Horns of Light Chronicles 1

Welcome to the Horns of Light Chronicles. Peter Berbalis chronicles his family story, prophecy, and testimony. God's story unfolds, from his grandfather in Lithuania, Nazi Germany, the Russian Revolution, to Ronald Reagan in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the gospel spreading across Eastern Europe, how God called Peter to Petra, Jordan, and so much more as prophecy and testimonies unfold. And now, the Horns of Light Chronicles. And so, as we hear Pete's stories, I think they're absolutely marvelous, what I know of them, and so I think you're going to be excited to get more of the stories.

So we got Pete Berbalis, and he is my Horns of Light friend that I did, again, that picture there at ChristianCarGuy.com. But the story goes way back, actually, several generations. And so, Pete, I'll let you take it from there.

Sure. And kind of, you know, where this starts for me is starting to realize that there's threads of this story that really start with my grandfather, and kind of that belief, just as God worked through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that he really desires to use families and work through generations. So that's kind of where looking at his life, I've seen how some of the things that the Lord started in his life are beginning to manifest again in my life. And his story really begins in Lithuania. He was basically, when he was in his late teens, he was just kind of trying to figure out what to do with his life, like most teenagers are, and he decided to become a shop teacher. And he had to go to Germany to be trained to get his certificate, not a lot of colleges and those types of things in Lithuania. So when he finished his training, Hitler at that time was starting to come to power, and he would come to all the graduations. And Hitler showed up at his graduation, and he just knew at that point in time that this man was evil.

So he refused to kind of go through the greeting line or the shaking of hands and refused to shake his hand, and there was no consequence to that because he was not in a place of power yet. But it just kind of gives you an insight and understanding, even in our times, how we need to be cautious about what our kids are being taught and what they're learning. And that'll show up again in a little bit. So he, in his kind of, I think, late teens, early 20s, the Methodist Church is starting to work in Lithuania, and he comes to know Christ as his personal savior and begins doing evangelism. So they would take brass bands and march them through the center of town, and that would create a noise, and people would follow, and then they'd start preaching the gospel to those that had gathered, kind of doing the horse to horse, riding horse from town to town type of deal. And that was kind of where he just started to get a passion for the Lord and for his work. And during this time, the Methodist Church had come to him and asked for him to go to seminary to become a pastor, and he really had no desire to go into ministry. So he had told them no, and they came back again, and he still really didn't want to. And the story that he kind of told me of this moment in his life was he was walking in the woods, and he said it was, you know, just a heavy thought that he knew wasn't his own. He said it was kind of like the audible voice of God, but it wasn't audible. And the Lord just spoke to him and said, if you don't go to seminary, the people of this nation will suffer.

And he had that kind of who am I, Lord, who am I that that would matter type of moment. So he decided to go to seminary. And he was a really intelligent man, you know, he spoke five languages and would study from sunup to sundown type of thing, so much so that a doctor came to him and said, you need to stop this.

It's not good for your health. And from that point, he developed a habit of walking every day. So he gets ordained as a pastor, and he's also a teacher, and then communism comes into Lithuania, and Russia takes over Lithuania without a shot fired. Once again, kind of just stressing the importance in our time of the ideologies that are floating around in our schools and how important it is to pay attention to those and stop those ideologies.

So my grandfather basically then, it's not good to be both a teacher and a pastor. So the Russians gather him up and take him in for interrogation and kind of rough him up a little bit on the way in to the interrogation and are speaking very harshly to him. And they brought him into a room and wanted a list of every single member of his congregation. And he said it was just that passage in the New Testament where it talks about when you're brought before governors, don't worry about what to speak, but the Holy Spirit will give you utterance and the words to speak. And he always described this story as that passage coming to life at that moment. And he said there was just a boldness that came upon him, and he told them to ask the commander because his wife was at their house all the time and she could be the one to provide that list.

And he said instantly the tone changed. They were very nice to him, and they kind of ushered him out and sent him on his way. And during this time, I mean, some things that you just don't fully understand, he enters into kind of that cup of suffering that many people have to go through. He loses a son, and by the end of his life, he had to bury three of his sons. And he talks about that in a manner of that being the hardest thing to do, even going through the war and all these types of different things.

The burial of his three sons was the hardest thing because it's just not the natural course of life. And along the way, before he became a pastor, he met my grandmother, and my grandmother had kind of a powerful testimony too. She would go around singing with a group.

