When God Goes 30 On The Highway Of Our Lives

I can’t decide.

• Do I want God to move quickly? I-ask. He-answers-hopefully-in-my-favor. Ta-da!!
• Or do I want God to take His time, be patient, give me room to figure some things out, but whatever He does…to not give up on me?

It really depends where I am standing at that moment. Instant-God comes in very handy when I need, or need to know something; but I prefer slow-to-act God when I am being a moron. I guess ultimately I would like God to act according to my wishes because that would be really convenient.

In reality, I don’t get to choose. Sometimes God does act swiftly, but I find more often, He doesn’t. Sometimes it feels like God is driving 30 km on the highway. Why can’t He pick it up a little?

2 Peter 3:9 says, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

God acts according to His purposes; His priorities and I realize that my health, happiness, success, comfort, longevity, while certainly something to talk about, aren’t actually His primary concern. My needing an answer or action NOW does little to disturb His careful timing. This is confusing until you sit back and look at one single soul and what it means to God.

What matters to God? When you look back through history, God was actually willing to protect very little if it got in the way of what He ultimately wanted: true relationship. This whole thing, the earth and life upon it, was created to be a community filled with the life and breath of God, in communion with Him.

Then sin enters the picture and yada, yada, yada: we wander, we get lost, we can’t make our way back to God’s original intention. So while we build our lives and get all concerned about what we get concerned about, God is still only concerned about one thing: our return. It is all He has ever been concerned about.

I was thinking about this, how only one thing matters, when I was in the Westminster Abby in London recently. I looked at the astounding architecture of that building. I sat in a service and took in the overwhelming detail and then it struck me: as nice as this is, it means very little to God. God is not contained here, and He would not protect it at all cost. It isn’t that God doesn’t appreciate good architecture, artistry, craftsmanship; He does. He is the Artist of artists, after all; it’s just that nothing, not even buildings that might have taken hundreds of years to complete mean a whole lot to Him in the scheme of things.

People built a beautiful temple to God, it took years and years and years to make but it actually got in the way of a heartfelt relationship with Him. People thought the temple would mean a lot to God, that He would go to all lengths to protect it, but it didn’t mean that much. He let it be destroyed.

I think God is still willing that some things get destroyed so that all that remains is the obvious problem we are skirting (whether that is salvation or submission). His desire is that no one will perish, and He is patient towards us so that we have every, every opportunity to enjoy the life He offers. He calls us out of darkness, to walk in His light.

As I said, when you are being a moron, patience is the most beautiful thing you could ever experience. When someone is gentle towards you, wants you, longs for you, searches for you, puts up great big signs that say, “WALK THIS WAY” and doesn’t give up…is there anything more beautiful then that?

God’s slowness is something beautiful; I have experienced the grace of slowness, and I have people in my life that I really want God to be patient with, to extend the days of their lives, to give them the chance to open their lives to Him. I don’t want things to end where they are.

“What I want” in any given situation can be all over the map, but God only has one desired outcome: that none should perish.

— Teresa Klassen

 

 

 

So You Think This Is Freedom?

With permission, I am printing Mike’s thoughts:

The world that we live in has forces that pull at us. There is no neutral; we are pulled either towards God’s good ways or away from God’s good ways, and it all seems to come down to what a person does with their desire for and perception of freedom; we have “anti-authority” tendencies where we  conclude that authority is a freedom stealer so we push against authority. This applies to people in all walks of life, from the toddler to the hard-hearted Senior, who both shake their fists at anyone who might tell them what to do. This is why people shake their fist at God, the God they often say they don’t believe in, because they see Him as an authority figure who wants to take their freedom away.

Yet, with all this so called “freedom,” what actually results is a life of debauchery. 2 Peter 2:18-19 says, “There are those who call out to others, promising freedom — yet they themselves are enslaved in their life of debauchery.”

Debauchery = reckless immorality, lust for pleasure and seeking it out.

What we often miss is that this kind of “freedom” without borders, has its own cage. What feels like freedom, is actually enslaving us. Freedom, true freedom, comes by limiting our freedom; an idea we struggle with.

