Front row: Ellen Kalda, Horret Kalda
By Karmo Kalda, Estonia
In circa 1980, when I was seven or eight years old, I remember having my first experience with God. My family and I were driving from Tallinn to Vastseliina [Tallinn is in the north and Vastseliina is in the south] to visit my grandparents, who lived on a farm. These were the times of the Soviet domination of Estonia. We were lucky to have a car, but this car, a Zaporozhets, was not much more than a metal box with an engine and wheels. It had more broken parts than working parts, and before we departed from Tallinn en route to Vastseliina, my father spent half the night fixing the gear box with used parts given to him by some friends. We had no other parts to fix anything if something broke down on the trip.
So, you may ask, how is this connected to my first experience with God? Not wanting the car to break down in the middle of nowhere, and not wanting to sit in the car and to wait for my father to find help, I sat in the back seat with my eyes closed, and I prayed for the first time, "Dear God, please make sure that the car does not break down, so that we can drive to Vastseliina and back home without any problems!" A selfish prayer perhaps, but it did get the snowball rolling.
My relatives were not religious, but a few of them claimed to believe in "something", but what that "something" was, they could not say, as they did not know. One of my grandmothers was a member of a church. She did not eat rabbit, eel, or pork, which was something her church believed in and had learned from the Old Testament. I thought this practice and many other practices and beliefs of her church to be strange and childish. So, I decided to also believe in "something", and that is when my "search" for "something" began.
I read many mystic books to broaden my knowledge. I started taking karate. Now it seems amusing, but at the time, the philosophy of karate was like honey for my soul. The movie Star Wars, believe it or not, gave me a sense of what "something" was. And I'm not the only one because there is a Jedi sect in the USA.
My second experience with God occurred after the Iron Curtain was lifted, and churches from around the world came to Estonia to advertise their religion to a nation which had been without God for 50 years. Churches became quite popular. Many young people joined them, including my good friend and his brothers. He encouraged me to join, but I still had a picture in my mind of a God who forbid us to eat eel, pork, and rabbit, and who allowed crusaders 700 years ago to occupy Estonia with fire and sword. I did not join the church, and my friend stopped communicating with me, and my search for"something" continued.
In 1996, while a student at a university, I saw The Urantia Book on a friend's bookshelf. Unfortunately, at that time the book was in English only, and neither of us could read English well enough to understand the contents of the book. But I knew that the book was something very important. I had to wait several years until I heard Peep Sõber, the head of the Estonian translation team, on the radio. It was a spiritual broadcast, and he mentioned The Urantia Book. After that, I saw Urantia Raamat in spiritual bookstores in Tallinn. It was not one book yet; it was 16 fascicles of 10 papers each. I read them, devouring the teachings like a hungry animal.
Now I know what "something" is. I know that it is God but not a primitive one that regulates what we eat but rather a loving God that is our Father. The Urantia Book gave me the feeling that I had arrived home. The search had ended, and the journey could begin. My possibilities are limitless, my life is endless, and life on Paradise is timeless.
Thank you, celestial beings and midwayers, for giving us this revelation!