Heart in chains

For Andrei Lavrentyev, 33, seeing a guy with the coolest tattoo at the age of 18 led him to prison and addiction.

“I made the wrong choice. I saw this guy with a nice tattoo right over his heart – it was a heart chained. I liked that tattoo. His lifestyle was attractive to me – he had lots of money, fancy car, gold jewellery.”

Andrei had a stable home, was into sports and had been a good pupil at school. But now at the age of 18, with the collapse of the Soviet Union making anything seem possible, he wanted some independence and a lifestyle like his new friend.

“I wanted it all and I wanted it fast. But most of all I wanted a tattoo like his – and that’s when I spiritually chained my own heart. I spent 15 years in jail as a result of that choice.”

Drugs were an inseparable part of Andrei’s ‘glamorous’ new lifestyle. “It started off as a pleasure. Then it became a big, big problem which I couldn’t defeat. As a human being I could never have defeated it. Neither doctors nor anyone else could help me.

“Thank God that one day in my home town of Voronezh, the Exodus ministry came and I saw them like a mirror image of me – my contemporaries, looking just like me. They used the same slang, were streetwise. But there was a difference. I saw light shining through their eyes. I saw joy.

“One of them started talking to me – he didn’t talk much about spirituality, he just said, ‘I know what you need now. You don’t know how to fill in the vacuum in your heart.’

“He told me he knew how to do that and invited me to try out the Exodus centre. I listened to him because something was different about his conversation. I had treid everything by then and it hadn’t helped.”

So Andrei arrived at the Severskaya rehabilitation centre. “Here I saw not just one person with light in their eyes but many. These were people who’d been set free – they’d been set free by God.

“The Bible, they said, is a guidebook for our day-to-day life given to us by God. I tried living by the Bible. And I understood that if I even needed a manual to operate the TV remote control, I certainly needed one for my life.

“And I’ve changed.”

Andrei has seen a change in his family’s attitude to him too. “All the connections that I’d destroyed myself at the age of 18 have now been restored.”