• If we were to eat only junk-food (because we have the freedom to do so) we end up enslaving our bodies strength and health.
• If we were to spend all our money as we wished (because we have the freedom to do so) we become a slave to those items with a bank-load of debt.
• If we decide to take our sexuality outside of marriage (because we have the freedom to do so) we end up entangled instead, forever a slave to our bad choices, instead of free.

In each of these situations, what starts out as exercising freedom, results in enslavement; but this is a tough sell to people who don’t want to eat vegetables; to those who don’t want to live by a budget; to those who want to play loose.

Why should we let anyone limit our freedom? Adam and Eve sure didn’t want it. God wanted Adam & Eve to experience full freedom, but to achieve this, He had to limit what they could do within that garden setting. Parents desire their children to experience full freedom, but to achieve this, they actually have to say no to certain things and to hold their children back from activities that look like freedom, but put them in danger.

True freedom comes by saying no to other freedoms. True intimacy in relationships both with God and other people, comes by saying no to freedoms that actually steal intimacy but we so often cannot see this. We are pulled, fooled, by what looks like it must be better than what is being “imposed” on us by guardians in our life.

The voice that screams the loudest is always the voice of debauchery. It is uncouth, it has no manners, it butts into line, it lies. True freedom always shows all of its colors, but it waits. True freedom knows that the lie usually has to be exposed, usually people have to run into a wall, before they will compare what they have with what the could have.

This is the sad thing about people. We are so determined to throw off anything that seems restrictive that we don’t even realize that we have now become fair game to an enemy who has been standing by to steal our soul. It isn’t freedom we end up getting; it is actually the way that leads to tears and regret, poison and prison, fear and anxiety, uncertainty and the death instead of abundant life.

Living simply for one’s own pleasure only sounds good in the beginning.

— Adapted from Michael Klassen’s journal — Teresa Klassen

Marijuana, McDonalds and Morality

I am grateful to live where I can engage openly in a dialogue about and have the opportunity to influence what happens in my community, province and country. Last night I attended the all-candidates meeting, giving me the opportunity to listen and learn and interact with those who will carry on the leadership of West Kelowna.

When the floor opened for questions, I was able to ask my own:

“My question is this. Currently we have two businesses in West Kelowna who are openly selling drug paraphernalia. They are operating, technically, legally because they have found a loophole in our system. Hemp City and Mary Jane’s both openly sell items, hundreds of them, clearly for drug use.

One of these stores openly sells to minors, but that is hardly the issue because adults are also shopping for children. This is a problem for everyone concerned; for both adults and kids.

I realize there are many ways for people to get their hands on drugs and pipes and grinders; I realize that some people want to do drugs. But the criminal code says that buying, selling, using drugs is illegal. Yet…we are providing an open door, in this city, for drug paraphernalia to be openly sold. We have allowed a store for them to shop in, essentially an invitation to engage in drug use.

If elected, will you engage with this issue, bringing the best minds around this problem to find a way to keep our community as drug-free and safe as possible and to support the efforts of our RCMP, by in this particular case, finding a way to say no to shops like these in West Kelowna?”

Most of the candidates showed support for finding a way (realizing there are complications) to say no to businesses like the two I mentioned. Some of the support is cautious, which I can appreciate on some level.

The very last comment made, however, concerned me a great deal. I was not given the opportunity to respond in the moment (it wasn’t a debate forum, after all), so I want to respond here. The final candidate (Mr Albrecht), in response, raised the issue of how there are people who don’t want McDonalds in our community and other people do, and who are we to say who should be able to eat a McDonalds burger and who can’t? We must be careful with morality issues. He received applause for his good humor and middle-of-the-road approach.

I take exception to this as a person who is in support of the Criminal Code of Canada and our RCMP members.  As far as I know, there is no law against eating a McDonald’s hamburger, but there are laws regarding the buying, selling, using of Marijuana.

A large portion of the inventory at Hemp City and Mary Jane’s are for the purpose of smoking marijuana. As I talked to one of the employees, I asked him to not give me the usual speech:

“They’re water pipes” wink, wink
“They’re for smoking tobacco” wink, wink

I asked him to be straight up with me: What are those pipes for? And his response was that they are for smoking marijuana primarily.  I appreciated his frankness. Let’s not play the same game, so familiar in the Emperor’s New Clothes, where we don’t say things like they are.  Those two stores sell items that are primarily for drug use. And yes, they do so legally which must be incredibly frustrating for law enforcers that we have commissioned to carry out the laws we have supported and then undermine.

