I was born into this world as a "free gift" alongside with the event called "intermediate peace" that was to end the World War II. My "experiences" of it were prenatal. On several occasions my mother had spent fearful moments in the cellar of a nearby four-storeyed building which was the closest bomb shelter to our house. She was alerted by the howling air sirens warning the inhabitants of the impending Russian air raids over the town. There she found temporary shelter while I was safe in my own world.
As the long awaited and overdue peace was born, new life was conceived in the hearts of people to change and reshape their worlds which had been shattered by the miseries of war. Amidst these hopes and fears emerged into the daylight of existence, a baby girl named Rauha Annikki in remembrance of the arrival of peace.
The name was closest to the intended meaning and was coined by my maternal grandfather, Jaakko Räihä, who when queried as to the would-be name, used to answer those queries by saying quot;rauha annettuquot; which meant "peace given". The second part of the name was not included in the official records of existing names and hence it was dropped. I was never called by my first name which must have been considered too vulnerable a name to be used frequently and frivolously as peace had been abused and trampled.
Although I was fortunate enough not to have seen the war, the first years of my childhood were overcast by dark shadows which descended on us affecting our daily lives. I still remember playing, as a little girl, in and on the ruins of the bombarded buildings, walking and balancing on the remains only a block away from my home. The house which had served as the bomb shelter had also been hit and was adjacent to these ruins.
During that time there were severe shortages of everything and uncertainties that affected people. There was one thing that was certain in my home amidst these shortages. There was no lack of spiritual food for which I am grateful even to this day. I came from a background of exposure to Bible truths from my earliest childhood.
My father, Matti, had come out alive after six years of fighting in the war, but he had been wounded. He had been searching for the truth and a deeper meaning to his life which had been shattered by war so that everything in life was then in doubt. He had been forced to fight the enemy. But had he destroyed it?
While he was fighting in the front line of the war in Karjalan Kannas on the northern shores of Lake Ladoga he had cried on the battlefield and had pleaded with God for his life. He made a promise then that if his life was spared, he would dedicate it to the search for truth. He was saved and true to his promise he began his search for the truth.
He found the answer he was looking for and in the same process he discovered who his true enemy was. He knew that he could never have conquered this enemy with his own strength and means alone. He had faced his true adversary in the battlefield but had not known it then.
My father was not of a religious disposition. However, during his early life he had come face to face with humanly inexplicable realities. He had concrete evidence of an existence beyond this life known to man. He vividly remembers one personal experience as a young boy when he lived in a remote and practically primeval forest, surrounded by sloping hills and some small lakes.
Life there had not been easy. It was largely defined by the forces of its rugged nature. Those were hard conditions in which to survive. Poverty was their landlord not a visitor. But the majestic nature and the silence that prevailed there spoke their own language, making the inhabitants raise questions, look for answers and turn to the Creator and Sustainer of all things in their time of trouble.
One particular incident was concrete evidence of the existence and workings of the world little known to man. My father often recalls this strange and awesome event that occurred in his home village, Puokiovaara, near Puolanka.
He was about seven years old. He and his father, Pappa, were returning home from a neighbour's house after listening to the news on their radio as they themselves did not own one.
It was a dark winter night. As they walked towards their house they saw a ball of bright light in the sky. This bright ball grew bigger as it approached them. It was travelling horizontally from a north-westerly direction at high speed. As it came closer to their house it changed its shape from the ball to an ellipsoid and slowed down. It stopped a few metres above their house and changed into the shape of number 3. It was as large as the house. It remained in that shape and position for them to see it clearly. Then it just extinguished itself leaving behind absolutely no trace. Nothing fell out from it. Its light had been so strong that there were shadows of the fence and other things on the ground cast under it.
My father had a younger brother, Veli, who was to be three years old shortly. Veli had been suffering from a severe kidney ailment. Pappa immediately understood the meaning of the phenomenon. He said that his little boy would probably die soon. When his birthday came and he was 3, the parents asked this sickly child "Are you father's and mother's little boy?" He answered "I am my father's and mother's boy but my Heavenly Father lets me die". He died a few weeks later.
After this incident Pappa started to read the Bible aloud regularly. He read a lot from the book of Daniel as well as the Revelations, which he could not understand. He did not get the answers for what he was searching. All this left an impression in the mind of young Matti, then just a little boy. It left him intrigued and puzzled in the years to come as he too could not understand the Revelations. He was eager to know the answers, but he found them nowhere.
