Now my father was gone, sentenced to eight years in prison for drug trafficking. My mother - alone with two children - was looking for a hold on her life and began to take up yoga. She immersed herself more and more in this teaching and in the exercises and meditations associated with it. She met a man who suggested that she sell our apartment (my grandparents' inheritance) and buy a house in the country to raise cattle. A fatal mistake, because the buyers cheated my mother, and in the end she was left with neither the apartment nor the house she had dreamed of in the countryside. This left her completely dependent on her new husband.

Our stepfather was not only incapable of work, but also cruel to us children, and sometimes to my mother. I hated him and would have liked to kill him. But we were in his hands. But it got worse. One day he revealed himself to us as a follower of the "Church of Satan". He pressured my mother to participate in satanic rituals, but my mother steadfastly refused. In her distress, I once heard her pray the Lord's Prayer, which she had memorised at some point. Our stepfather declared his "mission" over, suddenly became seriously ill and died in the hospital. God had delivered us from this person, although we had not yet believed in Him at all. But all these events and the closeness to the occult had not passed without a trace on my mother's soul. She began to drink, and watching her slowly perish from alcohol is one of my worst childhood memories.

Then my father was released early from prison. He found us in the village where we lived and suggested that I come with him to Kazakhstan to earn money. I was 16 and agreed. I left Uzbekistan in the spring, not to return until the fall. For four years I worked in the fields of Kazakhstan. When I came home after the third year, our mother was different. She no longer drank and told me she was now going to church and reading the Bible. This was completely incomprehensible to me, because I considered myself a Muslim, since my father was a Turk. My mother often invited me to come to church with her. In vain. When the house group gathered at our house, I would demonstratively leave. "My son, God loves you, and He calls you," my mother would say again and again, especially when I suffered from those unbearable headaches that so often tormented me. One day I did go to church. But on that Sunday, of all Sundays, the service went on without the call to conversion, without the invitation song to come to God. Deeply disappointed, I went home. Again, a severe headache confined me to bed. On a shelf I discovered Mother's Bible and began to read it - for a whole week, over and over again. And finally I was able to give my life to Jesus Christ and give testimony to the congregation the following Sunday!

For 16 years I have been serving God, the Only One who is worthy.