This is not a personal morality issue for any one of us who object to the presence of these establishments in our city. Unless the laws change (may they not), we need to pay attention to what is going on in our city, just blocks from our schools.

If we are going to engage this issue, let’s be very clear about what we are and what we are not talking about. I am not raising this issue to take on every establishment I personally disagree with. I am raising this issue because we are saying two things in our city:

1. We support laws that criminalize the buying, selling, using of drugs.
2. But we will allow what you need to do drugs to be sold legally in our city.

We need to talk. We need to take action.

— Teresa Klassen

Are You Done Messing Around Yet?

Dear Kids,

Are you done?

I have been watching over you and the poor choices you have been making and I am shaking my head. Why would you trade the good life I have given you, for the life you are living right now? Honestly, I have done everything in my power to give you a rich life, a healthy life, a safe life, a satisfying life, a purposeful life…the kind of life where you don’t have to look back with a pile of regrets, yet what do you do? You choose the opposite; you choose to do life the hard way.

You aren’t forced to live a life of darkness.

You aren’t in a position where your only choice is an evil one.

Yet you choose, you choose, to live in the dirt.

I shake my head at this.

I sigh.

I ache over your foolishness.

And I am hopeful.

You won’t spend the rest of your life chasing after evil things.

At some point, you are going to come to your senses and you are going to be anxious to do what is right. You will thirst for it. Hunger for it. Chase after it. It will become your desire, your campaign; your cause.

At some point you will have had enough of living unwisely; you will look the things other people “enjoy” and it will turn your stomach. You will look at their illogical choices, the way they hurt themselves and others, their lust, their overindulgence, their drunkenness, their out-of-control parties, and the way they only live for the moment and their immediate pleasures, and a chill will run up your spine because you know that this was once what you thought was so great, only to find out that it was death to your soul.

And when you step out of that life you will find that your so-called friends will be surprised; irritated; it is going to rub them the wrong way that you don’t want to do what they do any longer because misery loves company. They will even say things about you that aren’t exactly complementary; be prepared.

But just remember this: they aren’t the ones you should be concerned about and you aren’t the one they insult. Step aside; I am the one. I am the one with the final call on all of this. I am the one they have ultimately offended. I will be the one who will speak to your actions and to their actions and I am wondering, how do you want that to go?

Listen again to me: I am about love. I am about Good News. I don’t want anyone to waste his or her life. I want you, I want everyone to live…to live an abundant, amazing life, engaged in what is life-giving, not soul-stealing.

Just thought I should remind you, in case you have forgotten.

With love from,

Your Father, God.

(From 1 Peter 4:2-6)

— Teresa Klassen

India: Scene 10 — Braille.

Mostly about Braille

We used to talk about this once and a while: if you could lose one of your senses, which one would you be willing to lose and why? I think the one I struggled with the most was blindness. To lose my sight, to not be able to take in the beauty of God’s creation, to not be able to see my family and friends, to live in a dark world; I couldn’t imagine it. And beyond that, the tremendous challenges of being blind in a world full of obstacles; how frustrating that would be.

I am not saying that Canada is doing a fantastic job at helping the blind (I don’t really know), but just looking around at our system of sidewalks and cross-walks and somewhat orderly traffic system, it has to be better than India. In India, approximately 14 million people are blind and I can’t imagine what that is like in that mayhem of traffic, with people pressing in on you from seven different directions, illogical, uneven sidewalks and roads all in a tangle.

I am going to jump ahead here because at some point Alecia is going to be writing some articles on this topic. She had the chance to visit with people who deal with blindness in India, so I will link to her articles when she is done. So fast-forward to the topic of Braille.

Braille looks like a bumpy page of code; my fingertips can’t make any sense of it, but to someone who is blind in India, it is the difference between being connected and being isolated; being useful or viewed as useless. The “electronic age” we live in, is impractical in their day-to-day life, but Braille opens up their world!