Another incident recalled by my father shows how there were clear indications of supernatural manifestations concerning their lives. The village school teacher and my father's relative, Ransu Reinikka, were sitting inside a house called Heikkilä in Puokiovaara. When they looked out of the window they saw a strange sight. In some bushes nearby there was a wooden stretcher standing upright. This was one which was normally used to carry dead bodies to be kept in an outhouse, called a "riihi", till the body was to be buried. Above that wooden stretcher there suddenly appeared a pack of white sheets. From that pack stretched sheets began to fall, one by one. Altogether five sheets fell.
The teacher asked Ransu if he had also seen this apparition. Ransu admitted that he had. The teacher seemed to know the meaning of this apparition. He said "Five men from this village who go to the war will not return home." And so it was. Among those five was my father's younger brother, Erkki, who had gone with him to the front line. He lost his life in July 1944 only a couple of months before the war ended. This had happened in close proximity to his brother. On that fateful day, my father had asked Erkki to hide behind a stone in the battlefield where he was lying prone. Erkki had replied that wherever one might hide, if one was meant to die one could not escape it, and a few moments later he was gone.
These incidents taught my father that the occurrence of such realities are revealed to people for a particular purpose. So some years after the war he continued his search for the meaning for his life, living then in the small coastal town called Oulu in northern Finland. He had married to my mother, Hilja, a tall, slender, quiet daughter of a farmer from a village called Alavieska, south of Oulu. From the farmland plains of the village, my mother had come to Oulu with her aging father. His wife, Aina Josephina, had died several years earlier when my mother was just 13. My mother's family were devout churchgoers. My mother has always been a very religious person by nature. She values the deeper meaning of life.
My mother was not keen on going to movies or taking part in other boisterous entertainment, some of which appealed to my father at that time. One day, she saw an announcement about a series of meetings to study the Bible. The speakers were going to examine the Book of Daniel in particular, as well as the Revelation of St. John the Divine. The meetings were to be held at different locations which were available for hire. One of these meetings was to take place in a cinema theatre hall called HOVI very near our home. My mother persuaded my father to go there with her.
The hall had been hired by a small denomination of Christians who believed in and preached about the second coming of Jesus at a time when hardly any others did; they advocated health reformation which was objected to by the medical sciences at that time. (What was then considered to be without basis has now been proved to be true and of immense value to man by recent scientific research throughout the world.) They warned people of the impending threat of environmental pollution for which there was not much evidence and no one was ready to believe it or take it seriously then. By and large, at that time, these messages were mostly ridiculed. These brave, strange messengers were the Seventh-day Adventists. As these were, however, based on Biblical prophesies it did not deter them from spreading the message and their work goes on to date with increasing actuality. (Italics below supplied by the author.)
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[Norman M. Kaplan, M.D., professor of internal
medicine and head of the hypertension section of
the University of Texas' South-western Medical
School at Dallas, is considered one of the foremost
(if not the number one) authority on hypertension
(high blood pressure) in the world. Speaking to
more than 1,000 health-care professionals attending
the Lifestyle Medicine convention at the
Loma Linda University
School of Health in the summer of 1983,
Dr. Kaplan addressed particularly the Seventh-day
Adventists in his audience with these words: "You as Adventists may have espoused a certain dietary life style on the basis of faith, in the past; but now you can practice it on the basis of scientific evidence. Hopefully you will not [go back and re]join the main stream, but [rather] adhere to your heritage." (Cited in Far Eastern Division Outlook, August 1983, p.12.) One year later William Herbert Foege, M.D., M.P.H., director for the Center for Disease Control, United States Public Health Service, Atlanta, Georgia, under the administrations of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (1977-1983), spoke at a Loma Linda University School of Health "Update" on Monday, March 5, 1984. He declared emphatically, "You Seventh-day Adventists are now the role model for the rest of the world." At the time of Dr. Foege's Loma Linda address he held the post of assistant U.S. surgeon general and special assistant for policy development in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Since the summer of 1986 he has served jointly as executive director and Fellow for International and Domestic Health of the Carter Center of Emory University, a consortium of nonprofit organisations that "seek to alleviate conflict, reduce suffering, and promote better understanding among peoples" of the world (D. Louise Coon to Roger W. Coon, Carter Center, Atlanta, Georgia, June 12, 1991). {Extracted from The Great Visions of Ellen G. White, Volume 1, Roger W. Coon, 1992, Review and Herald ® Publishing Association, Hagerstown, Maryland MD 21740, U.S., pgs. 104-105.}]
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At that time a sister and brother team, Liisi and Onni Halminen were preaching. When they generated the discussion it was my father, not my mother, who was keenly interested. To him it was both exciting and invigorating. As my father said that it was like getting to know the end of an exciting book which he had started reading and had not been able to continue. He also had not known the rest of the book. But now he got to know the whole story, its meaning and its end. He now came to personally know his Saviour who had preserved his life, not once, but several times during the war. My father was ready and willing to follow Him.
