ‘What you’re about to see is God’s love manifest in your lives,’ and then get out of the way for Me to do what only I can do. If you don’t declare to them beforehand what I’m about to do, they can give credit to another source.”

God reminded me of the story of Moses and the Nile. If Moses had come the day after the Nile had turned to blood and said, “My God did this,” he would have been number 13 in a long line of magicians who claimed credit for their god. But because Moses came the day before and said, “What you are about to see is God showing His glory and His majesty in your presence,” nobody could argue.

A while after that, I was talking to a gang leader, and he essentially told me, “Your God has no place here. This is the devil’s territory.” Oxana was there while he was saying this. She’s an orphan girl who has, in desperation, tried prostitution and suicide. She said, “No. God is real.” She told a story about how she had had a terrible headache one day when she was riding the bus with Tanya. And Tanya prayed for her, and the headache immediately left. “God is real,” she said. The gang leader had nothing to say.

These kids were saying to us, “I need someone who can save me from the hell I live in and the hell that lives in me. I mean save. Every part of me.” Oxana could see God was real and working in her life when he saved her from her headache.

Not knowing what else to do, we began to pray for healing for kids who had physical problems, and we started reading books on healing and deliverance. Among the books we read was Always Enough, by Rolland and Heidi Baker.

Mrs.: Basically, Always Enough is a book about Rolland and Heidi Baker’s working in an orphanage in Mozambique, and how God has used orphans in one of the poorest nations on earth to begin a revival that has swept through the whole country.

Mr.: We thought, “We need what the Bakers have, because what we have doesn’t work.”

Mrs.: We had gone to do this impossible job, and we were not supposed to go without the supernatural tools. When we did, it was just horrible. I learned that the spiritual gifts are really necessary for ministry. You cannot do it without them. We said, “God, we’ve just got to have more of You.”

Mr.: By this point, my frustration level with ministry and my pain for our kids had increased so much it exceeded my offense at God. I said, “Okay, God, I need whatever you have.” Soon after that, a friend invited me to a conference and I said, “Okay. What’s to lose?”

Some of the main teachings at the conference were about forgiveness and judgment. (Judgment has always been a big issue for me.) During that conference, I spent about 10 hours total over three days lying on the floor, watching as God paraded before me people I needed to forgive. It was like I was a hot-air balloon tied to the ground with weights around every side. With every person I forgave, it was like another cord was cut and another sandbag was dropped, and I felt like I was flying, flying, flying. I had more joy, more happiness, more peace, more power – even more than I had just after my salvation. I wanted to read the Bible again; I wanted to spend time with God. I could hear His voice again. Learning to hear God was what freed us both up to have anything to give our orphan kids. And it happened through forgiveness.

The scriptures say [see John 5:19] that Jesus only did what He saw His Father doing – present tense – not what He saw His Father doing on the first day of the month and then didn’t do for the rest of the month. Moment by moment, Jesus did what His Father was doing, and that has become, essentially, our entire ministry model.

Mrs.: I never really knew I could hear God’s voice. I didn’t know that on a daily basis God had stuff to say to me, like pages of stuff to say to me, and to everyone really.

Mr.: He’s there, all the time, talking.

Mrs.: And we just don’t know how to tune in and listen to Him. We’re not taught how to hear His voice. We’re not taught to expect Him to speak. And if you ask Him to speak, then He will.

We started learning how to hear God’s voice and to teach others to do it. Over time, we also began learning to do prayer counseling. This is when we seek to allow Jesus to be the One who is counseling people, and we just help them to learn to hear Him for themselves; we help guide them in the process. We started to see that, through prayer counseling, Jesus would take people into the moments of trauma and show them that He was there with them in that moment. Then He would show people what lie they had believed from that experience.

Mr.: Honestly, all the gifts of the Spirit flow from just listening to God.

When we got back from the conference, we started inviting orphans to come to our house, and we would spend an hour just listening to God’s voice. And you know what happened? We had non-Christian kids telling us perfect theology. They would say, “God told me this and this and this.” And they had healthier theology than many of the people I know. They heard His voice. Non-Christian kids!

What we found was that most of our kids had not been able to come to God, because you cannot come to God unless you believe that He is a rewarder of them who do diligently seek Him. If I think that He’s going to reward me with a two-by-four in the head, I’m not going to come near Him. Most of our kids are convinced that God is either super far away or He’s waiting to hit them. And so their first step actually has to be to hear His voice. We teach them to ask, “God, show me one of Your thoughts about me.” I can’t tell you the number of times they have heard God answer, “I love you.” They’re like, “That can’t be. Can that be Him?”

And there are kids who hear Him and say, “I’m still not willing to accept it.” But one of the biggest shockers for me was how He answered all the questions they had – like, “Where was God when ….?”

Mrs.: Once the kids can ask God for themselves, and they actually know how to listen, He gives them really good answers. His voice is always encouraging, loving.

One of our favorite stories of healing and restoration is about one of our girls. Natasha was an orphan from birth (left in the hospital by her mother). She was a tough little girl with lots of anger and unrest on the inside. By the time she was in second grade, she was smoking; by fourth grade, she was drinking.

We met her when she was out of the orphanage and studying in a tech school. Shortly after we met, she received Jesus and was instantly transformed in many ways. She lost all interest in drinking and stopped cursing (which, up to that point, had been her main language).

Natasha started growing in Christ, but after about six months, she came to a point that unless she allowed God to deal with some of her pain and unforgiveness, she couldn’t go any further. So she met with one of our teammates for prayer counseling.

As they prayed, Natasha saw herself carrying a big bundle of her pain. Then she saw herself at the foot of the cross, and Jesus was asking her to give Him her pain. It was a real struggle for her to give up her pain, because it had become so much part of her identity. Finally she gave it up to Jesus and was immediately transported in her mind to the next picture where she was a little baby, and God the Father was carrying her around in His arms and showing her off to everyone, saying how glad He was for her to be born and how incredible He thought she was. He was also calling her His daughter.

As Natasha came out of this experience she was no longer an orphan, but was adopted by Daddy God Himself. To this day, two years later, Natasha will tell you that she used to be an orphan, but then was adopted and now has an awesome Daddy.

Mr.: Sometimes the kids get answers from God that are, to me, not satisfying. But to them, they are. For example, when one girl wanted to know why God didn’t intervene when her mom wouldn’t come see her at the orphanage, God showed her a vision of her mom passed out drunk on the couch. The girl saw that Jesus was there, too, trying to wake up her mom. When her mom wouldn’t wake up, Jesus began to cry. When I asked the girl if that answer (seeing Jesus crying like this) was enough for her, she said, “Oh, more than enough.” People want to know a God who cares for them like that.

Before all this happened, we saw ourselves as doctors. Now I feel like we’re somewhere between a nurse and a cheerleader for what God is doing. We’re just following God around saying, “We just want to see what You are doing and what You’re going to do next.”

To give to the ministry of Mr. and Mrs. Peterson, indicate account #0299 on the online donation form. 

Ruth A. Burgner is the editor of Unfinished.