• Braille is the only way they can read, and reading opens doors.
• Braille gives them independence; they don’t need anyone to help them with it once they know how to read and they begin to learn and grow, taking in ideas and sharing their own.
• Once they can read, and if they have access to materials in Braille, it makes integration with the sighted world possible.
• It allows them to have better job opportunities.
• It opens up the possibility of an education.
• I.T. equipment that is “Braille friendly” allows blind people to surf the web!
• It provides enjoyment for blind people as they enjoy reading as much as anyone else
• It allows them to participate in group settings (like school, church, small groups for example) and even lead house churches.

In many countries, including India, learning Braille and then finding material to read is very challenging. Braille can be mailed anywhere in the world (right now) for free, but teaching it, translating it, and then getting materials into people’s hands can all present serious obstacles.

There are also challenges in trying to convince many parents that it is worth educating their blind child. There are parents who would just view their blind child as a huge inconvenience and not worth the investment to get them to and from a school. There is the issue of karma, where if a person is born blind, there must be a reason for it (I recall a Bible verse also where people thought the blind person had committed some sort of sin, or perhaps their parents had). Sometimes educators need to visit a home over and over to convince parents just to let them try to educate their child for a short time so that they can see for themselves what great improvements could be made in their child’s life.

Alecia and I spent a wonderful afternoon with a couple near London who lead an organization called (I removed the name of the organization for now) and their mission is to produce Braille Bibles and Christian materials to distribute them among people in needy areas. Just to give you some perspective, this organization is one of the only organizations in the world doing this kind of work (there are a few doing some limited work), and definitely the only organization that translates to so many different languages.

They print the Bible in Braille (the entire Bible stands around 2 meters long) as well as children’s Bible-story books, and healthcare awareness booklets. They are passionately committed to this ministry of putting the “Good News at their fingertips” which they now print in about 42 languages for distribution to 120 destinations in Asia, Africa and Europe.

What a great afternoon!  We talked about their own journey to becoming involved in this calling and about the challenges the blind face, and the way that their Braille Bibles are treasured. Reading material for the blind in India is so scarce, that even if you were Hindu by religion, you would be grateful to receive a Bible, just to have something to read!

Most people don’t ever get the chance to read the entire Bible; they might own one book of the Bible (I had to think, what if you only had Ecclesiastes? Or Lamentations?) This organization is setting up mini lending libraries in India so that people who might not own a book or a book of the Bible can come and borrow one, return it and take another.

They also have helped a group in India to set up their own Braille “printing press” so that they can write their own booklets in response to the issues people are facing in their communities from a Christian perspective:

• Overcoming temptations
• Overcoming fear
• Growing relationships
• Making right choices
• Self-acceptance
• Assurance of salvation
• Spiritual growth
• How to lead a Bible Study group
• How to lead intercessory prayer groups.

They have also printed song books, and Bible notes, and Bible correspondence courses in seven Indian languages.

One of the goals of this organization is to at least get the book of Luke in as many hands as possible so that people who are blind can get a good look at who Jesus was and is. I am not sure what that one book would cost but the New Testament costs around 80 GBP which is approximately $130.00

I came away from that meeting with so much to think about. There are all the issues of being blind in India and beyond that, being blind and trying to understand who Jesus is and the promises God has for those who love Him. How many Bibles do I have in my home right now? How for granted I take it, that I can read any book of the Bible I want at any time? It is so simple for me to read and reflect on God’s Words and I literally can take it or leave it. But if you are blind, and if you are blind in India, it is literally a treasure.

As I looked at the pictures of people receiving ONE BOOK of the Bible in Braille and the beautiful smiles on their faces I again felt that mixture of embarrassment and awe: embarrassment at how casual I am about so many things, knowing that to whom much is given, much is required; and awe at seeing how they immediately would open the cover and begin to read, and that look of pure joy as they began to take in those life-giving, life-changing words.

This organization is now in its 21st year. Its warehouse is nothing fancy. It occupies a fairly small space with a few paid employees, a big machine that prints off thick sheets of Braille,  and a host of volunteers who sort and bind the Bibles and books and then ship them off to their contacts in different countries. They are mostly supported by the United Bible Society and a few U.K. churches, but, as with most churches and organizations trying to obey the call God has given them, the money is always tight.

