I was out in the yard setting gopher traps when a friendly voice addressed me one sunny Sunday morning. Jerry Procopio’s wife, Bridgette, had already sped by our property on the gravel road, pushing a stroller containing their young boys.
Jerry and I entered into friendly conversation that included the state of affairs in our world and spiritual dimensions. Jerry asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a Seventh-day Adventist pastor.
Jerry had once met a 90-year-old Seventh-day Adventist by the name of Joe Melashenko stranded with a flat tire, and had stopped to help. Joe had insisted he needed no help. Jerry could see the need and helped him anyway.
The Melashenkos responded to Jerry’s kindness with gift DVDs of their music. More conversations followed. Jerry was impressed by the quality of this family and by Joe’s prayers for his children. He asked Joe how he had become a Seventh-day Adventist. Joe told the story of how an evangelist had come to their little town in Canada and presented the truth from the Bible. About half of the church where they attended became Seventh-day Adventists.
Several weeks later we again had occasion to visit on a Sunday morning as Jerry passed by our property. This time we got deeper into spiritual things. I asked him if he wanted Bible studies. He didn’t say no. I started praying specifically that we might be able to have Bible studies with this couple, and visited them with some produce from our garden.
In the meantime, unbeknown to us, Jerry and Bridgette visited us twice but never found us at home. Their third try, one Sunday afternoon, found us getting ready for an evangelistic meeting that very afternoon. I did not hear the doorbell, and my wife, Connie. had not yet met Jerry and Bridgette. Seeing strangers at the door, she assumed they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Uncertain what to do she solicited my help.
He had uncorked and dumped 600 bottles of personal wine.
At the door I found Jerry and Bridgette and invited them in.
“Do you have to keep the Sabbath to be saved?” Jerry asked.
“It depends,” I said. “It depends if you know the truth about it or not. It depends if you are open to knowing the truth or not.”
I was working my way around to asking them if they wanted Bible studies. They were more hungry for spiritual food than I had imagined. Our studies began that very night after the evangelistic meeting. Jerry and Bridgette never missed a study.
Several weeks along they volunteered a question: “What do you think about wine?”
The question reflected a Mennonite influence. While some Mennonites no longer frown on its use, the Mennonites whose church they had been attending for about a year did not believe in drinking alcohol. But wine had always been a part of Jerry’s life. He had grown up making wine with his Italian dad.
I said, “Well, we’ll have a study about that later.”
Bridgette responded, “We have to know right now; we are making an investment and don’t want to go further down that road if we will be doing something wrong.”
So we studied it the next week. They were not persuaded.
“Well,” I said, “we aren’t done yet; I’ve saved all the big guns for next time.” We felt impressed to simply pray for our friends and go back to the sequence of Bible studies.
When the subject of the Sabbath came up, we invited them to church. They came. We had lunch together, but Jerry didn’t show up until we were finished. We saved his plate and served it with a question: “What kept you?”
His response was a bombshell: Jerry was late because he had just helped his cousin load some equipment to take it away. Under conviction he had just bailed out of their winery partnership.
Several weeks later he complained of sore fingers at the start of our Sunday night study: the past two Sundays he had uncorked and dumped 600 bottles of his own wine.
We studied the three angels’ messages in the context of righteousness by faith, the investigative judgment, the Second Coming, the Sabbath as the seal of God and the final test, the remnant church, spiritual Babylon.
The Procopios were ready learners and step by step accepted each truth. At his local business Jerry began praying silently for opportunities to witness. The door opened for him to join a spiritual conversation, and he shared some of the things he was learning. One of the men accepted his offer of Bible studies. A short time later he began studying with the son of a local pastor and a teenage boy from the Mennonite church.
Was it just by chance that all this came about? Connie had begun praying regularly for all of our neighbors. We had not yet even met Jerry and Bridgette and didn’t know they existed. We learned that they had been praying for truth and light. The positive encounter with the Melashenko family had prepared the way. God brought us together by divine appointment.
Larre Kostenko is a pastor in the Northern California Conference, in the United States.
