DownshoreDrift

The Abuse, Feticide, and Abortion of the Girl Child in India

India's Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, is calling for a cease to the abuse, abortion, and feticide of girls in India. We have seen this in our trips there. The girls are treated horribly and have little future. Boys are favored and Indians are using ultrasound equipment to detect the sex of babies and they are aborting the girls.

“No nation, no society, no community can hold its head high and claim to be part of the civilized world if it condones the practice of discriminating against one half of humanity represented by women,” Singh said in an April 28 speech to a national meeting on saving girls. India lives “with the ignominy of an adverse gender balance due to social discrimination against women built into our societal structures,” he said.

“One of the most inhuman, uncivilized and reprehensible practices is the practice of female feticide,” Singh said. “The patriarchal mindset and preference for male children is compounded by unethical conduct on the part of some medical practitioners assisted by unscrupulous parents who illegally offer sex-determination services.”

Christianity is bringing hope to these girls and is addressing this social discrimination against women built into their societal structures (read Hinduism). The ministries that we are working with are rescuing these girls and women and are educating them, loving them, and bringing them to Christ where they have a hope and a future. Hindu society is arrayed against them, but God loves them and wants to rescue them. The Church in Northern India is doing just that and I praise God that we are able to work with them and support what God is doing through them.

Anyone want to join us and help do something about this injustice? We are directly addressing these issues and dealt with this at the conference that we helped lead last month.  For $20 a month, a girl child can be rescued and redeemed from a life of abuse and despair and can be brought from the Hinduism that enslaves to the Jesus that sets free. Children are waiting to be brought into these schools and homes because even the Hindus know that the Christians are helping them. We only lack the funds to keep building more schools. Want to help?  Email me or leave a comment if you are interested.

I'm not trying to go all Sally Struthers on you, but I'm really motivated to help this little girl and so many more like her:

The Flesh Eating Cockroach and the Night of Plague

I'm slowly putting up reflections on my last trip to India for posterity's sake - plus I have this innate belief that every thought and experience that I have is worthy of publication. At any rate, this story is worth telling.

Our entire trip went as smoothly as could be expected. No one got sick. Travel was perfect. Everyone got along really well. All the trip objectives were met. We went to dinner our last night satisfied that we had done all that we came to do. We would head back to Delhi the next day and then fly home.

Fortunately, I had escaped any type of stomach problems. It is no secret that I am not the biggest fan of Indian food. It just does not agree with me. Still, I thankfully eat all that is served me and I try to be gracious. I figure that it would be rude to say, "Um, I'm an American and I don't like your food." So, I eat and smile. I am extremely careful about not drinking the water or eating any uncooked vegetables, though. For the most part, I protect my stomach pretty well. However, the last night it hit. I was finishing dinner and I had to run to the bathroom. I don't want to get too graphic here, but the next couple of hours were pretty uncomfortable. I took some pepto bismol and finally laid down to get some sleep. This was around 10:30pm.

At around midnight, I was slowly awakened by something sharp and prickly stabbing into my hand. I was sleeping with my left hand stretched out above my head and as I felt the poking, I woke up enough to throw whatever it was against the wall. I jumped up, turned on the light, and pulled my bed back to find out what had just been gnawing on me. It was a roach. I figure that it was about 3 feet long. In reality, it might have been a medium sized dog. Somehow, I was able to grab my shoe and start beating it to pieces. It had really long antennae and it was massive. Okay, maybe not three feet long, but it was pretty big. The guy rooming with me jumped into the fray and actually beat the thing into two pieces. I've never been one to be afraid of roaches or any type of insect, but this thing was pretty big, and it had just been eating my hand. Roaches in America don't do that, do they?

Well, after killing Godzilla, I decided to lay down and go back to sleep. I noticed that I could not feel my left hand. It was going numb. That was the hand that the roach had been gnawing on. Then, I noticed feeling leaving my right hand. Both my arms started going numb. Then, the rest of my body, including parts of my face. Um, this isn't normal, right? I spoke to my roommate and told him that either I was going to get worse and die or I would get better. Clearly I was thinking on a very high level at this point. We were some ways away from a hospital or doctor so I didn't really think that I could do anything about it. What was I going to say? I got bit by a roach and I going numb all over? Help? So, I told him that if I didn't wake up, the roach numbing agent had gotten me. Nice. It must have been affecting my brain as well.