I leave this with you. If you love God’s Word and have a desire to see Bible’s find their way into the hands of “the least of these” maybe this is something you will want to look into further (they are a registered charity).

 

(I have removed contact information at this time due to the political climate in India)

— Teresa Klassen

India: Scene Nine — Dead ends

Mostly about dead ends.

This came to my mind last night as I was thinking of all the opportunities and options we have here in Canada.

When we were on our way to Varanasi, we were picked up at the airport by a taxi. The taxi driver, it turns out, was a Christian.

The thing that stood out about this man was that he was very well educated, as was his wife. I don’t recall exactly what his degrees (plural) were in, but both he and his wife had found a way to get an excellent education in the hope of improving their life.

But here is the thing: they were of a low caste.

He cannot get a job.

If he wants to get a job in the field of his study he will need to come up with an outrageously large bribe. And will that bribe get him the job? Uncertain. The bribe will allow him to place his resume on someone’s desk who will now look at it. Beyond that, no promises. The trail could end there.

So he drives a taxi and his wife also has some sort of menial work that she does. They have two children. They will not have any more children because they won’t be able to afford to raise them if they do and provide some kind of education for them.

There are so many things you still can’t escape in many parts of India, including the position to which you were born; Slumdog Millionaire is only a movie.

I am thinking about that and how simple it is, really, for us to get ahead.

How simple it is for us to change our mind about doing one thing, to do another.

How an ordinary person can advance if they work hard enough.

How we can move around from one city to another.

The choices we have that we expect to have and can’t imagine not having.

In Canada the roads keep going.

In India there are dead ends everywhere.

— Teresa Klassen

India: Scene Eight — Miscellaneous

Mostly about miscellaneous things

• Smells – I can’t speak for all of India, as we really only traveled in Northern India and really only a few places in this huge country, but I know before I left I had a few people talk to me about how it smelled. The most obnoxious smell, to be honest, and the thing that puzzled me the most was that British Airways sets off a spray in the plane as some sort of sanitization process before and after you leave India. I felt like I was in a gas chamber. The attendants walk up and down the aisle with hairspray-sized cans and spray the entire cabin as you are sitting there breathing it in. They say it has been approved by some health board and it isn’t bad for you, but seriously, how can it not be? I was not impressed with that. As for the places we visited, it isn’t what I thought it would be, like an assault on my senses; there is a just a unique combination of scents that I mostly noticed when I would reopen my suitcase; it had a sort of polluted smell. Varanasi smelled the worst as there were way more cows and way more smoke in the air from the Pujas and from the cremations, after that I really felt smelly and dirty.
• Language – there was no problem communicating. Many people are at least bilingual with Hindi and English both being official languages, and you can almost always find someone who speaks English. That isn’t to say it wasn’t hard to understand at times; you might both be speaking English but depending on where you place your emphasis, or if you do or do not roll your “r’s” you might look at each other puzzled. And the Indian head nod is something to get used to, so when you think you are in agreement, you might want to ask three more times if you actually understand each other. Three is the magic number.

• Food was a-m-a-z-i-n-g and overabundant. We stopped eating lunch just so we could enjoy dinner because Alecia was overfeeding us! I loved all the Chai breaks (yum), the garlic Naan, the rice and chick-pea dishes, the strangely fined-boned chicken (odd that there are no cats around, you make your own conclusions), the spices, the Lassi (thickened, sweetened Water Buffalo milk, tastes a bit like sweet yogurt), Fresh Sweet Lime Soda, Kheer (like rice pudding), the curries, the custard apples, the bananas straight off the tree, the Samosas, Aloo Paratha (stuffed naan eaten at breakfast), barfi (kind of a fudge), black bean dal, and the list goes on and on. It wasn’t overly spicy and everything was cooked fresh to perfection. Now, having said that, after a while a lot of things tasted the same to me. There is a combination of spices they use (masala) that is in everything, and to my palate, made things taste the same.

• Two things you must carry with you: Toilet paper. If you travel to India, take at least 1 package of travel sized Kleenex for every two days you are there. Trust me, you will thank me. Water: always have bottled water; I was constantly thirsty, especially when I first arrived and you must only drink bottled water, unless you are like Alecia and think worms are your friends.

