Building Bridges ...

of Hope...

 

It’s snowing outside. Again! It’s so beautiful to look at from inside where it’s warm and cozy and the falling snow is beautiful to see from my picture window. It looks like God is shaking powdered sugar all over the chocolate earth!

It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon and I am grateful to have a warm little house to hide inside while winter roars and little brother earth trembles outside my window. I am in a reflective mood today. On this beautiful winter afternoon, I have just finished reading a story about the poverty stricken families in a faraway land, where the children are born and live their entire lives in desperate poverty, hunger and abuse. My heart has been moved to sponsor a child through one of their programs, to give a child hope and a future, not just in this life, but for eternity. I will sponsor a little girl through the Bridge of Hope, an outreach to the poorest of the poor in India, through the Gospel for Asia.

These beautiful children are given a hot meal, clean clothes, taught to read, and told for the first time, almost always, that Jesus loves them.  These children, who have no life in their eyes and who never dream that they were made for so much more, are transformed by the life changing message that Jesus loves them enough to die for them. They respond to the Gospel with the innocence of a child. They believe what they hear and they grab ahold of God’s hand when they see it extended to them. No wonder Jesus said we must become like little children if we want to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. They don’t debate with God. They just fall in love with Him and chase after Him, as little children do.

My heart has been stirred with the plight of these children. In his heart wrenching book, “No Longer a Slumdog”, the author, K.P. Yohannan, tells story after story of children whose lives have been forever changed by the ministry of Bridge of Hope Centers dotting the landscape of this huge country we know as India. We think of this as a faraway land, a culture different from our own, a nation very different from America. But, God doesn’t see it that way. God’s eyes don’t recognize national boundaries, or cultural taboos, or despise people based on their economic or social status. He doesn’t show favor to the rich while despising the poor. He doesn’t see anyone, least of all, a child, as someone that can be “thrown away.” God doesn’t choose favorites, at least not in the same way that we do. On the contrary, where we, in our culture, seem to favor the rich and idolize the young and the beautiful, God says He “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds… The Lord lifts up the humble; He casts the wicked down to the ground.” Ps. 147: 3,6

Now this is the problem I see in the church in America, including me!  Rich, affluent, comfortable, overfed,  and sometimes indifferent America. Most of us read the kind of things I just wrote about and say something like “Oh, that’s too bad. I feel so sorry for them…” And then we turn on the T.V. or go shopping. We medicate the discomfort that God wants us to feel to spur us into action. 

Don't believe me?  I can't tell you how many "Christians" I have talked to about sponsoring a desperately needy child who look at me as if I have asked them to do the impossible.  If the shoe was on the other foot, and you or I were the mother or father of a child in need, I know we would pray that someone who could help would do whatever it might take to help!

When I first read this book, I felt a very deep sorrow for the children and their families, trapped in this nightmare, with no hope, for their entire lives. But, feeling sorry for them isn’t what I knew the Lord was calling me to do. I knew He wanted me to sponsor a child. I knew it. And yet, I had “to think about it…” Why? Do I think that the Lord of the Universe speaking to my heart is something I can ignore? Is the cost of sponsorship (about $1 a day) too exorbitant a price to put on the head of a child in desperate need? Is God asking just too much of me? Are these children real to me or am I just reading a fictional tale about situations that are just made up?

On the other side of the question, if these desperate and suffering children with the dying eyes are real, how can I turn away? If it is God who is asking me to get involved, how can I ignore His voice? Who am I to ignore the voice of God in my life? Am I really a believer in the life saving message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Or, is it just a nice story I like to tell that has no real bearing on anyone’s life, including mine? God forbid that I should be so foolish as to ignore His voice and trivialize His Word in my life.

The thing is, either God is God or I am. If He is, than I am not. And so, I do His bidding. I submit to His amazing love for me and for others, some of whom I have never met and never will meet this side of heaven. He asks me to trust Him that He knows what He is doing and He will take my meager little offering and multiply it many times over in the life of a child that He loves…

As I look outside at the beauty of the falling snow, a picture book story playing out right outside my window, I thank God for the beauty of the world all around me. I realize how blessed I am to have a warm and cozy place to live, a job that blesses me with enough money to share with someone in need, and a God who knows me and loves me even when my needle is stuck on “well, it’s all about me, it’s all about me, it’s all …”

He is so patient with me. He is so generous. He is so kind. 

