In Moscow when our church started opening witnessing centers across Russia

I was in Moscow from 1993 when the church started opening up witnessing centers across Russia and inviting Russian students to the US. I saw a lot of things - members who were able to break through the hard life in the centers and go on to create blessed families and maintain their faith, students who used the church to go to the US and disappeared, James Baughman was the big lecturer in the Crimeas then, but now he’s gone.

I had an older sister in the movement who was much more active than me. She was appointed by Maarten Meijer as a mother figure of a center in Moscow. When she visited home sometimes, she would tell me secretly that _____ would secretly tell her the confessions of the members, and my sister would retell them to me, which led me to understand all the members’ sins, and that deception existed which affected me greatly as a young and impressionable person, and I felt that I could not trust. My sister was actually having a secret love affair with the father figure of the center, S. Kamarov, an early Russian member. And they broke their blessing and eloped together and got married. He is now my brother-in-law.

I saw a lot, and it made my journey as a member difficult. But I never lost faith in who True Parents were and never rejected the validity of the Divine Principle, although I had opted not to follow the 3 year church life course because I felt that I had nowhere to turn to and it was hard.

This path is filled with obstacles. I’d like to level with people and say that you will see a lot of the bad stuff as well as good stuff, but once True Father described God going to hell to save his children, so it can feel like heaven but sometimes like hell.