From Death to Life

By Lena Apelian

Reviewed by: Vahe H. Apelian

 

       Recently I translated Lena Martyrosian Apelian’s Christian born-again testimonial she had published as a book titled “From Death to Life”.  Lena is Missak Apelian’s wife. My cousin Jack Chelebian M.D. edited my translation.

Lena had my translated manuscript recently published in Armenia when she went visiting family members, relatives and friends she has there. A picture from Shogher Baghdoud Tilkian’s artwork called “Wheat field” graces the cover. Richard Taminosian prepared the presentation of the book’s cover. Missak Apelian put the manuscript in the book format. 81 pages of the book comprise the text. Additional 19 pages are devoted to pictures.

Along with Lena’s born-again Christian experience narration, the book also opens a window of the atheistic culture that prevailed in the Soviet Republic of Armenia when Lena grew into adulthood and its impact on family relations as the country made the transition to its post-Soviet era. Lena was born in Ararat. The town is located 26 miles southeast of Yerevan. Her parents were Sarkis and Tzovik Vardanyan. She was educated, nurtured in her parental modest family there. Her father was a laborer and a devoted atheist and a committed communist. Lena writes: “I had no notion about Christianity. I just remember that our teacher of atheism would tell us, “What God in this age of enlightenment? Where is he? Let him reveal himself. Do not believe in these legends. Someone has jotted own an erroneous account and they want to force it upon us. I had not heard from anybody anything truthful about God. But my grandfather used to say:” In old times there was Satan and there were good angels whom people had seen.” She further notes: “I believed a bit in what my grandfather said, but I do not know why I disliked Christians who were referred to as believers. I hated them. I even would demolish their meeting place. I do not know why I harbored such hatred towards them. I did not know them and none of them had done any harm to me.”

As it was customs, Lena married at a young age to Samvel Martirosyan. They had three children, Marine, Angela, and Artashes. Lena, happily married, continued in her mischievous ways gathering the women in her workplace and telling them crude jokes and making fun of the believers. Samvel proved to be a devoted family man. When the children asked their mother Lena permission to attend a presentation about Jesus by the believers, she forbade them only to find out later that her husband had permitted them afterwards. When Lena asked her husband to remove from their bedroom a picture of Jesus Christ he had cut from a calendar, Samvel insisted that the picture remain there hanging from the wall.

Their tranquil family life, minding their own business attending to the care of their family, came to a tragic end when Lena at the age of 34 lost suddenly her 35 years old husband in 1993 due to a massive heart attack at a time when Armenia was experiencing hardship and families were experiencing long cold and dark nights due to lack of electricity and heat in their homes because of shortage due to the ongoing war.

Widowed in the highly patriarchal society of Armenia, she did not find the support she expected, and she rebelled against God. Her day-to-day uncertainties and struggles brought her to depression. Realizing she was no longer able to cope with her life, she managed to have herself admitted to a hospital in Yerevan where she contemplated committing suicide by throwing herself from the balcony. It was at such a moment in the hospital that she experienced the transforming testaments of a Christian woman named Armine Barkhoudaryan who revealed to her the redeeming power of the Christian faith through Jesus Christ.  Her continual stays in the hospital for the next two months became a spiritual journey in her newly found discovery of the Christian faith and she immersed herself in the study of the bible with Armine and with many visitors they received, some from overseas, all supporting each other through their study of the Bible

After discharge, she returned home enthused to spread the transforming message she had discovered only to find out that her relatives and friends and even her own family shunned her to have become a believer herself. For a while, they managed to turn her children against her, but Lena persevered in her faith and continued to meet in worship with those who professed the love of God through Jesus Christ and prayed for her children’s welfare. Eventually, her children accepted their mother and started following in her ways. They supported and worked with her after she got fired from her new job she liked very much just for having become a believer herself and spreading the good news of the Bible.

Years passed, the family grew, some of her relatives accepted her and started attending church with her but her parents remained adamant, initially disavowing her but then coming to terms with her that each of them would go their own way. Lena would continue attending church and being a Sunday school teacher in her own house and they would go in the ways they were brought up.

In 2011 Lena came to America to be with her daughter Angela and her husband who had moved to the U.S. a few years earlier. In the U.S. she experienced the challenges newcomers experience, but she continued to find comfort and fulfillment in the Christian Outreach for Armenian Church and shared her testimonies with the congregation and embarked on mission with the other church members in Armenia.

It is in the church that she met Missak Apelian, who is a long-standing member and the treasurer of the church and found in him the fulfillment of all she had jotted down in a single women’s retreat in Armenia. During that retreat, on a heart-shaped blank paper she had noted, and kept the note with her, the qualities she would look for in a husband, should the unlikely opportunity come about realizing that years were passing by and she now had become mother-in-law to her three children and a grandmother to six grandchildren. 

Missak and Lena were married in their church in 2014 and held their wedding reception in the Garbian Hall of the Kessab Educational Association and donated the gifts they received to charity. A new course opened for her and for her children who Lena noted, had not enjoyed the pleasure of a grandfather and found it in their mother’s new husband Missak.

Lena ends her book assuring her readers that “those who seek shall find. Those who knock, the door will be open for them. Those who ask, it will be given to them.” and offers her book as a testament for enduring faith and the transforming affect it had on her enabling her to raise her children into the fine adults they became with families of their own.

Through the proceeds of her two books, Lena has raised $3,277 to widowers in Armenia and Gharapagh. The book retails for a token $15 for charity to be sent to Christian Outreach for Armenian Church, P.O. Box 1129, Glendale, CA 91209 (Tax exemption No. 95-4320177). A copy of the book may be obtained by emailing Missak Apelian (ApelianMA@gmail.com). 

In the preface of her book Lena writes: “I am narrating about myself as to how and for what reasons I wanted to commit suicide and how was it that a miracle happened, and I started to discover life and love it”.

 “From Death to Life” makes for an interesting and inspirational reading. Although the book is a narration of a very personal experience, it none-the-less is universal in its appeal and will resonate with the reader.