Eventually, I fell back asleep - for a little while. I awoke a little later to feel something else biting my hand. It was a mosquito. I slapped at it, and then felt another bite a moment later. Then, another and another. There was a swarm of mosquitos that had somehow made it into our room. I was feeling a bit sheepish about NOT taking the malaria pills that the rest of the team had taken. Oh, I won't get malaria, I said. Not me. So, this goes on for a while until we realize that we should turn on the bathroom light to attract the mosquitos. We ended up sleeping the rest of the night (all 3 hours of it) under our blankets, covered from head to toe with a swarm of mosquitos waiting for any part of our body to stick out from under the blanket. When I woke up, there was actually blood on my pillow. I guess a mosquito got too full and spit some of my blood out before he flew off.

In the morning, I was talking with my roommate and I told him that I thought we experienced some  spiritual warfare. He disagreed. "Just life," he said. Okay.  Massive stomach cramps, followed by a flesh eating roach the size of a Volkswagen, followed by a swarm of mosquitos, all in one night. "Just life," he says. Maybe so.

I love going to India, but today, I am glad I am home. 

Some Thoughts From India on the Gospel and the Kingdom of God

I am wrestling with a lot of things as I recover from jet lag and settle back into my normal life. I have been greatly impacted by the Christians in India that we are working with. They have a perspective on life that does not exist here, at least in the people that I know.  They are Kingdom people. They use their time and their resources to bring glory to God. They think a lot about how they can help others and see people come to Christ. They sacrifice and face persecution. They continue to believe God and rejoice in Him. They are brilliant, talented people, and they are using their gifts so that more and more people might be helped and come to faith. When they receive resources, they do not use the resources on themselves, even though they have great needs. They continue to creatively think about how they can bless others and they use their resources for that purpose. They are taking the gospel into unreached mountains and are beginning to see real fruit. They are a tiny minority in a very hostile culture, but they do not complain nor do they focus on the blatant evil all around them. Their focus is on Jesus.  They are far from perfect and they can struggle like anyone else, but God is definitely at work in them.

Their Christian experience is very different from what I see here in the States. It has taken me four trips to realize that when they talk about education, health care, or economic development, they are not leaving out the gospel. For them, sharing Jesus with people is a given. They talk about the other things because people have real needs and they recognize that Christians are supposed to lay down their lives to meet the needs of others. There is no "social gospel" dichotomy. Helping lift others up out of poverty is just what Christians do, they tell me. They are confused when I keep bringing up evangelism as a priority, as if the fact that they are doing development work somehow cancels out the gospel. The two go hand in hand. Of course they do evangelism. How do you think they have all these baptisms and new church starts all over? I have realized that the separation of good works and gospel proclamation that we have here in the West is an anomaly. It is not a given elsewhere. As Christians in the West, we overspiritualize things. We separate spirit from body into a false dichotomy. We break man up into a bunch of little pieces and then pick and choose which ones to address. As conservative evangelical Baptists, we address man's eternal state, and then if we get to it, we address his physical state. But, the two remain separated. The "gospel" addresses the spiritual nature of man, and then the act of doing good deeds addresses the physical state of man, in our view. But, doing good deeds is considered largely optional, or subsequent to the "real" work of preaching the gospel.  I am coming to believe that separating things out like this is a terrible mistake.

Don't get me wrong: I fully understand that the gospel is the message of objective truth concerning the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Through the work of Jesus we are forgiven of our sins. Salvation is received by grace through faith. It is the gift of God. It brings about conversion, the new birth. But, the gospel is more than just forgiveness of sins. It is more that just the message of how we get into heaven - it affects all of life, including the life that we are presently living. I am beginning to believe that we are getting it all wrong. We are chopping the gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe, into pieces and calling it truth. The result of this is that we have created a church in America that is primarily focused on whether or not they are getting into heaven. I use the term "church" loosely, because the vast majority of people who claim to be Christians in America do not participate in church. And, many who claim to be church members do not attend very regularly (see Southern Baptists). Yet, we have little to say to them because they all claim to be going to heaven and to have accepted Jesus. When the rich young man went to Jesus and asked what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus told him to sell all he had and give it to the poor. That doesn't make any sense to us. We say that he just meant that he could not have attachments to wealth. Maybe so, but you have to really discount Jesus' plain words to get that meaning. My conservative theology has no room for the very words of Jesus in our understanding of the gospel in passages like this. There are many, many other hard sayings of Jesus that we do not have much room for, so we just ignore them or explain them away.

