Sigi & David Oblander Ministries|Sigi Oblander her story... A Run For Freedom

We will understand what it means to be preserved...

"I believe that salt speaks of preservation and when you look at your life, your calling did not start when you got saved. One day we are going to stand before the Lord and He is

going to open up the book of life, and we are going to realize how many times He has preserved our lives to fulfill the destiny and the purpose of our lives. Then we will really understand what being preserved means.

"Some of us are sweet savors, and others of us are salty sacrifices because we have to go through a process of preservation before God can accept our sacrifice. We don't all have the privilege of being born into the Church. I know some people who can never actually recall one day when they were saved because that salvation has been a lifestyle of sweetness and glory and freshness and of innocence and purity, but there are other sacrifices like us.

"We were not preserved because we were sweet ... but only because God's salt was upon us. And sometimes it would hurt and wound because we had inner wounds and outer wounds, but God would put in us salt so that at the right time the sacrifice was ready to be consumed and the fire of God could do what it needed to do in our lives.

"I was born in the middle of bomb attacks in Berlin, and my father and mother called me Sigreid which means 'victorious rider' and I was born in the hour of greatest defeat, starvation and hunger.

"I remember living in earthen bunkers when American bombs would fall. We didn't know from one attack to the next if our house would stand."

Our father, Walter, was artistic and he worked on the design of a bomb for Hitler. Because of his work, the family was evacuated from Berlin to Czechoslovakia. "When we went there I was very small and we were quite safe in a little town, because my Dad's factory was underground and he was a draftsman for that bomb. "As you probably know that bomb was never completed because the Russian army pressed in and they came right into the town.

"All the Germans were called over a loudspeaker to come to a certain place to be marched out of Czechoslovakia back into Germany, and we had to walk about 100 kilometers to the border. "

Sigi's brother and sister had scarlet fever and they were in isolation at a local hospital. Sigi was still in a pram and her mother was expecting a fourth child. The doctor released the two oldest children back to the family: they were emaciated and not yet healed of scarlet fever.

They had one night together before they were due to evacuate and they had to decide what things there were going to take with them.

"I learned from the time I was young that things don't matter because one day you have something, the next day you lose it. Many times our hearts are attached to things that have no value. The devil will emphasize the value of being modern and cool so that we don't find the real depths of what God wants to do in our lives. "The Russians came and took most of our things from us and left us with the junk. We started walking back to the border and we didn't know whether our grandparents back in Germany were still alive or if our house was still standing. As we walked in the beating heat of the sun, the soldiers were driving us with their horses and their guns."

Some were shot because they slowed down.

Sigi's Dad had made them a little cart to carry their provisions, but when that packed up, they just abandoned their provisions. All the time they were told to hurry up or they would be shot. Some people were shot because they were slowed down too much by their belongings.

They arrived in Dresden. By then the first group had already departed on a boat and Sigi and her family were stranded without food. They were sad that they had been left behind and their Dad went from store to store begging for food. They had to wait eight days for the next ship and had nothing and nowhere to go, but a woman took them in and fed them. The boat they missed later hit a sea mine and exploded and everybody drowned "and God preserved us for the right time."

When they got to Berlin it was totally bombed. Sometimes their food ran out and in the night they would steal fruit and roots. Sigi was very sick and weak as a child and had anemia. "I remember hunger pains so great that I couldn't sleep..." That winter was very cold and they had nothing to burn and nothing to eat and they were blue when they woke up to temperatures in the house of -20C.

"For years I would have nightmares because of the fear of death in my life. I have found that every limitation in your life you can only lose when you go deeper with God.

"We lived for 15 years under the Soviet occupation. We were the first generation that was indoctrinated by the Russians. Our main textbooks were Stalin, Marx and Lenin and as we were born into the time of famine and hunger, we naturally developed a dislike for the Russians. We blamed the Russians. We didn't realize that the Russians came because of what Hitler did.