And when she came to the Lord, she got kicked out of her house, and her family disowned her as a result of her faith. So they ended up married Lithuania, pastoring a church, and it was the only Methodist church at that time in all of Lithuania. So then the next part of the story leads to the Germans coming in on their blitzkrieg and basically kind of an overnight type of thing. They take control of Lithuania, and the Russians flee, and they didn't have time to get rid of all the paperwork.

So they're kind of gone in like a dazed type of time. There's a prisoner kind of a war camp that's set up right next to the church in the home, and my dad remembers going and kind of sneaking some of the prisoner's food and that type of thing. And during that time is when the execution of the Jewish people starts to happen in Lithuania. That's one of the places I believe there were a couple hundred thousand Jewish people, two, three hundred thousand Jewish people.

But by the time the war ends, I think there might be thirty or forty thousand left, if that. So it was just a mass extermination. And my grandfather had heard about this happening, and he just wanted to verify that these stories were true that were coming to him. So we took a walk out to the woods of Lithuania, where one of these atrocities was told to have happened. And he remembers the smell of death.

And the story he told me was it was the blood was still literally bubbling up from the ground. So they would they would force the people to dig their own grave. Basically, they dig the big ditch and then the executions would happen and then they would be it would be buried over. And that kind of starts the thread in my life, I believe, of kind of a love for the Jewish people and the plans that God still has yet to fulfill through them. So then the Germans fail, basically, in that brutal winter and Russia comes back and he described kind of trying to figure, oh, and during this time when the Russians had to flee, they couldn't get rid of the paperwork. So when the Nazis came, they published the names of everybody who was due to be shipped off to Siberia by the Russians and my grandfather was on that list. And somehow he found out that had the Germans not come within the next, I believe, it was week or two, he would have been shipped off to Siberia and deported as a result of his being both a pastor and a teacher. So the Russians are coming back and he kind of described it as you really didn't have much time to pray.

It was just kind of, you know, you just had to trust that the Lord was going to guide your steps. And it's, you know, there wasn't a good choice. You had to choose between Stalin and Hitler. And the sad thing was the choice that he had to make knowing that he would be deported was he had to flee to Germany. So as the Germans were withdrawing, they fled into Germany and he just talks about the difficulty of that time in the sense of as a pastor, you're having people die, heart attacks right next to you, families pleading with you to take their children. And my dad had developed tuberculosis and he had three children of his own. I mean, two others, one had died at that point in time.

So two other boys and my dad. And with my dad's tuberculosis, they were traveling slow so they could not take any more on. So he just talks about the heartache of that time of seeing all this death around you and not being able to help. So basically they make it into Germany and as a result of his time and education in Germany, he had made connections with a German man who was in charge of one of the railroad yards. So he provides a railroad car for my dad and their family to live in. One day him and my grandmother go to town to get some food and on their way back, they're stopped by the German soldiers and they see that my grandfather is a young man and they want to know why he isn't serving in the military. So they want to conscript both him and my grandmother at that time and they said, even though you're, you know, non-citizens of this country, you need to serve this country if you're going to reap the benefits of this place. So they wanted to take both of them with my dad and his two brothers in the railroad cart, but my grandmother was able to plead with them.

And they released her but took my grandfather and my grandfather told her as he was taken that they would meet up at the manager of the railroad company's yard once he was able to be free of the service. So he's taken to the front lines then to dig ditches for the Nazis and once he gets there, they realize that he's able to speak four or five languages and most of the people digging ditches are Poland, Lithuanian, Russian. So they use him as a translator.

So kind of as a result of the gift that God had given him to speak many languages, he's able to avoid the manual labor. Stories that go with that is one day everybody wakes up and the German soldiers had retreated and left all kind of the ditch diggers and so many of them just decided to leave the camp. So my grandfather didn't really know what to do, so he stayed. The Russians did not break through the lines like the Germans thought, so the Germans came back and my grandfather was there and some of the people were still there. And they thought that my grandfather had told all the people to leave, so one of the younger soldiers put a gun to my grandfather's head and was ready to shoot him. And then a couple older soldiers intervened and said, there's no way this man could coordinate all this, the people just left on their own. So it was kind of God's mercy on sparing his life. That situation happens again and this time my grandfather… I hate to jump in on you there, Pete, but we're about at the end of this episode, so I'm sure, like me, you're wondering what happens on this. And again, I will tell you that what happens with his grandfather is almost mind-blowing. In other words, what God is doing throughout this, there's a real reason why he's protecting his life, his family's life, even now to this very day. You know, he's at work in all of our lives and so we will be back soon with another one of these episodes with Pete Berbliss and Horns of Light.