Auspicious day for Sali Rahmani

July 26 will always remain an auspicious day for Sali Rahmani, whose story is told in God’s Secret Listener.

Thirty-six years ago today the former Berwick-upon-Tweed Bible College student married Helen McGinley at Mosspark Baptist Church in Glasgow.

After a three-day honeymoon in Berwick-upon-Tweed, the newly-married couple drove out to Munich where Sali began a new ministry there helping overseas workers.

He also continued sending his Christian tapes in Albanian back to the European Christian Mission studio in Rawtenstall which were then beamed into the Balkan country by Trans World Radio in Monte Carlo.

Sali, pictured below, never realised how important his wedding day was until six years later in April 1983 when he decided to combine a trip home to Kosovo to see his parents and to go into the nearby villages and towns to find if there were any listeners to his radio programme there.

He was arrested by the Yugoslav police who accused him of propagating the Christian message, mostly through his radio work.

After days of questioning they produced a couple of plastic bags with an Albanian John’s Gospel in it, plus a large straw to keep the bag afloat, some chewing gum and Christian literature on which there were Sali’s contact details.

What do you know about these, demanded his interrogators? Sali knew about them, but very wisely, he had asked the Christians involved not to tell him too many details. Now he was glad he had been careful.

Some Christians had approached him with an imaginative scheme to get the Christian message into Albania.

This group had filled 1,000 plastic bags and dropped them into the 335 kilometre-long River Drin in Kosovo to float downstream into Albania.

His interrogators refused to accept that Sali had nothing to do with this unusual plastic bags mission, despite all his protestations.

Anyway, the interrogators told him it had been a useless enterprise as the authorities had fished all the plastic bags out of the river.

So Sali was delighted when he was visiting Christians in Kruje about ten years later and one of them produced the plastic bag and Christian literature, which he had found in the river and had read.

Meanwhile, Sali was wondering how he could convince them of his innocence, when one of the interrogators let slip the plastic bags had been put into the river on Saturday, June 26, 1976.

Suddenly Sali shouted with delight. “I can prove it wasn’t me. I had nothing to do with those plastic bags dropped into the river. I wasn’t even in Kosovo on that day.

“I was a couple of thousand miles away,” he said triumphantly. “I was in Glasgow, it was my wedding day.”

Sali’s story is told in God’s Secret Listener, published by Lion/Monarch of Oxford.

To order a copy for £7.50 including postage in the UK and £9 anywhere in the world email John@jbutterworth.plus.com