"We did not deal with the root; but with the fruit, but later on we have to deal with the root, and this is the same with South Africa. Some of us don't deal with the root in our life, we deal with the fruit. But it will be this generation that has to deal with the roots and make a new nation."

For a number of years, Sigi and her family spent most of their time looking for food.

At that time there was a revival in America and the hearts of the people were softened to have love for their enemies. American women who had lost loved ones in the war had mercy and began to send over food parcels to West Berlin. Some pilots risked their lives and began dropping some of those parcels over East Berlin so people like Sigi and her family could live.

They also started smuggling food into the country and many times the guards would catch them and interrogate them.

"And I was shy and sickly looking, but they didn't know there was a big spirit in there," says Sigi. She was only nine at the time, and her sister was six.

But everything in her life was taken, so Sigi learned not to get attached to anything or to anyone.

There was interrogation and brainwashing at school. Their parents had to try and defend their children from two systems: the older two from nazism because they wanted to get them into the Hitler Youth and the two young ones from the communists who wanted to get them involved in the Young Pioneers.

They were influenced, and turned pink.

As a family they went to church, but Sigi was not impressed with the Christians because they were influenced by the system and turned pink. "It is amazing how you can still be a Christian but you are not snow-white anymore, you get pink or grey. You get coloured by the circumstance in your life because you lose the purity and only the pure in heart shall see God - and some of us are not bad, but the system is colouring our perspective.

"I have seen deacons and elders become communists. I have seen the preachers being nice to the communists. Nobody wanted to die; we had just come out of Nazism where the pastors died with the Jews and so on. We didn't want to go through that again."

So the family's Christian stance was eroded and Sigi was allowed to join the Young Pioneers so she could take part in sport. After she joined the communist party she went through brainwashing sessions. She was shown movies of what happened in concentration camps: how they made lampshades of peoples' skin; how they made biltong out of people; experiments in the SS labs. Sigi had nightmares.

Meanwhile, her older brother and sister escaped from the country. Young Sigi began to wonder often, "Why did I come into the world?" As she watched her mother sob and her father broken over the secret departure of her sister, Sigi determined that nobody was going to make her cry and she committed emotional suicide and distanced herself from the ability to feel. She became a smuggler again and trusted no one.

The family later escaped to a refugee camp over the border, and they lived in refugee camps for about six or seven months.

Then later moved to Hanover. As Sigi's education had been so disrupted, she decided she would become a maid, so that at least she could have a room and a place to stay.

Later Sigi, at the age of 16, moved to Canada to be with her brother. She couldn't speak English. She did babysitting for a few months. Sigi was old beyond her years and soon afterwards she was raped. Thereafter she existed from day to day, with the thought of suicide ever uppermost in her mind. A friend of hers got hooked on drugs and they both ran away to Sweden for a while. Although Sigi looked together and functional (she even had boyfriends and 'love') no one knew what was going on inside her.

Then, when she was about 20, she met up with her brother again. He was radically changed and had become a totally revived Christian, on fire to see Germany revived. "I would hear him crying on his knees in the bedroom in our little apartment: 'God send revival to my family. God bring revival to my family!'

"It was between Christmas and New "Year 1964, and he came home and I was sitting there. We started talking and I told him I would like to be a Christian but I didn't like Christians... "He said, 'Sigi, you can be a Christian; you don't need to go to church. You can experience Jesus right now...' What had been buried for years came to the surface. "He said,'Sigi just let yourself go. God is going to touch you. He is going to reveal Himself to you right now.' He encouraged me to kneel down and start praying from the heart. Now came to the surface what had been buried all those years: 'God if You are alive; God if You are really real; please God, I promise You one thing if You're really real, I'm never going to look to the left, I'm never going to look to the right. I'm never going to follow anyone or anything but You, but God show me You're real. "At that moment, it was like a wave of fire came into my life and for the first time I cried. In an instant I recognized I was a sinner. I recognized I needed Him. I recognized there was life beyond my deadness. In one instant I was restored - not whole. But I was impregnated for restoration and for life."

