the breakup

My journey home has begun. There are still many many hours ahead of me, but the transition has begun. I don’t really know how to describe what I’m feeling. The closest thing I can think to compare this to is an India breakup. I suppose though, this isn’t really a breakup, I think India and I are just moving into a long-distance relationship. I was reminded by a friend of mine here, that a breakup is often a time where we are forced to really press into our relationship with God and trust Him through all the hurt and confusion. We have to remember to rely on Him completely and make Him the center of our life above anything else. Wise words. Trust Jesus…so much easier said than done.

I want to thank each of you so so so much for talking all the time you have to read my ramblings. This has been really good for me to process all of the many things that have been bombarding my over-simulated brain in the last five months. I know I can stand in the confidence that Jesus has been doing a new work in me. This is just the beginning of the process, but its a journey I am so excited to be a part of. Life with Jesus is always interesting, never comfortable and rarely what we think it will be. I have learned enormous amounts and I’m sure I’ve have only scratched the surface of what God would like to teach me through all the experiences I’ve had.

I now will be spending the next two and a half months at home in Syracuse, NY with my parents and my sister. I think I’m going to just take a few classes, paint a bunch, and let myself hopefully breath a little bit. I would love to talk to you more about my time in India if you’re interested, feel free to contact me. Well, I have about another thirty or so hours ahead of me traveling home, but before I know it I’ll be state-side!

 

Thank you for all of your love and prayers, they have been so appreciated.

 

when you walk through the water

I think fear is one of satan’s most used tools in ensnaring people. During my walk through the redlight district I was told that fear is what grips most of the women into not leaving the trade. In many ways that makes sense—they are in physical bondage, which then becomes bondage in many more forms. But, I also believe that fear is often the tactic that the enemy uses.

Why do so many women become consumed with changing their appearance into a form that it isn’t naturally? I don’t just mean plastic surgery, I mean dieting, make-up, tanning, skin lightening, the list goes on.

Why do so many adults now struggle with being workaholics? Why is it that the goal is always the bigger house, the flashier car, and the nicer clothes? I do believe that a lot of it is a lack of being satisfied. But I also believe that it comes from a fear that what you have is not enough. There is also a fear of rejection and failure.

Fear of the uncomfortable, fear of instability, fear of not being in control, fear that the whole doesn’t actually revolve around you.

On Saturday we sat in the food court of the mall eating our dinner. The food court here is just like it would be in the United States, in many ways its probably nicer than most malls I’ve been to before. There was also a bowling alley, some arcade games, and various other forms of entertainment. Right across from us was a haunted house type attraction, similar to the kind you would see at the state fair, called ‘Demon Alley’. I watched as group after group paid and entered the house. About 3-5 minutes later there would be a loud crack and they would come running out the bottom door. They would chuckle a little as they breathed heavily and glanced a look over their shoulder at the object of their fear.

I think we often willingly walk into ‘Demon Alley’ and in many cases willingly pay in some form to enter our own fear houses. Sometimes, like in the case of the women on the red light district, we have been put in our fear house forcefully; however, in both cases the door is still shut—locking us inside. We have been ensnared in ‘Demon Alley’ and many times we either don’t want to see the light shining under the doorway of freedom or we are just so consumed by the darkness that we can’t even imagine a light. Freedom can rain down in the house. Like the walls of Jericho, prayer can echo that these walls come tumbling down to their fate.

Isaiah 43:1b-3a

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior”

come for a walk with me

We’re going for a walk, a walk through the lanes. The lanes in the United States may be in reference to the traffic lanes that go zigging and zagging through the planes and the cities. The lanes here, right outside my window, hold a different kind of trafficking.

 

I am twelve years old. This is the brothel I live in—it is where most of the underage girls are held. Except I don’t really know what ‘underage’ even means, because many of us here all started at about the same time as me. Let me see, I’ve been working here for about six months and I would say on average I service about twenty-five customers a day. Would I like to get out of the trade? I’m not really sure what you mean. Would I like to get out of the trade? Nope, I’m still not sure what you mean. If you’re asking me if I have a debt to my pimps and madame that I’m working to pay off the answer is yes. Can I leave? No, of course not, I have a debt, I’m not from here, where would I go? In fact, I’ve never left this room, so I don’t even really know where I am; I just know that I’m not home anymore.

