 Today we'll hear stories from Sister Judy of what God has taught her over the last 50 years. Yeah, so I've been going to church now with you I guess for a dozen years or so and got to appreciate a lot of things from your life story and excited that we can share some of that on Anabaptist Perspectives. So Sister Judy, could you just start with how God found you, how you became a believer? Well, Lord found me very lost, very self-righteous, hard worker, had a good job, conscientious, lived a pretty conservative American lifestyle, went to church, various churches from time to time, but when I was 26 I wanted to find my roots, so the Lord let me, unbeknownst to me, the Lord let me go back to Poland and I discovered my roots there, but while I was there I discovered something else. They had no newspapers and books and magazines in English, so it pushed me to reading one of the books a friend of mine had given me, The Christian Secret of a Happy Life by Hannah Whitehall Smith, and I had fancied myself to be a Christian because I went to church, and if you go to church you're a Christian, right? So, but I didn't know the Lord anyhow, so I read that book simply because it was in English. Anyhow, I read this chapter about why you can't get victory over sin, and so this chapter said if you are having trouble with victory over sin then you need to go deeper. Where is your commitment lacking to the Lord? Well, this was strange language to me, but I thought about that, and there were some areas that I kept getting angry at this little boy that I was rooming with his mother and himself, so I kept getting angry at this little eight, nine-year-old boy, but for no reason at all, and I thought, now this isn't right. Piotrus just wants his mother's attention, that's why he's doing this, you know, so that bothered me that I couldn't have victory about it. The Lord got me kind of pushed in a corner and said, you know, I had sin and I said, no, no, no, I've always lived righteously. Oh, I've always done right. And I said, I don't have any sin, just show me my sin. The Lord was waiting for me to say that, he said, there. And I saw the host of my sin first time in my entire life, 26 years old, going to church all my life. First time I saw my sin. I repent, I repent. I didn't know I was like that. I said, I don't want this life. If you want this life, you can have it, because I had done all the right things. I had my family's values, I was a good student, I was a hard worker, I had a good job, I paid my bills, you know, lived conservatively, I didn't do the gross sins of the young people my age and you want my life, Lord, you can have it. And he took it. And the burden of my sin rolled away and I was like, upon the ceiling I went. Tears of joy were washing down my face and washing through me and my life just took a 180 degree flip-flop. That was 26. So was that all in a very short period of time? Oh, yeah. Like that. And what was exciting was I didn't know what happened to me. I said, Lord, what happened? And he said, you were baptized in the Holy Spirit. Well, now mind you, in church all my life, I read the Bible, you know, in church. I didn't read it at home, but I read it in church. So he, I said where? And he told me Acts. So I read Acts, too, I found it. And then I understood that chapter the first time in my life. Oh, so it was good. It changed my life. Then I could come home from Poland because I had gotten what the Lord wanted me to have. So a change from church going, but you just, you thought of sin as the big things that put you in prison or that make everybody look at you wrong or whatever. Yeah, sure. And I didn't do those things. So yeah, so then you came back from Poland, you're 26 years old, and what did that next stretch of life look like? Wonderful. I was totally different, excited about life. Oh my, I cannot even begin to express how exciting my life became. I came back from Poland. The Lord sent me directly to the young adult group in the Sunday school that I had been attending, not in my hometown, but in the town that I was working in quite a few miles away. And they were all baptized in the Holy Spirit. It was glorious. So we formed Christian community, Christian prayer groups, and eventually we began to live like, we would live in Christian households. Sometimes it would be a married couple and then we would live in that house or sometimes it would be just an apartment with the young ladies or just the apartment with the young man and so forth. Then we went to different churches on Sunday morning. We didn't, it wasn't, we weren't forming another church, but our basic commitment was to this Christian community, uh, what we call Christian community. And we had a prayer meeting, prayer gathering, one for every Friday night, and we were required to attend. Now when I say required, I don't mean there was a list of laws that you've got to come here, you've got to do this, it wasn't like that. It was because our hearts wanted it. We joined our hearts, our hearts were knit together by the Holy Spirit. And so we did that and we were also broke, broken up into little cell groups or sheep groups. But our sheep groups were very, very different. It was you go to these sheep groups and you share your spiritual walk for that week, what you did, what you didn't do, where you had victory, where you struggled, you know, how you messed up and there'd be tears flowing, you know, and wise counsel given and comfort and love and prayer poured out upon you. But it was so full of life