Sigi's sister arrived on the scene shortly afterwards and she told Sigi of a little poor church close by where they were praying for people to be filled with the Holy Ghost. They had no idea what that meant but thought they would go and check it out anyway. There was a humble American evangelist preaching there who later became well known to Germans. The church was of the Pentecostal Holiness denomination and Sigi and her sister looked incongruous in their worldly dress as they walked in and sat in the front - so as not to miss seeing what was happening. When the call came from the evangelist, "Who wants the Holy Ghost?" Sigi was eager. He prayed for them and Sigi began to speak in tongues ... four hours later she was still praying in tongues. She had such in infilling that she didn't know how to control it for two weeks: when people would talk to her in normal conversation, Sigi would find herself answering in tongues.

A couple of days later, in a Baptist church, the spirit of prophecy came upon Sigi and she brought a word - never even having had a teaching on the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Six months later Sigi was in Bible school and there, the pressure of trying to be a perfect Christian all the time got to her and she got very sick: her blood pressure would drop and everyone thought she was going to die. Her spirit would separate itself from her body, and death's coldness would rise up in her body. She went on like that for months until she realized she was dealing with a spirit of death, which had attached itself to her.

After Bible school, and a time back in her home country of Germany, Sigi felt the Lord was calling her to forsake her father's house, so she left and returned to Canada.

There Sigi was, over a lengthy period, processed by the Lord in order to head up a ministry. "I remember always praying, 'God use me; don't let my life be in vain.' that was my greatest fear that my life would be in vain."

One of the first things God did in Sigi was to break the hold of fear in her. He took someone who was very afraid of border posts and border guards and got her to smuggle Bibles behind the Iron Curtain for 10 years. She has many stories to tell from this phase of her life and there were many miracles, but Sigi was also captured and tortured by the KGB and imprisoned. In the same period, Sigi also traveled to India a lot and lived in the mountains.

"I can tell you many adventure stories... in 1971 when I was in Pakistan, the Lord told me He wanted me to go into Bangladesh because there was a civil war. But I couldn't get in. I was in Karachi and the missionaries came running out of Bangladesh and they told us all these horror stories of the massacres. "I realized I would have to dress up as a man in order to smuggle myself into Bangladesh. The Lord had told me, in an audible voice, that I was going to 'hear, see and tell the truth.'" She smuggled herself on the plane and the plane was about to take off and the police found her. They stopped the plane and she was dragged off and interrogated. "God gave me such grace with these Moslem captains. I was a young woman then and they said they thought I was crazy, but they knew I was doing it for God. They released Sigi and she had to return to Pakistan.

God's reporter...

"Then the Lord said to me He was going to make me His reporter, and for five or six years that was what I was. The Lord told me I was to go to Calcutta and cross the border to get into Bangladesh to see what was going on."

In Calcutta, Sigi went to the local newspaper office and spoke to the chief reporter. When he heard her story he offered to take Sigi into Bangladesh with him.

They would slip in without passports, but he warned that if they were caught they would die. "Are you ready for that?" he asked Sigi. She reckoned that if he could die for his job, she could certainly die for her God. They struck a deal and the Hindu reporter became her friend. He protected Sigi as a brother would and took her to the front lines. She also got to talk to governors and to minister Jesus Christ to them.

Sigi was the only Christian witness in the midst of Hindus, Moslems and Buddhists. As she ministered to the dead and dying, Sigi was brought to a new understanding of the grace of God and she prayed: 'Lord I am going to go where nobody wants to go. I am going to do what nobody wants to do. Use me...' And He has...

What are you willing to do for God in South Africa, America, the nations? Is the death and the sorrow just a statistic, or do you let God's life touch your life to such a place that you can lay down your life. I have served God for 40 years and I believe He is still looking for people who dare to be different, who dare to run faster, who dare to dig deeper, who dare to endure, who dare to give it all because He has given it all...

In His Love,
Sigi

• David & Sigi's complete: International Schedule
• Here Sigi's Full Story - on CD

Sigi, her story...