 

I’m from Nepal. No, I don’t speak Hindi or Bengali. The only other people that speak Nepali are the other women here. I’m not sure exactly how many of us there are, but I know in this place there are a few hundred of us. Everywhere I look I see more and more of my sisters; I would guess there’s about four hundred of us in this building. I think I’m starting to get an infection in my eye from all the eyeliner. I’ve never worn a skirt that shows my knees on the public street before, especially not half of my thigh either. I don’t really like what they make us wear. My mother would be so ashamed. I can’t run away, I don’t have a passport or a visa what would I do.

 

I used to be on the other district. My pimp kicked me out because I’m getting too old and he wanted to make a spot for a younger girl. Why did I start on my own on this district? What else did you expect me to do? This is all I have ever known. At first I was surprised at how much we made here, but now I’m used to it. I don’t know what it is in your dollars but in rupees sometimes its as low as 40 (45 rupees is $1).

 

This is my first time out in a long time. Well, I’m quite sure how long, but I know I came here when I was really young. The other girls thought I was twelve when I first came. I did get to change rooms twice, but otherwise it was always the same walls. Now I’m maybe twenty years old. India still looks the same after eight years of being locked away. But of course I’m not from here and this place is very different from my village. But it looks the way it sounds, at least this street does.

 

From the lanes, outside my window.

 

Beautiful girl, let the sunrise come again.

 

 

 

 

It is in the darkest places that we have the hope that is the light.

The walking dead

The first weekend I was in Kolkata one of my relatives that I’m staying with took me for a walk to see a little bit of the city. Our major destination was a place called the Burning Ghat. Kolkata is the only city in India where they still do public burnings of of their dead. The Burning Ghat is located right on the shore of the Ganges River, the holy river.

As we walked through the city I asked him what he thought Kolkata’s biggest stronghold was, besides poverty—’greed’ was his response. We passed through what is called a squatter settlement; this is a group of people that build their homes out of tarps and pieces of cloth along the railroad lines. It ran packed, home after home on either side of the tracks for at least a quarter of a mile. I was reminded of my school kids back in Dehradun…I miss them.

The Burning Ghat is two major sections with an archway in between leading to the Ganges. In Hinduism when someone dies the funeral is quite the event. If you are even remotely related or know the person or even know the family of the person that has died, you attend the funeral. The body is laid on this wooden bed, covered in a white sheet and paraded all through the city concluding at the Burning Ghat. If you are a really rich family you will enter the building on left. The body is then laid on a pile of wood and burned in front of the whole crowd. However, the majority of the city can not afford a funeral of that extravagance; so, they enter the area to the right. Here the bodies are burned electrically. All of the ashes from the Burning Ghat are then placed in the river.

There are so many people in this city that if you stand for at least five minutes a funeral procession will turn up. Death in Hinduism seems in some ways to be a weird sort of celebration, because your loved one is entering into their next life; however, no one really seems to be filled with any sort of joy. We walked through the archway, passing by stacks of wooden beds on the right and on the left we saw a pile of ashes still smoking from a recently finished funeral. Right at the entrance to the river were about five or six children playing in the water. A man came up to us and said that they had just burned his wife. I didn’t really know what to say.

The air was filled with so much death, on so many different levels. There were so many people there.

 

Colossians 2:13 You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for he forgave all our sins.

The land of the living

It was Easter morning. Yup, it was 5:13am. Oh and yes, the sun had only been rising for just a short while. Did my alarm wake me up? No of course not. Do you really think that I’m silly enough to wake up by choice at 5:13am, even on Easter morning? At first I thought maybe it was the school children that sometimes have to line up outside my window. Then I remembered it was Sunday, “I don’t think they have school on Sundays, but what is this noise??” In my mid-sleep state I began to decipher the ruckus as Hindi singing. “What isssss going on,” I thought. I sat up in my bed, peeled by the curtain and saw a parade of people meandering up the street. I then began to hear a song I have become very familiar with. It is a Hindi song called ‘Yeshu Tera Nom’ which means ‘Jesus is His name’.