flowing. It was wonderful. Life was flowing through our little sheep groups. So then on Friday, at our big meeting, life was flowing there and it was just wonderful. And then Sundays, of course, we would be dispersed to the other churches, wherever we grew up, wherever we felt the Lord leading us to go. And we would plug in there help with the children's ministries and things like that, you know. That's how it was. Yeah, that's interesting. It was really was an expression of church in the basic sense, but it was alongside of the organized church. Alongside of the organized church. To organize differently, you know. So not exactly a house church, but it was in houses and homes, believers together. Yeah, it was not a house church at all. We had no formal standards or anything like that. Yeah, so moving along in your life, when did the writings of the early church become important to you? Well, my husband was really the one that was interested in that. He had been around the different churches too. He was tired of the mishmash of theology, mishmash of doctrines. He said, it cannot be this complicated to follow Jesus. It cannot be that complicated. So somehow he stumbled across Brother Brasov. Now, see, this is the days before the computer and days long before the internet never came along. But he heard about him or found about it out about him and he started reading some of his stuff. We got some of his tapes, as before CDs were invented, and we listened to them and we, oh, he said, you know, he said that Brother Brasov is really showing us how the early Christians went back to the scriptures and literally did what it said. If it said, love your enemy, they loved their enemy, they did not pick up guns and swords and whatever. So that's how, through him, and then he sat down and he got ahold of the martyr's mirror. You know, that big sick book, what a thousand and some pages. And he sat down and he would read through the martyr's mirror every day, read through it. And he loved it because it applied scriptures to the life. This is how we live. We live Matthew five, six and seven. And with the martyr's mirror, that's all largely through stories and the martyr's stories and so on. And he loved that book. He, I think he read every page of it. And so when I'm good in and say, all right, he said, I've got something I want to read to you. And I found out the title of the book and I said, I don't want to hear that because I didn't want to be sad. Well, you know, you can't help it be sad. You can't help it, shed tears. But after a while, it started building my faith because I could see the victory of the Lord in all these martyr's lives, martyrs and confessors, even, you know, the confessors may have lived through the torturing and all that. But oh, it was just wonderful. So then we went on to, he got the Anna Nicene father's volume and he read through that too. And he understood it. Oh, that is no small thing in itself. No, especially not if you got the public domain set, which was translated in the 1800s. And so you have not only the difference from the, you know, the early centuries of the Christian church, but also differences in English. Well, in some of the sentences were less this long, you know, I couldn't understand it. Yeah. And for our listeners, both the martyr's mirror and the writings of the anti-Nicene fathers are available on the internet. We'll put links in the description. We've also had the privilege and Anabaptist perspectives of interviewing Brother David Burso. We'll link to some of those as well. Yes, Brother Burso really taught us a lot. He taught us basically how to rightly divide scripture and what he said. And it could be on any topic, especially the controversial ones. This was very important. He said, don't take one verse. He said the early Christians did not take one verse and run with it. That's going to be their doctrine. Look up all the scriptures, take your time, look up all the scriptures that pertain to that topic. And then what it does, it blends it out. It moderates, you know, the doctrine and then you have a solid doctrine. You know, I've been a widow now for a couple of years and one well-meaning sister in another city called me up and said, oh, she said, now the Lord is your husband. I thought, where do you get that? Well, where she got it is from Isaiah 54 because there is a verse that says, thy maker is thy husband. But it is not referring to one woman. And if you take that, get it in the right context and then you go to the New Testament and you talk about, you find out the bride of Christ, you find out what are they talking about, the whole group of believers. See, that kind of thing, Brother Berceau helped us in all the controversial issues, you know, to not be half-baked in our doctrines. He said, that to me was the value of Brother Berceau's many teachings. You know, we could see that he thoroughly went through the Ananiasing Fathers. He was not lifting them up above scriptures. He was only saying, look, this is how they applied it. This is why they applied it. Yeah, so it was an approach of reading through context, reading multiple authors throughout the Bible and trying to get the whole picture. What the whole inspired group of God said, not only conscious, we all know we should take things in context, but doesn't mean we do it, but we know it. Yeah. In fact, still something like many of these issues, you have to go and search out. Yeah. So along with that, you made some changes in lifestyle and practice about that time. You want