Honoring My Father

A commemorative speech
by Victor Fomenko ©

Voted first place for Advanced Speech at Northwest University

May 2007

Father’s Day is the day when the world stops to recognize the great men that have profoundly affected our lives. Today is that day, the day to commemorate those heroes that have lived their lives for the good of others.

I am here today to honor the life of my greatest hero, my father, Yuriy Gregorivich Fomenko.

Yuriy was born on January 17, 1953 in Kishenev, Moldova to a poor family. He was the second of six children but the first son born to his parents. Being such, he took on a lot of responsibility in the family even at a young age.

In his childhood, my father could have been described as determined.

Sickness nearly took his life many times and a significant portion of his childhood was spent in the hospital, a couple times even to upwards of several months. He was bedridden, many miles away from his family, and completely alone in that hospital. But despite all that he still persevered. Then, by the age of 15 he got a job doing full-time physical labor in order to help his dad provide food for the family.

As he grew up and became a young adult, my father could be best described as zealous for God.
 

He accepted Christ at the age of 17, and a newfound hunger for God consumed his life. He spent much of his free time helping widows and the elderly by doing yard work and gardening for them. He also had an overwhelming desire to see people saved. For example, in his family, my father prayed and fasted for each one of his family members one-by-one, until all of them gave their lives to God.
 

He also endured punishment and persecution for his faith. On several occasions the KGB broke into our apartment and fined my father the equivalent of a month’s worth of wages just for having a prayer or worship gathering at our house. The KGB also bugged every apartment and house we lived by installing small microphones in the walls so that they could monitor everything that was going on, to make sure there were no religious meetings being held at our house. Countless times my father barely and miraculously escaped jail for openly preaching God’s Word.

Throughout his Christian life, my father was completely obedient to God’s will.

In 1988, he first heard God’s call to bring our family to America, and by November of that next year in 1989, God miraculously brought us out of the hostile and communistic USSR to start new life here in America. A life where we could enjoy the freedom to worship God in our own way. A life where we could enjoy freedom from persecution and abuse for being Christians. A life where we where we given an opportunity to rise out of poverty and do something significant with our lives. New life was graciously given by God to me and my family.

In America, with this new life, my father wasted no time. After about a year, he helped pioneer a church in Spokane, Washington. There, he served as the teacher of the church, and eventually he also became an associate pastor. But not only was my father heavily involved in ministry, he also owned and managed his own business—Fomenko Construction. He physically working over 50 hours a week doing construction, and then he would come home and spend several more hours in his office seeking God and preparing for his weekly 2-hour teaching sessions.

On top of that, he actively raised our family of seven kids! I don’t even know when he slept. He was always up late after he would put us all to bed, and then he would wake back up before sunrise. I remember so many times waking up as early as five in the morning and hearing my father praying and worshipping God in his office. He would seek God’s face early in the morning, praying for each of us, by name, every single day.

My father truly was a man of faith and prayer. He represented a picture of Jesus to everyone who knew him.
 

Of all of the elders and pastors at our church everyone wanted to talk to and be around my dad. People from the church always flooded our house seeking prayer, guidance, and support from my father. And yet despite how busy he was, he never once turned anyone away. Somehow, he managed to help everyone in need. I can remember the innumerable hours he spent in his office counseling and praying for people.

Also, never have I met a more giving and self-sacrificing man than my father.
 

Even though his income ranged between only twenty to forty thousand dollars a year, he still always found ways to give so much money to the church and to people in need. On top of that my father paid up to ten thousand dollars every year to send all of us kids to a Christian school. If you do the math, some years up to half of his income would go toward our tuition!
 

He sacrificed everything to make our lives better than what he had. I can even remember when one time he gave away our ten thousand dollar car, a luxury Chrysler New Yorker, to a family that just immigrated to America. That was the car that my brother drove all of us to school in everyday. But my father’s generosity always considered others before himself.

Little did we know, however, that on Thursday, July 8, 2004, everything in our lives would soon change. While working at a construction site with my two brothers, my father lost his balance and fell 14 feet from a two-story garage, landing head first, backwards onto the concrete floor. Immediately he was knocked unconscious and went into a coma.

For seven days my father laid completely unconscious in the hospital. Those were the longest seven days of my life. Seven days that my family and I never left that hospital. Seven days we remained there by his side in prayer, believing that God would raise our father, and completely restore him to full health. Yet despite our prayers and ceaseless faith, my father passed away on July 14, 2004.

On that day, like no other, I wanted the whole world to stop, to pause, to cease, and to just mourn the death of the greatest man I had ever known. But the world did not stop, it continued in its chaos as if nothing had ever happened. But my life and lives of hundreds of others who knew my father would never be the same again.

For many, Father’s day is a day that children can spend time with their fathers and appreciate them for who they are and all they have done. But for me it’s different. All I can do is just remember… the life of my best friend, my mentor, my hero—my father.

The saddest thing is that while my father was alive he probably never knew how much we appreciated him. He never heard us say how much he meant to us, or how much we loved him. Instead, our many bitter words of dissatisfaction and complaint must have cut deep into his heart. But still he chose to love, still he chose to give, still he chose to sacrifice everything he had for us

Oh how I wish more than anything else in entire world that my father could have seen that his life of sacrifice was worth all the trouble he ever went through. Oh how I wish that I would be able to show him that what he dreamed, desired, and declared in prayer, every single day, actually came true. His number one dream was to see his children love the Lord their God will all their heart, mind, soul, and strength; and live their lives completely on fire for Him. And although that might be true today, my father never got to see that before he died.

Have you ever tried to thank and honor and praise someone with everything you had, but you just didn’t know how? And no matter how many endless words from the bottom of your heart you said, or how many things you did, you still felt it was not nearly enough to thank that person? Well that is just a glimpse of what I feel.

No matter how many great things I say, no matter how elegantly I organize a string of perfectly arranged vocabulary, no matter how well I deliver sincere and heart-felt words, no matter much I can impact an audience... all that is still not enough to communicate how much I love, respect, adore, honor, and cherish my father and the life he lived.

No matter how hard I could ever try, my father will never be able to hear any words of gratitude from me. He will never know the legacy that he left or the amount of people that he deeply impacted by his selfless life. A crater the size of the moon could not compare to the impact his passing has left for us who knew and loved him.

The most appropriate inscription is etched in my father’s memorial stone. It reads:

In loving memory of a FAITHFUL husband, father, and grandfather. A shining light and a man after God’s own heart. "He walked with God and was not, for God took him."
-- Genesis 5:24

Daddy, I love you and I miss you so much. I can’t wait to see you in heaven. Happy Father’s Day.

My greatest hero