Dear God, make me more like You…

"Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this:

to care for the widow and the orphan in their distress..."

James 1:27 NKJV

 

I am Nobody...

"Jesus loves the little children...
All the children of the world..."


"The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather, the feeling of being unwanted."  Mother Teresa, from the book she authored: "Where There is Love, There is God: A Path to Closer Union with God and Greater Love" p. 82

Chapter 2 of the book, "No Longer a Slumdog" opens with this quote from Mother Teresa.  The author explains the history and origins of the caste system in India, dating back to over 1,500 years before Christ.  A cruel and dehumanizing system devised to protect the imagined superiority of the newly arrived Aryans in India over the indigenous peoples, this system allowed the Aryan minority to enrich themselves at the expense of the native peoples of India.  Thousands of years later, even though this system is officially outlawed by the government, the caste system still rules the minds and actual practices of the people of India.

To us as Americans, although we do experience some "class warfare" in our own nation, it is difficult to wrap our minds around a system as dehumanizing and brutal as the caste system in India.  K.P. Yohannan's book introduces the reader to a world of unimaginable deprivation and cruelty that leads to the rampant abuse and murder of men, women and children, based simply on the caste into which they were born.

In this system, caste is determined at birth and, as such, for those millions who live under the teachings of the caste system, there will never be any opportunity to rise above the caste an innocent child is assigned at birth.  The child born into the caste system, especially the lowest caste of all, the Dalits, or "Untouchables" is "cast off" at birth as sub-human, unworthy of the most basic human necessities - a simple home, food, clean drinking water, an opportunity to grow up and make a living, or live with any sense of human dignity.

As a Dalit, you are worthy of nothing but contempt.  You live in filth and are considered deserving of nothing more.  Literally, no one in the castes above you is allowed to even touch you, hence the name "Untouchables".  You will live and die in the slum you were born in.  Those who are above you consider you to be on the same level as a wild animal that ekes out a living eating from garbage cans and rolling in the mud.  You are nothing more than a "slumdog".

As a child of the Untouchables, you have no value beyond what others decide to do to you.  You will likely starve to death before you reach maturity, or you will be sold into child labor camps or child prostitution, where you may be tortured and murdered at the pleasure of your owner, often by the age of five.  Your parents may sell you because they have no hope of even feeding you when they cannot feed themselves.  If you are stolen or murdered, no one will report it, because no one cares.  You are nothing. 

This book is a shocking and eye-opening expose of the caste system in India, and the devastating effects it brings upon the familys of the Dalits, particularly the children.  It is tempting to put this book down and refuse to look at the horrors it describes.  But, these are children who are precious beyond measure to the Lord of the Universe, who suffered and died that they might be redeemed.  As followers of Jesus Christ, we have a vested interest in these children, simply because He cares for them.

All throughout this startling and compelling book. the author challenges us to remember the words of Christ, the passion and compassion He always showed us for the little children that flocked to Him on the hillsides and roads of Israel.  He never turned them away, but always challenged His disciples to make room for the children - to care for them, for they are precious to our God.  On p. 72, Yohannan draws the reader to remember the words of Jesus in Matthew 18:10 (NASB) "See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven continually see the face of My Father who is in heaven".  We cannont turn away from the cries and anguish of these little ones without turning away from Christ, Himself...

I would like to close this post with a poem included in this book
(p. 45) written by the author from the perspective of one of the Dalit children.  It is heartbreaking...

I am nobody

Worthless my life is

To Untouchables I was born.

A Dalit child my fate sealed.

 

I was born in slums

Rights?  We have none

To upper-caste our lives we owe

Slaves to serve all their wish.

 

Poverty and hunger

Is all I ever knew

If there is hope

Tell me how?

 

What is my future?

Do I have any?

It all looks so dark

And I wish I was not born.

 

*Poem "I am Nobody" published by permission of gfa books, a division of Gospel for Asia. If you would like to receive a free copy of the book, "No Longer a Slumdog" by K.P. Yohannan, please send your request to: www.gfa.org/sharehope You may also like to consider sponsoring one of these children monthly through the Bridge of Hope. Contact www.gfa.org/slumdog to be a blessing to a child in desperate need.