to talk about some of those? Yes. Brother Berceau, again, said he knew that Earl was interested in the early church because of all these reasons, you know, and he directed us. He said, you know, you may want to find Elmo Stoll. He has set up an old order community in Cookville, and he said he's trying to go back to the early church practices. So we did. We got brave and drove there and spent some time with Elmo and his family. I loved it. I loved their lifestyle and everything, but my husband had an affliction, and he could not live that lifestyle. And that was a horse and buggy group, right? Yes. Yes. You know, carrying water and working in the fields, he physically could not do all that at that point in his life. But we made some really good friends there, and I just really appreciated their solid walk with the Lord. Their families were, for the most part, very well-ordered. Not that they were perfect, but they were very well-ordered. And I, from my work with children, I was so delighted to see well-ordered children. But then, so I used to tie a red babushka on my head because the Lord had told me to cover my head. He had told us to get out of debt and cover our head. Two things. We were not to go in debt, so we got out of debt. And then for me to cover my head, well, that was fine. I covered my head with a red babushka, but I didn't take off my jeans. You know, I still wore jeans. But gradually that changed, and I started wearing dresses and long dresses and everything. No particular order from the Lord. I just felt like this is what I ought to do. So when we went to Cookville, I had tied, I changed from a red babushka to a white diaper, clean, and tied it behind my head. And I thought I was doing pretty good. And so Elmo sat me down, sat us down at the dinner table once. He says, he says, now just tell me. He said, now are you putting on that head covering because you're coming to visit us? Or is this something that you have a conviction for? And I said, oh, no, this is something the Lord has led me to do. And then he grinned because it was really rather awkward looking and not orderly like he would expect. And he also, I eventually got a pattern from the sisters there and made it under the chin veiling and got a pattern and made dresses that were plain and dark and simple. So was that connected to you reading the New Testament passage talking about the veiling or was it just God directed that? The Lord, again, see, you can read scripture. You can go to church all your life and read scripture all your life, but it doesn't awaken until the Lord says, okay, this. And then I say, oh, there it is. The Bible's far too rich. You could never get, never get everything at the first reading or the 10th reading or the hundredth reading. But the Lord, when he directs you, I listen to him. I listen to his voice. I take it very seriously. I make mistakes. I fumble and bumble, but I really listen to his word. I do not go to the left hand or to the right. Because if I do, and it happens every time, if I go to the left hand a little bit or to the right a little bit, expressing myself, boom, I get it. He makes sure that I get corrected. Yeah. So another practice that you have or that have taken up and that I've learned a little bit about was the daily office. Did you talk about that? Yeah, it's funny that you call it the daily office. We just called our prayer stations. And when, oh, like, oh, more than 20 years ago, we had wanted to do, my husband and I wanted to do ministry, but the Lord would never let us. And then about 20 years ago or so, he said, okay, I want you to do an order. I said, what's an order? We didn't know what an order was. So we had to research and go find out what an order was. And we found out that all these orders, usually they're done by the high church in the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, some Episcopal and some Lutheran do have orders. But anyway, what they all had in common is they would stop their day to do prayer stations at the time of the crucifixion, nine o'clock, at noon when the sky was dark and then at 3 p.m. when the Lord said it is finished. And they had different ways of doing it. So Earl composed Thanksgiving prayers for each of those times. And then we would do three Psalms out loud. And the strange thing happened. It didn't take much time, maybe five to 10 minutes at these prayer stops. But our flesh resisted it. We didn't want to do that. It doesn't take much time. But we did it. And then the rest of the day would flow very smoothly, very smoothly. We did night prayer, which I was just horrified at. It's like, I don't want to do night prayer. We did it. The Lord said, do it. Night prayer is in getting up in the middle of the night? No, no, no. Before? Before you go to bed. Yeah. So we would do that. And I would drape myself over the chair or something like, oh, I can't stand this. But it was good. And it was good spiritual discipline, excellent spiritual discipline. We did that for a number of years. And then now the Lord, he will call me up in the middle of the night and I'll get up and spend time with him. And my husband used to say, you know, you are too busy. You're too busy. You need to be, learn to be with the Lord. You don't always need to be doing, doing, doing, doing, doing. And that was very hard. That was a very hard training time for me because I can glue myself to the chair. And that's just it. You know, my mind is going on and on so forth. But the Lord has trained me. He has trained me all these