I think that the answer to our problem is that we must enlarge from a gospel of only personal forgiveness of sins to the gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus preached (Matt. 4:23), which of course, includes forgiveness of sins and so much more. Jesus' message was for all of life.  He proclaimed the in breaking reign and rule of God through Himself. He did not just bring a teaching, but He appeared to take away our sins and destroy the devil's work (1 John 3:5,8).  Jesus does not call us to a teaching or a set of facts, but He calls us to Himself. As we repent (turn away) from our old life, we are called to embrace Jesus, not just a doctrine about Jesus. When we embrace Jesus, we embrace all that He is. His life becomes our life. We become His disciples. If we see things this way, then it makes sense that we begin to address all of life, because Jesus did. His Word comes alive and begins to mean something more to us than just a personal devotion book to make us feel better. The Gospel of the Kingdom sets itself up against all of the other kingdoms of this world. We realize that the Man, the Message, and the Mission are intricately intertwined and we dare not separate them into stages for our convenience. When we come to faith in Christ, we come to truly know HIM, not just a few teachings about Him that get us into heaven.

I have come to believe that the Christianity that we are proclaiming in the West has enfolded itself into our individualistic culture so much that it has become terribly weakened. My professor, Thom Wolf, used to say that most Christians are so subnormal that when a believer approaches normalcy he appears to be abnormal.  I think that I am seeing normal Christianity in India among the believers and it looks abnormal because we are so subnormal. I am really not trying to be critical and I have a lot of compassion on American believers. I love the American church. I just think that as pastors, we need to make sure that we are not truncating the true gospel of Jesus Christ to replace it with only part of the message. The good news of Jesus is that He makes all things new - our whole lives can come under His reign and rule.  The Christians in Northern India are demonstrating that. Praise God. 

   

God is Moving in Northern India

I just returned from our trip to Northern India where we participated in helping lead a conference with an emerging indigenous ministry network that we helped initiate last year. It was amazing! We also travelled into the mountains to facilitate further development of the clean water project that we have begun with a local Christian hospital. Our travels took us all over the north of India, from the Ganges River to the Himalayas. We even ended up on a safari and saw a herd of wild elephant one morning! The Father worked in powerful ways and we were able to meet many people who have recently come to Him through the work of these holistic ministries.  ALL of them have a story of some type of miracle that took place that caused them to change their direction. Something is happening in this region as people are coming to faith much more rapidly than they have in the past.  Our relationships with the indigenous believers have grown exponentially and we have seen amazing things.  We hope to go back again in the fall, or possibly next year and I wish that I could take everyone I knew with me.

Over the past week, we met with development workers, teachers and leaders, economic developers, medical personnel, and educators - all using their skills to better the lives of people and bring the Kingdom. We are helping the organizations of this emerging network with micro loan programs, clean water projects, church planting, and school start ups and development in unreached areas. I could not be more amazed at what we have stumbled into. We drove along mountain roads, tromped all over God's green earth, sat in huts along river banks and ate over open fires with Nepali farmers who had just recently had a change of heart.  We gathered in a house on the side of a mountain at around 7,000 feet sharing our really great news with over 20 Hindu tribal people in a village where we had just placed a water tank and sat at the feet of the giants of the faith who first brought the message to these mountains. People are opening up in amazing ways as the seeds that have been planted are beginning to bear fruit. I am privileged to be a part of it and to serve the Indian believers as they take responsibility for their own calling.

I have learned some pretty incredible lessons about what we are doing well and what the American Church is doing very poorly when it comes to this type of work and I will be sharing some over the next week or two. Since I just got home today, jet lag is taking its toll, so I'll just stop by sharing a heap of pictures - every one has a story behind it. The first is me on my favorite motorcycle, the Royal Enfield, which is made in India (if anyone wants to get me one, I'll be eternally grateful! -  Kidding. I don't think that would be a good idea just yet!). The rest of the pictures are more focused on the purpose of the trip. Enjoy, and please pray for Northern India. God is on the move!