"For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." I Corinthians 3:11
My father went to every meeting in that series. He has faithfully continued to attend church meetings ever since for over 40 years. His previous background had been typically Lutheran. He was soon baptised and became a member of the Seventh-day Adventist church. This was when almost the entire population of Finland were Lutherans. The ceremonies and the rituals of the impersonal church system had not given tranquility to my father's soul which seemed to yearn for what would give him inner peace.
The impact of the message had been so great on him that he risked everything and because of his belief, became a stranger in his own land which only recently he had fiercely defended what it stood for, Fatherland, Religion and everything else that was Finnish. He also came to know his true and only enemy which he could not see with his human eyes but the effects of which he could not fail to realise.
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Ephesians 6:12
His whole life changed from then. He would not blindly obey the commands of others, even if he had to pay for it with his own life but he was not prepared to do so with the life of another.
"Ye are bought with a price; be ye not the servants of men." I Corinthians 7:23
"For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find it." St. Matthew 16:25
"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." St. Matthew 6:24
My father no more considered his neighbour, even a distant one, as his enemy. He knew that he would never again take up arms because he realised it was only an act of bondage.
"But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you," St Luke 6:27
My father now believed in what Jesus had promised in the Bible when he freed people, that they would indeed be free.
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." St. John 8:32
I can frankly say that I grew up with the background of this church in my life as my father used to take his brood of six children, whenever he managed to gather us all together, to church with him. At home he always read the Bible aloud so that the children were not deprived of knowing the bread of life, the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.
My father had converted from the State religion to one of his own choice. It brought a lot of conflict into his life as well as to his family due to many practical reasons. He was fiercely attacked by his enemy on all fronts, as the Word says will happen when one truly follows Jesus.
"If you were of the world, the world would love his own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." St. John 15:19
My mother, however, did not share the same depth of my father's beliefs. That, of course, was not surprising since the changes affected her very much as she had been exposed to only one type of thinking and way of living which was then in every sphere of life, whether rich or poor. Everything that was taken for granted before was now being questioned. My father's choice had touched every area of life and had absorbed him totally.
My father could do it no other way. He would either follow his Lord and Master fully or not at all. Against all odds he has continued to do so through the many conflicts which had entered his life and made his personal life a battlefield, at times more fierce than in the war zones where he was in the front line. In his own struggle the 'enemy' has been camouflaged and it has been difficult to always know his strategies, but the worst attacks were always overcome. There were conflicts and divisions both in the home and in the society.
It was against the background of these trials and triumphs that I grew up with my two brothers, Erkki and Eino, and three sisters, Aino, Anneli and Anja. The shadows of war had been wiped out but the battle between the forces of good and evil continued.
My mother valued belonging to the institutional religion of her parents and the majority of the people. She did her very best to hold us together in the traditional way of life, with the society that encircled us and whose influence was solidly built into every structure of life. If I had depended on the sentiments as were taught to me, I would have most easily followed that path but getting to know the truth from the Bible as a small child was more precious to me than anything else.
However fracturing this kind of a situation was, the clear and strong message of the Bible alone spoke its language in every facet of my life. I learnt from early childhood to question everything. I would not accept anything without understanding and before believing in it. I learnt to examine everything from many angles and sides and to ponder and weigh them in my mind, as I had learnt in my father's church. There great emphasis was given to the study of the Bible in great detail, week after week, to respect the authority of the Bible above all else and to measure everything against this standard.
What I learnt in my childhood was, on the one hand, totally different from the thinking of the rest of society. On the other hand the very strong grip that society had on the majority of people tried to take hold of me firmly. As I grew up, left home, went abroad and observed life along a wider perspective, especially the events taking place in the rest of the world, I began to see more clearly, what I had heard and learnt as a child. At that time, from society's point of view, such events were totally impossible and strange, but they seemed to be becoming increasingly more relevant.