years now to sit, get my body, not only my body, but my mind still. We're way too busy in our mind. We wake up with what we're going to do that day. We wake up with what we're going to buy and sell. We wake up with what we're, what travels or fun things we, we are planning all the duties and chores that we are way too busy. If we don't get still, we will never hear the voice of the Lord directing us. He won't do it. He will not compete. You're talking about a still heart and a still body, but maybe especially a, a still mind. Oh, that's where the struggle is. Yes. Yes. You want to, sometimes I put my hand on my head and say, Lord, please help me. Help me stop these thoughts because, you know, I'm a planner. You know, I'm organized and I'm a planner. I've always been that way. One of the hardest things for the Lord to tell me when I pray about something is wait. And the other thing is leave it alone. And he tells me that all the time. Leave it alone. I will take care of it. I just had to sell our car and I'd say, oh, maybe I should do this. Maybe I should do that. And he would say, leave it alone. He had appointed another young man in the church to take care of it. Just get my ore out of the way. And that's a big, that's a big thing because we naturally want to take responsibility and to control everything, right? Yeah, thanks for, thanks for sharing those various pieces you learned. Yeah. So another question, as I think about our audience, there's people watching from a large variety of churches. Some people quite happy where they are. Other people think, well, if I was in a different church, things would be better or whatever. And yeah, throughout your lifetime, you have worked with people in many church settings. You have experienced in a lot of church settings. Can you just, I don't know, speak some reassurance or encouragement, maybe, for how to think about that? Yeah. You know, Brother Berceau liked the continuing Anglican church. He said their doctrines matched up most closely to what the early Christians believed, except in non-resistance. They're not non-resistant. But we had discovered that in all the church groups, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, they have, yeah, Mennonites, the Anabaptists, the whole Anabaptist bunch, you know, they, everybody has something that they, they have retained from early Christianity. Now, through the centuries, it's been warped and twisted and things get out of hand, you know, a little bit in this group or that group. But, but my experience has been to just appreciate some of the things that, that the churches have that draw you closer to Jesus. So when Earl and I went to continuing Anglican church, we really loved the liturgical worship because it was based on scripture. It wasn't any unscriptural things, you know, it was based on scripture. And it, we found that it led us into worship, led us into worship. And we would, we would start singing these different liturgies, you know, the doxology, the Apostles Creed, these kinds of things. We start singing those, the glories, serve some quarter, lift up your hearts, we lift them up unto the Lord. We start singing these things at home during the week. And it just would draw us every time into worship. So we really appreciate that out of that church. Now, with the Mennonites, they are very solid Christians for the most part. You know, they, they raise their families, and they keep their families together, you know, the families that pray together, stay together. And they do that, but they're missing that element of worship. And I really get so hungry for that. And so it's not wild. It's not Pentecostal or charismatic, which, you know, I came through that too, which I appreciated that. But they miss the worship. We, we teach, teach, teach. But we just don't have that time of worship that, see, the liturgy helps you set aside all your problems, all your trials, you know, all your struggles, and you just sit. And as the whole congregation is worshiping through the liturgy, lift up your hearts, we lift them up unto the Lord. You know, let us give thanks unto our Lord God. It is meat and right, so to do. As, as they go through that every Sunday, they learn it, and it just pulls them. It just pulls their hearts up to the Lord, and then they can relax. And then when the teaching time comes, they can receive more because they have been close to the presence of the Lord. So is that part of what you were pulling into your home life, especially when you and your husband were doing the prayer stations together? Oh, yes. Yeah, I still do the prayer stations, and I still do the liturgy, you know, but it's nice to do it with others. Yeah, thank you for sharing that, both, yeah, your individual stories, but that encouragement, find Christ, people in Christ practices, where you are, where you are. And, you know, the basic issue is in your own heart. You draw near to Jesus, he'll draw near to you. And when you do that, when you live your life, you know, we were sold out to Jesus. We, we didn't care anything about this world. We were sold out to Jesus. When you do that, oh, when you do that, guess what happens? The Lord will pull other people to you, and you will, oh, you'll share together because they're hungry for that. I believe the Christian church people are hungry for that real presence of Jesus. They're hungry for it. They don't know how to get there. You know, we, so what's your short answer to that? Well, we do our cell groups, but we don't share our hearts. We share our