Nepal held so many beautiful and difficult things for me. It was both healing and challenging, painful and absolutely joyful.
One of the biggest blessings while I lived in Nepal was my Nepali family.
Our ministry hosts were an amazing group of people, and I recall so vividly that the first night we met them, we were immediately ushered into the family. The parents of our host family wouldn’t allow us to call them by their names; they insisted right away that we call them Mama and Papa. Their five children, ranging in age from 10 to 25, became our siblings. We were immediately showered with love.
Now, some of you know about my dad, and some of you don’t. This year, September 17th marked exactly two years since he passed away after a 7-year battle with cancer. Often, I still feel like I’m reeling from the fact that my family of four suddenly and so painfully became a family of three. I’m still turning over grief in my heart, but thank God I can see some of the places where God is healing that dad-shaped spot, that missing chunk of my life. Not erasing, but healing.
Papa was one such herald of healing. God totally used that man in a quiet and beautiful way to meet me where I’m at.
Let me start with a bit of Papa’s story. By the time he was five years old, he was living as a street kid with his sister after his parents split up and abandoned them both. Again, both of his parents were alive, but had remarried different people and decided that their children had no place in their new lives. So out on the streets those two little kids went. Tiny, five-year old Papa and his three year old sister struggled to survive on their own, their efforts even more desperate after their father pointedly told the public not to feed them or give them anything. Papa learned how to play the saronge to scrape some money together, but in the winter things would get so desperate that the two ate dirt. At that rate, it blew my mind that the siblings survived so many harsh Nepali winters in the mountainside villages.
Years later, God’s presence came to him one day, and shortly afterwards Papa found a Bible. Totally illiterate at the time, he poured his heart out in prayer to God and asked that he be able to read and comprehend what was going on in that book. And boom.
Papa could read the Bible.
As he read through it and learned from it he realized that he was called to be a pastor, and has since given everything to pursue that calling.
These kinds of things can sound at times like tall tales, but sitting in that room with tears running down his cheeks, this was unmistakably a true testimony of a life moved by Christ. As Papa shared his story, we were all crying. Later, he would show us a tiny alcove in a cliffside where he used to sleep, and another overwhelming wave of emotion hit us squarely in the chest. He told us the only reason why he is alive today is because God had a plan for his life, and with the memory of staring at that rocky little cave, I believe that wholeheartedly.
There are many amazing results of this man’s testimony, so many ways it shaped him, and in turn, those around him. But one thing in particular is that because Papa had no Papa, now he’s determined to be everybody’s Papa.
And that meant a lot to me.
He is such an incredibly cheerful person and was so excited to share Nepal with us. To share his community and family and home with us. When we went on hikes he carried a little umbrella to shield the sun and it reminded us all of Mary Poppins. He was our Mary Papa. With his lively disposition, one could even joke, ‘Merry Papa’. The way he lives his life is endlessly inspiring, with so much grace and love for everyone around him. He’s thoughtful and wise and always willing to gently share that knowledge with others. He called us all his daughters and would always check in with us; from how we were feeling to whether we were getting enough food.
“God is love,” he said many times, “and so we love.”
The night we said goodbye to him, he went around in a circle, blessing us one by one. It’s a memory I’ll always hold close to my heart. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like the daughter of a father here on earth, and it felt so sweet to be given a Nepali dad for a little while. Actually, I know in my heart that I’ll always be Papa’s foreign kid, and I have another home in those mountains I’m so far from now.
God knows how I am hurting, and he knows how I am healing. It was such a blessing to be given back this father-daughter relationship in a different way at a different time. I know I am still cared for and loved, by so many. I wasn’t abandoned in my mourning, just as street kid Papa wasn’t forsaken all those years ago. God is called a, ‘father of the fatherless’ in Psalms, and isn’t that so? God bringing Papa into my life was another reminder that I am not forgotten.
None of us ever are.