I could see that the Bible was true and that all its prophesies were sure and that they were being remarkably fulfilled in our own lifetime. There was no better place than India for me to observe and decide as to whom I should trust and love. It was a whole mini world of existence, where beliefs from the earliest of times seemed to still live on, besides their mutations which had sprung up in different parts of this land. Living amidst all this, the person of Jesus overshadowed everything else. All the other "ways" seemed to lead a person into bondage, however good and beautiful the teachings and the substance were. All of them aimed at saving themselves through one way or another: some by self denial, some through good deeds, some by torturing themselves. This was the one thing that was in common with all of them - that salvation had to be attained through their own effort.
"Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confessed that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confessed not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God:" I John 4:2-3
"Neither is there salvation in any other for there is none other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved." Acts 4:12
Jesus declared that no one can ever reach eternal life by himself. He showed Himself to be the only hope for mankind, the way, the truth and life and there is no other way. He is a friend to all and is always ready to help.
"Jesus said unto him 'I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." St. John 14:6
"Then spake Jesus again unto them saying quot;I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.quot;" St. John 8:12
Given this background, here was I, who had left home at the tender age of 17, to work in a Seventh-day Adventist sanatorium near Borås in Sweden. At the end of the year I was competent in speaking Swedish and was going to start a course to be a nurse. It was there that I met Helena, also a Finn, who was working in the sanatorium. She was instrumental in the turn of events that was to change my plans for the future. She suggested that I should follow her example in doing the nursing course in England which would equip me with a wider scope for employment. My plans were not definite and I did not need much persuasion to accept her suggestion.
After a brief visit to see my family in Oulu, my sister Aino and I left home for our destination, England. We arrived in London in the autumn of 1963. A new world - a new language and discoveries awaited us. It was a strange experience for a small-town girl from a distant and quiet town in Finland. It held many surprises far beyond my wildest dreams.
Aino and I fitted into London life quite easily though and found ourselves, like all newcomers to London, looking for jobs during our first month. It was then that I met Jacob, an Indian student, who happened to be in the same flat that Aino and I had been invited to. It was Helena's friend, Deb, another Indian student, who had brought us together. Thus began a bond between us which was for life, steering the course of my future, though not immediately.
I found a job as an au pair with an English family where there were two children I had to take care of. This was in Streatham, a beautiful, residential suburb of London. I attended classes in English and Art in the evenings after the parents returned home. I was with this family just over a year.
Aino, who was not happy in her job, asked me if I would go to Germany with her, to which I consented. Entry to Germany was not as easy as it was to Britain. Both of us had to apply for jobs, be accepted and get our residential permits before leaving England. Once again I worked as an au pair in the home of a German Count and Countess in Metkauzen bei Mettmann, near Dusseldorf, who had three children. They were left in my care. It was hard work as the youngest was an infant. My evenings were spent in following classes in German and Art. This experience equipped me with fluency in speaking German.
It was a coincidence that Jacob was already in Germany on a summer training job at Leverkusen when I arrived there. This was quite close to the small village by Dusseldorf where I was living. He met the family I was going to live with. He returned to England when his training was over and we corresponded with each other during this time. We saw each other in Paris next where I had gone on a coach tour from Germany.
I completed a year of work with the Count and Countess and returned to Oulu. I had time to reflect on the rich experiences of my life abroad. I lost touch with Helena. I had not pursued the nursing career I had set out to follow but there was no regret. Finally, realising my commitment, I decided to join Jacob with whom I had been in correspondence throughout.
I returned to London and worked at the Marie Curie Cancer Hospital in London, quite near to Jacob's house in West Hampstead. Jacob completed his studies in June of 1966. We declared our engagement at that time. He got a job at the Rubber and Plastics Research Association of Great Britain at a small village of Shawbury near Shrewsbury in Shropshire, on the west of England near the Welsh border. I joined him there and we got married in January 1967 in the ancient St. Mary's English Cathedral which stands in the middle of Shrewsbury. With that I vowed to live with him and he with me through the rest of the days of our lives.
Jacob chose to work in England to gain experience. Once three years were over he took me and our two little children, Susanna and Jaakko, back to India, taking the long route, from Venice in Italy round the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, as the Suez Canal was closed. We visited Finland en route for Jacob to meet my family, but our destination was India. We arrived in India in September 1969. I quickly blended in with the life there and was soon the mother of two more children, Joanna and Mika.
Now it was eleven and a half years on since I set foot in India. I had been back to Finland only twice in this time and for very short visits. I learnt to speak Tamil because we had lived in Madras for seven years before we moved to Bangalore, and was able to understand Malayalam, Jacob's mother tongue. We, however, maintained English as our family language, although the children also spoke Kannada, the local language of the State of Karnataka.