daily walk, but we don't, daily activities, but we don't share anything spiritually that's really happening deep inside us, honestly, in our little sheep groups. That should change. The other thing is a little bit more worship. They're so afraid of rote. Oh, we don't want to do anything rote, you know. Let me tell you, if you teach, if you say the Lord's prayer every Sunday, the doxology, the glorious, let's serve some quarter, believe me, it will get, drill itself into the hearts of those who are hungry for the Lord. And it's marvelous. And then you're going to have the spirit flowing. You're going to have more life instead of more death flowing. You know, sometimes you will notice there'll be deadness. Okay, in the church service, what's happening then? It's not that they don't love Jesus. People need to walk with Jesus deeply in their heart, put their life in the light as he is in the light. Then what? Then we have fellowship, one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin. See, that's what we need. And then when we come together to worship, then what the Scriptures say to do, every man bring a song, a song, a praise report, something, something that the Lord has given them. And we fall a little short on that. But when the first person does it, and the second person, it makes it easier for others. Yeah, it does. It's just like we can get very scared to confess our sins to each other. Yes, yes, that's a very, but the first person does it and it can open it up if there are other hearts willing to share. Yeah. I'd like to add one thing. We kind of skipped over this about the habit. My husband, my husband liked Tom Shanks's book. He read that, Let Her Be Veiled. And in that book, there are two pictures of a Hebrew Christian woman and a Gentile Christian woman, and they are dressed like this. They have their little sash to identify themselves as Christian and they're long veiling. And he asked me if I could make a habit that looked like that. And I said yes, I could. So when I put it on, kind of changing from the Old Order Mennonite style of dress to this, a big change happened. And I just was so delighted. I was so delighted. Oh, because actually it represents the world. This is the world. The white is God's people. And decisions that we make, they either are for the world or for Jesus. There's no middle ground and there's no gray, no middle ground. You're either for Jesus or you're not. And so if the world is mostly dark and not white, we need to get busy with our evangelism. Okay. So I knew the habit was from the early Christian practice. I did not know the color symbolism before. Well, I don't know that they knew that either, but that's what the Lord has showed me. That this is why it's so important. And it is, it's crucial because when I go into town, whew, there is a parting of the spirits. No matter who I meet, some people will look above my head. Yeah, they don't see me. I could step on their toes and they still wouldn't see me. Other people will just, they'll open up their arms almost. And I know it's the spirit of the Lord. Now sometimes they will say, oh, are you Roman Catholic? You must be a nine. One lady said, it's been a long time since I've seen a nine. And I said, well you still haven't seen one because I'm not a nine. That's a Christian sister who belongs to the Roman Catholic Church. I'm a serious Christian sister, but I don't belong to the Roman Catholic Church. But all the serious, very serious ladies who have given their lives over to the Lord, they will wear some kind of a habit. And it's a silent, you don't have to open your mouth. You don't have to say a word. The witness goes forth. And people will stop you. They'll ask you to pray for their son, their daughter for themselves. They will stop you in a minute, or they'll come up and talk, religious talk to you, you know. And I like that when they do, because then I can say, I can turn the conversation over to Jesus. Where are you with Jesus? Do you know him? Do you know his love? Do you obey him? Do you walk with him in purity and in truth? It's so wonderful. I love the habit. Oh, I love the habit. And I found the more severe, ears covered, all hair covered, the more severe the habit, the darker, the planer, the stronger the witness is that goes forth. I kind of wish that Anabaptist brothers would do something a little different. My husband, at one point, before he got very, very ill, he got broadfalls. You can get dressed broadfalls. Did you know that? They're really pretty, really pretty material, very nice. And he would wear broadfalls, you know, just plain jeans type broadfalls. They were wonderful. They bore witness. People would stop him. They knew he was different. And they would talk to him all the time. It just little changes like that make such a difference. People notice. People do notice. I just wish the Anabaptist brothers would get on board. But I did want to add that. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It's so fruitful. So fruitful. Yeah, thank you for sharing these stories and encouragement. And yeah, I want to leave that with all of us. Follow Christ. He will bring people around you and open up to those people. He'll bring the hungry to you. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our channel or find more content at anabaptistperspectives.org. You can find links to interviews with David Burso and other materials referenced in this interview below. Or you may enjoy the episode called An Anabaptist's View of Salvation with Brother Burso.