By Mark Ellis –
She grew up in communist Romania under the dictatorial rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, who led one of the most repressive regimes in the Eastern Bloc countries.
“I heard my parents inside our home whispering about how horrible the communists were,” Virginia Prodan told God Reports. “They were very submissive to the government and agreeing to the government to take all their rights because they were fearful that they will kill them or their kids.”
Less than five-feet-tall, weighing all of 82 pounds when she reached maturity, covered with freckles and red hair, her striking appearance sometimes caused foreign visitors to stop and take her photograph near their home on the Black Sea.
She was put off by her parents’ submissiveness to the authorities. “I felt confused about who I was and why they were so afraid to speak the truth. They knew the truth, but they were fearful. And as I grew up, I realized I did not want to live this kind of life.”
Prodan applied to law school after graduating from high school. She thought a study of the law might be the place to uncover answers to a question that plagued her: What is truth?
I’m going to find out the truth, and I’m going to speak for the truth, she thought.
The communist government kept a secret file on every citizen. She could be accepted to law school only if her parents had never been part of any organized resistance against the government, if their children (Virginia and her siblings) had never reported their parents saying something negative about the government, and if they were not Christians.
“I passed the test, and I was admitted to law school,” she says.
She graduated and began to practice law, but after her first year she had a personal crisis. “I come into my office, I put my briefcase on my secretary’s desk, and I said, ‘I don’t want to be a lawyer anymore. I can’t find the truth. There is nowhere to find it.”
Prodan’s secretary looked at her with bemusement, thinking she needed to come back to the real world.
A short time later, Prodan met with a client who seemed different than her other clients. “He had hope in a hopeless land. He had joy in a joyless land.” She wondered if he was a little crazy.
But as they met together and she observed his peaceful countenance, she told him: “I want to have in my life what you have in your life.”
“Do you go to church?” he asked.
Now she was convinced he was crazy, and wondered why he would ask such a question.
He scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to Prodan. “This is the address to our church. Would you come next Sunday?”
Then she gave an answer that surprised herself, considering she was a 25-year-old lawyer raised as an atheist. “Yes,” she replied.
The following Sunday she met her client in front of the church and she found a place to sit. The pastor opened the Bible and began to read these words from Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” (John 14:6)
The words of Jesus hit her with a power and authority beyond this world. Suddenly, she was glued to the pastor’s every word.
“After that, I accepted Christ, and I was baptized. Christ became real to me, absolutely real.” She realized He had been guiding her, by planting in her heart the desire to find the truth.
She developed a new set of clients, dissidents with the courage to stand up to the authoritarian regime. “I didn’t have to look for clients, because they found out that I was baptized, that I am a sister in Christ, and they came to me to defend them and help them.
“God showed me that he had a purpose for my life, and that purpose was to defend Christians and human rights cases in Romania.”
After Prodan began representing dissidents in court, Ceausescu’s dreaded secret police, the Securitate, began to follow her. The Securitate was responsible for mass surveillance as well as severe repression and human rights abuses within Romania, and controlled the press.
Arrested numerous times, they subjected the diminutive woman to torture. “They hit my head on the table and I was full of blood. They hit me against the wall and I was not able to breathe. They did all kind of horrible things to intimidate me.”
“I heard many times in the interrogation room, the telephone ringing and I heard the dictator screaming at them. I didn’t know if he ordered them to kill me or not, but I had more peace than they had.”
During the abuse, Jesus’ presence was closer than ever before. “I remember Him whispering to me, saying, Tell them that I love them.
“I don’t like what you’re doing,” Prodan said to her torturers, “but God loves you, and I choose to love you.”
The men were crying and turning their heads away from Prodan because they didn’t know what to do with her.
“Only in heaven will I know how many of them accepted Christ,” she says.
When Ceausescu learned that President Ronald Reagan had taken an interest in Prodan’s case, and that Reagan might remove Romania’s most favored nation trading status, he sent an assassin to kill Prodan.
The dramatic story is told in her book, Saving My Assassin, along with the story of her
escape from Romania with President Reagan’s help.
“Christ Saved me for a reason,” she says, “to tell people how powerful he is. I’m nothing but a tool in God’s hands. God is powerful, and he can save us.
“He said the martyrs will go right to the throne. If he doesn’t save us, He takes us to his throne, so we don’t have to wait for the Second Coming of Christ. We don’t lose anything. We are a winner in everything.”
To learn more about Virginia Prodan’s ministry, go here