This was not just an obnoxious wake-up call, this was a Jesus parade.

Leading the charge of the parade were the children from the blind school at the bottom of the hill. Each girl held the hand of her fellow blind friend as they marched cheerfully up the steep hill to the very top of Rajpur, singing very boldly praise to Jesus their Savior. Coming close behind them were children from another boarding school in the area playing various percussion instruments. At the very end of the procession was a truck with big speakers, blasting music for the whole town to hear.

About forty-five minutes later the Jesus parade was on their way back down the hill. The crowd had doubled and now had students from the school at the top of the hill and many members from the community. I couldn’t help but smile as I couldn’t get a phrase out of my head—’this is the land of the living’. Apparently thats a song (I didn’t know that); that morning for church that was the third Easter song we sang.

In India truth is rarely (and I mean very rarely) proclaimed. If it is it is often faced with a great deal of opposition and attack from the enemy. When truth is not proclaimed there is plenty of untruths cluttering every spare inch of your hearing, eyesight, and thoughts. It was incredibly refreshing to hear the name of Jesus shouted through the streets with such joy and such boldness. We never have Jesus parades in the United States, and in the US there’s no threat of being beaten up.

freedom

Well I’ve been in Kolkata for almost two weeks now.  I leave on Monday evening for the states and will be home (USA time) around midnight on Tuesday.  I will probably make a few more posts before I leave, but for now, here is the website of the organization I’ve been working and living with:

http://freesetglobal.com/

Freeset is awesome.  You should absolutely check out what they’re doing.

pieces of truth

Have you ever played that game where you test your sense of touch? You have to put your hand in a box and guess whats inside without seeing what it is. Your fingers take in information with your sense of touch and then sends that information to your brain. However, your brain only has several, small, pieces of information to draw on. Your brain is only given pieces of facts or truths to then decide what the object is. Something that you think is a bowl of worms, probably is a bowl of spaghetti; what feels like a cube of jello really is a block with butter on it. I don’t know, but I think you get my point.

In Delhi we went to a Bahia temple. Its shaped like a giant lotus flower. Architecturally this temple is beeeeaaauuutifullllll. I won’t bother to describe it because I won’t do it justice, just know that its shaped like a big, giant flower. They make you take off your shoes and you’re not allowed to take any pictures from the inside. We had to file into two lines before entering the temple and hear a speal about the temple and such. A big thing emphasized though was that this is a place for anyone of any way of thinking to come and pray. The emphasis of the temple is to pray which means once you enter the doors of the temple you are to be completely silent. Everyone files in, takes a seat, and you leave when you’d like.

First off, that was the most eerie stillness I’ve ever experienced. It was so silent that when I sneezed I thought the building was going to fall down. The echo sounded like a war has erupted, which in many senses there was a war occurring. The room emptied after about 5-10mins, and the next rows of people filed in to take their places.

After I left the “sanctuary” (please forgive my lack of a better word), we stopped to talk to an usher that was standing outside the door thanking us for coming. He was twelve years old if I remember correctly and he very cheerily told us about why he was Bahia and what he knew about his faith. We were then given a brochure to inform us more about this belief. Something that was very quickly noticed was the amounts of truth in what the brochure said. Even the words out of his mouth were dripping with truths. However, buried, ever so delicately in the midst of those truths were crooked truths—things that in reality weren’t truths at all. It worried me so much, because I knew that if I wasn’t suspecting to find those untruths, I could have very easily missed them. If I wasn’t suspecting to find spaghetti in the covered box I could have very easily thought it was worms. Pieces of the truth doesn’t mean that it changes what the thing really is at the core. Just because my fingers tell me that the object feels like worms, doesn’t mean that it really is a bowl of worms. Its important to know the truth, and to know all of the truth, so we don’t just see a bunch of truth covered lies.