Things died down a little bit as people filtered out of the church. They went back to their huts and homes to sleep or at least try. I'm sure there were plenty of people stirred by questions needing answering after hearing us four white guys come in and share our hearts. What we shared was messy but then again so is love. We were real and we were honest and I was proud of the guys with how they shared. They were led by the Spirit and not interested in coming with a 5 point well polished and rehearsed script.
I went back outside to take another quick look at the stars. It was no time at all and I was being called back into the church for an upcoming dinner that somehow had prepared for us. So I shuffled back inside only to find a different surprise. Among the handful of people who remained, was a young lady and her child. She was a little girl who looked like she was about a year old. This woman was talking to the pastor and motioning towards us.
WHAT?!?! She wants us to name her firstborn little girl??? You've got to be kidding me!!! Seriously Raj?!?!
I remember as those thoughts raced through my head as our translator told us of her desire for us to name her child. Crazy! In the States, most parents have names and 15 back up names JUST IN CASE before the baby is ever born. People give their input and there's a bit of an excitement that comes with the name picking process. However, at the end of the day, the parents usually decide and from day 1 the baby is named. This is foriegn to them…literally.
We had been in other villages where babies were crawling around without names and we thought it was wierd. In fact a couple days prior to this a topic of our discussion was when exactly kids get named in India…well now we knew. Here we were standing in the front of the church with expectant onlookers as we stumbled through names. Yet one name resoundingly kept coming back… "GRACE".
So honored and flabberghasted, overwhelmed and intrigued, we named this baby girl Grace. One pastor ripped a page out of his notebook to write it down for the mother as our translator told her the name we had picked and it's meaning in her language. She smiled gratefully, bowed her head slightly to honor our decision and tucked away the piece of paper away so that she would know how to spell her own child's name…
Standing in dumbstruck with what was happening in our lives, we sat down to do what we were getting very familiar with…eating…
