I am in the beginning of my second week in India right now, and I’m reflecting on my month spent in Nepal. I’m sorry that this blog is late in coming, but I wasn’t prepared to write it at the close of our last month. How in the world can I convey to you the entirely different world that we entered? Make yourself comfortable and grab a coffee (if you would like to make it Indian coffee, follow this recipe: 1 spoonful of instant coffee, heated [real] milk, and lots + lots of sugar) because I might talk for a long time.
Ministry aka A Lot of Walking
This month we were very fortunate to have the amazing opportunity to evangelize and trek through the foothills of the Himalayas while guided by a pastor and a translator, who will remain anonymous for their safety. The Himalayas! We divided our time among a series of villages, some further away and requiring a bus ride, others closer and requiring up to one and a half days of walking (yeah, I know!). We stayed in churches at night, some for one night and two churches, in particular, for a long enough time that they began to feel like home. On the race it does not take very long for something to begin to feel like home.
During the day we would go visit people and pray for them, hold services in the center of villages, preach at church, lead bible studies, well, pretty much everything. It was a month with very little stability as far as daily schedules and experiences goes, but one of the months with the most fruit! One afternoon, for example, a racer playing the guitar drew a group of children to the church yard and one thing led to another and suddenly we were having a revival as a crowd of both children and adults listened to the gospel and joined in worship songs. We later learned that some of those children returned to that church to attend for, I believe, the very first time in their lives! I should mention that that afternoon had been a ‘break day’. Like there is a break in the Kingdom…
Devon drawing a crowd of children
Another day we planned to go to visit individuals in their houses and bring the gospel to them. However, I stayed behind with one of my teammates who was sick. I had been learning more about the Holy Spirit that week, so I decided to devote my day to praying for the people out ministering. When they returned I learned how many of my prayers had been answered in that God had prepared the hearts of individuals to hear the Gospel and worked healings over physical pains. That day I learned the power of intercession!
A distinctive thing about the Christian cultures of India and Nepal, and possibly our other countries as well, though I didn’t experience it, is the way that prayer is treated. Often we would spend hours if not a whole day simply going from person to person or from place to place to pray for someone, and it was always directly in their presence. I was rarely asked to keep people in my prayers, but if someone needed prayers, we travelled to their house so that we could lay hands on them directly, only after being served milk tea, of course. Once we walked to a plot of land that a church wanted to buy so that we could pray over it physically.
The prayer culture is so different! Even what people ask God for is different from the US. In America so many of our needs our met that I feel more familiar with prayer requests relating to the spiritual: ‘pray for energy to pursue God’s purpose for me’, ‘pray that I have more understanding of the Bible’, or ‘pray that I can remain focussed on God’, as well as prayers that God’s work will supplement the medication we are on or the studying we do before a major exam. Sometimes I think that prayers such as ‘give me success and bless me’ are considered selfish. However, in a place of deep spiritual attack and little medical options, prayers are direct pleas that God heal a sore knee, chronic headaches, or a sensitive stomach. In a place of poverty where needs are struggled to be met people often ask for prayers for more money or a specific plot of land that they have had their eye on. In America, when we are ill, we walk a few blocks to one of a myriad of pharmacies on a street corner. In Nepal, they go directly to God. Is it faith or desperation? Or does desperation create a faith we can’t comprehend?
A day of trekking
Choosing God in a Dark Place
Still, of all the things that I will walk away with, the greatest to me is the knowledge of what it means to choose to be a Christian in a place of darkness, and the faith and strength of the people who do. Prayer requests revealed the greatest picture of this. Through their prayers we could see the way that their very bodies were attacked with weakness and illness. During prayer requests after our Bible study, two women said that they were possessed by demons. A few people, though not possessed, asked for prayers against demonic activity that occurs against their family members, such as disembodied slapping. In America our spiritual warfare often takes the form of money and luxury. Can you imagine what it would be like to stare at the manifestation of the spiritual face to face daily? We experienced this in a way that I never had before. Let me tell you what happened.
It was after our women’s bible study. All of the women who were sick (the vast majority of them) sat in the middle of a thin circle of prayer warriors. The women asking for prayer included the two who had demons. Shortly after we began to pray, the demon possessing one of those women began manifesting. She trembled and shrieked and soon we were all gathered around her praying that God would cast the demon out. Finally she quieted down and the men returned and, hearing about what happened, asked to pray over her. This time I was right at her side, and as we began to pray she began to tremble and shriek again, but like nothing I had ever seen before. She was convulsing and writhing out of our hands, trying to grab us and claw at us, and speaking in Nepalese words that were later translated for us as verbal attacks against us ‘foreigners’. The whole attack lasted for over an hour, and at the end we were exhausted and confused. Why did we have to pray over her twice? Our translator explained that the demon had been playing ‘hide and seek’ with us, only pretending to be gone after our first prayer. Was it really that hard to get rid of a demon?
I won’t lie. It was challenging for me to experience this side of Christianity. To see the amazing ways that God answers prayers, and then understanding that sometimes the miracles we pray for don’t happen, even when they seem most necessary. These are things that I doubt I will ever understand, but I will trust in God’s sovereignty.
I’d like to link you to the blog of another Racer who wrote about this experience in much more detail than I did: http://ryanjinks.theworldrace.org/?filename=verbally-assaulted-by-a-demon&fb_ref=Default
One thing that I would like to bring up, because it shapes Christian culture in a number of countries, is their polarization away from anything relating to the secular or dominant religion. When the darkness seems so vast, the children of God strive to be as distant and distinctive as they can possibly be. Often their regulations leave us baffled. For example, in a Nepalese church we were asked to pray that they have land to bury their dead. In the Hindu culture, the dead are burned on pyres by the river (we actually witnessed this) and so the Christians believe that it is necessary for them to bury their dead, often causing themselves a lot of trouble because there is not land set aside in their culture for this purpose. In India I was shown beautiful pictures of the customs of a traditional Indian wedding. When I asked my friend if her wedding would be like that, she said no, but that Indian Christians have western weddings. When I asked her, half jokingly, if I could have an Indian wedding but while preaching Jesus and praising God she seemed horrified. I think ‘western’ often gets confused with ‘Christian’ with little compromise, such as burying the dead, and therefor very specific rules are developed and believed to be necessary in following God.
Why do Christians strive to differentiate themselves so much from society in these countries and not in America? At what point does living a pure life and not being one of the world turn into a series of such specific rules, and if we were surrounded by so much spiritual opposition would we do the same? Nepal just left me with a lot of observations and questions…
But one thing is certain, I can never understand what these people gave up and committed themselves to when they made the decision to follow Christ in the midst of a culture that will only greet it with hostility, both physically and spiritually. When we left Nepal it was shortly before the nation made a final decision as to whether Christianity should be recognized as officially illegal. I am blown away by the faith of people who made the decision to choose God in a dark place. That is what I walked away with.
