Tragedy!
Like many of you, I have email accounts, MANY email accounts! Like, well.... Let's just say I have "several", OK?
This morning, I was looking for an email from one of our supporters to write and tell him the good news about how his gift for the orphans in India was put to work today. In the process, it seemed something was wrong and I couldn't find the email. I checked to make sure I was in the Inbox and, to my horror, I was. The problem is: There were NO emails to be found. Nowhere!
Every email was gone from my Inbox in one of my Gmail accounts.... Wait a minute... What is this? Click, click, clickety, click.... I thought I said horror already, but how can I multiply horror times 5? You won't believe it, but it's true. Five different email accounts are gmail. And in ALL five, there is not one single email stored in the Inbox!!!! How on earth can this happen??!!???
The agony I sensed was incredible. You'd have to know me -- I have emails from YEARS ago! We keep emails from all our friends that have written, what we responded to you, what you sent back, etc. This is indeed a tragedy beyond description... Please shed a tear for me.
But, what I was truly agonizing over, suddenly became tiny and insignificant. I went to visit some Christian friends. A niece is staying with them from the village. She's here to give birth. She needs to be near a hospital. She's quite overdue and so far has shown no signs of labor. It's her first baby and she's scared. Husband has not come yet, mother and father left her here and went back to their village. She's alone at the most important time in her life.
But let's not be over dramatic. Millions of women have their first child every year. Most of them do just fine. I was talking to the niece trying to encourage her that the Lord would help her and that she would soon give birth and all would be OK. That's when I made my tragic mistake...
In my upbeat, hopeful words of encouragement, I crossed a line. Within a flash, I was rebuked strongly, put in my place and warned that I was cursing the poor woman. I couldn't figure out what I had said that could be so wrong. Not to worry though, my rebuker continued and pointed out my "sin".
I had somehow mentioned the happy thought that the baby might be a girl. That was it! I had gone too far. You see, I had committed one of the cardinal sins in India -- I had suggested her firstborn might be a girl.
It was clearly pointed out to me by "Aunty" just how grievous my sin had been. I had broken one of the worst of taboos. I had cursed the poor girl. It doesn't matter that I didn't mean too. It doesn't matter that my "musing" about whether it might be a boy or a girl has nothing to do with which gender God will send to them.
That's when I realized that losing your email is not the real horror of life. The real horror in life (for an Indian) is the dreaded curse of giving birth to a girl baby. Remember, if you wish to comprehend the horror of all this, this was not some ignorant, heathen savage. "Aunty" was a mother herself who had given birth to a daughter for her firstborn that was rebuking me. It was a Christian woman. It was a pastor's wife! This is the real "horror" of India. Supposing to be a believer, a child of God, and yet mired hopelessly in the perverseness of a culture of blindness and shame that feels this way.
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| How can this little child be "a curse"? |
2) The next thing is to learn to be like Jesus. Humble your heart, start all over again, from the very beginning. Then teach them to know God, fear Him and hold His Word high and above all other creeds and cultures.
Do pray earnestly for ministry here in India. Pray that the Holy Ghost would break down the walls and barriers built by 5,000 years of Hindu darkness. Pray that Christians would truly become "little Christs" and evidence their submission to Him in all things. And, finally, pray, that the Word of God may have free course in the hearts and minds of men.
Let us go to the high and lofty halls of a recent House Subcommittee meeting in Washington, D.C. and listen in to a hearing about the plight of girls in India. It is eye opening testimony to be sure.
"In the recent hearing on India's Missing Girls before a House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations, Jill was called on to provide testimony and was able to provide real life examples of what life is really like for part of the female population in India. Her stories make the listener wonder if such atrocities could really be happening in the world in which we currently live.
"She told a story of a girl who was the twelfth daughter in her family, but the only one who was allowed to live. Her other eleven sisters were killed by her parents after they were born in hopes that later they would have a boy. In this village, there were eight boys for every one girl."
I hope you're getting the point. The things that we think are so horrible and painful to us in our normal, every-day lives, are real nothing in comparison with the real problems out there in the real world. At least, the real problems here in India, to be sure.
Where do you begin? How do you teach "christians" who are this permeated by their own culture that they almost wholeheartedly join in with the same warped thinking?
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| Who will weep for her? |
Whatever has happened to my emails, I may never know. But whatever has happened to millions and millions of little baby girls in India has been recorded in Heaven. Someday a faultless tally will be given and we will know how God feels about an unspeakable crime like this.
May God please help me to search my heart. Could I also have "cultural blind spots" just like this in other matters? Search me, oh God!
Beyond Frontiers
Beyond Frontiers
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