A gang held a knife to my throat, a madman tried to kill me. Yet it was all a blessing?

A gang held a knife to my throat, a madman tried to kill me. Yet it was all a blessing?

"Blessed is the crisis that made you grow, the fall that made you gaze up to heaven, the problem that made you look for God!"

- St. Padre Pio

Hey friends,

Reading that quote by Padre Pio once again made me revisit the fact that God’s plan and path is always more important than our ideas and dreams, that His mind and ways are nothing like our ways.

Further, many recent discussions made me ponder on what role some strong events play in our life. I’m talking about events that can end our life if decisions would be tilted in a slightly different way.   

Ones I will demonstrate from my own life might seem really crazy to people who never experienced something like that, yet I believe that many of us don’t even realize that everyone has had such moments. Moments where a different decision would have ended the physical life in this world.

When I was a kid and my sister was already living in US, I was given a gift, a fancy jacket with a hockey team emblem, not something that was available at that time. One day leaving school, my best friend Oleg got close to me and said “Run through the bazaar and try to lose them.” I wasn’t sure what he meant, but we ran through the bazaar and upon exiting Oleg ran in different direction and I ran towards my home, then I realized it as I saw several older young men with shaved heads running after me. I was the fastest runner in my class, even competed, yet the fear somehow sucked strength out of me. They got me and took me to a dark building into a corridor. There the main guy took out a knife and held it close to my face. One of the guys was telling him to kill me and take my nice jacket and be done with it.

This is perhaps when an angel interfered into my mind and made me calm. I told them that it would be a mistake to kill me as I knew where we had a lot of cash at home and I could bring it for them.

They showed me the spot where I was to put the cash and let me go. Needless to say    that I really broke down crying when I got home and of course I never brought them any cash, and thankfully never saw them again.

Feeling the divine influence on that situation left an impact on me, obviously. So, was this situation bad overall or was it good in the sense of my growth?

As with everything in life, there is a balance and there is light and shadow. There is a candle and the darkness around it.

The experience made me much stronger in the sense of tolerating fear and things like horror movies became a joke to me. I could also relate to others better, but the negative was that I understandably grew an overwhelming sense of danger around every corner and I see how I overdo it sometimes.

The next experience of similar nature came over 20 years later, in fact in 2022. I won’t get into as much detail about this one, but I’ll get the point across.

We had a neighbor in a place where we lived before current one who was a psychopath schizophrenic. He had made it clear that he wanted to kill us, yet police was doing nothing. To make the story short, he ended up attacking me eventually, with a metal pipe, trying to strike my head. All three times he hit me I was able to block with my hand, taking away most of the hit. As before, I felt a presence with me at this time. Sure there was damage done, but nothing like it should have been in a regular situation.   

The experience with this person made me really appreciative of things that I possibly took for granted before. Like, I always thought I had sleep issues, but during the time he was our neighbor I sometimes went 48 hours without sleep. God sustained me, and today when I think that I’m having a roughy night I just have to tell myself “Million times better than during that time.”

I think God can teach us really big lessons through experiences like this and increase our gratitude and humility. I think we can be stuck in the trauma, or learn from it and become stronger, or more realistically…have a mix of both.

A blend of trauma and growth, and the key when absorbing this blend is to see the growth and appreciate it.

I’m not sure what else I can tell you about this and I know for many it’s hard to accept that there is positive growth that can come from such things, and I don’t blame you. I have compassion for you. I do hope that someone who reads this can find something that may begin their healing from any type of event.

One thing I know for sure is that with trust in God every person can be filled with love despite any circumstances.

I’ll finish with an example of not my own, but of a pastor I like, Francis Chan.

Chan’s mother died during childbirth. Father remarried and when Francis was 8 his stepmom died in a car accident. When Francis was 12 his father died from cancer.

Amazingly, Francis contributes all of these struggles to loving God even more, because he says he saw how God protected him and guided him. It almost can’t get tougher than that, yet you see his sermons many decades later and you see a man filled with love and gratitude. He could have become a depressed person with no hope and you know what, no one would blame him considering what he went through, yet he chose a path of love and light despite deep traumas.

Incredible in my opinion.

Thanks for reading and blessings.

XXXXX

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