I have a dear friend called Sergei, who lives in Belarus. He’s a church leader and church-planter. As a young man, he fought in Afghanistan with the legendary elite Russian special forces, the Spetsnaz. Once, when visiting his home in Minsk, I was thumbing through his photo album and came across a picture of him and his comrades leaning against a tank in the Afghan mountains. Sergei looked so violent, with ammunition belts criss-crossing his bare chest and holding a machine gun on each hip. He looked like Rambo! But the next photo in the album caught the moment he was baptised in a silly white
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