• Indian Pit Toilets are a good thing. It is really funny how western women react when they go to use the toilet and realize it is a pit toilet: they all take a step back and go “oh” and ask if there are any western toilets nearby. I have to admit, I felt the same but knew that using one was inevitable and came to appreciate the little ceramic hole in the floor, mostly for cleanliness. The fact that you don’t have to touch anything is actually GREAT. Technique is everything and that’s all I am going to say about that. If you want to know more, email me 🙂

• Does no mean no in India? There are too many people and too few jobs in India so you find 5 Indians doing what should only take one person to do. This means that there are a lot of eyes watching everything you do as well, so get used to a lot of random people telling you what to do or what not to do. The thing I found curious is that they will say, “no,” with no explanation. They will say, “Ma’am no” but not tell you why or if this is a special circumstance “no” or whether things will be changing shortly or if it was for your safety only or if it is an actual rule.  They just say “no” and mostly ignore you if you ask questions (perhaps that is the only English word they know?).  So “no” might only mean “no” to that person at that time at that place and “yes” if you just walk two feet ahead and try it again. Random.

• Continuing on the random rule changes, we had flights purchased through a Canadian travel agent for some travel within India but when we got there the agent wanted to see the credit card that was used when the flight was purchased. This was impossible because we didn’t even purchase them, someone did it for us. But this was a new rule in India and they would not let us fly. So Paul had to re-purchase the flights on his credit card, and save all the info to hopefully get a refund of the other flights. You might want to keep that in mind when you travel if you prepurchase flights. Then again, the rules might randomly change again. One must be flexible in India.

• Cinema’s in India are waaaaaaaaaaaaay better than Canadian Cinemas for these reasons: big reclining seats, waiters who come and serve you during the movie, and intermissions so you can go to the bathroom.
• Henna-head – I thought it was so strange, all these people walking around with unnaturally reddish/orange hair (men and women). This is the Indian way of covering up grey hair, to dye it with henna. It has been used to dye many things in India for the past 6,000 years so it isn’t a habit likely to change soon.

• Hotels – the hotels we stayed in were mostly modern (Indian modern) and mostly air conditioned (though some places only had the possibility of air conditioning) and hot water (which you sometimes had to call down for). They quite often had wifi and decently comfortable beds, and television (mostly Bollywood). There are some pretty sketchy places you could stay, but we were well taken care of. We did have some funny things happen, like one morning we were served chai and we noticed on the paper liner on the tray there were two distinct footprints of a cat (again, cat in the kitchen, fine boned chicken, is there a connection?) You just try not to think too much about that; cheers!

• Seatbelts – none in rickshaws and seldom in taxis. Usually the front passenger seat in a taxi has a seatbelt which you will want to use…I know it saved us a lot of grief one particular day.

• Markets – loved the Indian markets – Dilli Haat, Khan market, Sarojini Nagar, Vasant Kunj – I can’t remember where else we went but it is so much fun exploring the markets and bargaining. We also had henna designs done on our hands and had a fish pedicure (you put your feet in a fish tank and a swarm of fish eat away at your dead skin, followed by a pedicure/massage), and ate some extremely sweet treats made by street-side vendors (Jalabe, too sweet for me).

I will be adding to this list as I recall other miscellaneous things worth mentioning.

— Teresa Klassen

India: Scene Seven — Varanasi revisited

Varanasi revisited

_______ was born into a devout Hindu family. She served the gods along with her sister and family. But her sister dealt with an overwhelming despair. One day her sister stood before their gods and in some kind of ritual she asked the gods if she should live or die. They answered: she should die. She wrote a note to her family explaining, and then she committed suicide.

_________ was devastated and angry. She vowed never to serve the gods from that day forward.

One day a missionary couple came into her world. They were hired to help her learn English, and the way they did this was to have her practice her English using the Bible. She read and memorized scripture. They only stayed for one year in India; it is almost like they were sent there just for her.

Following this came many years of asking questions and walking through a process of coming to understand and to embrace Jesus as “the Way and the Truth and the Life.”

She got married and joined a HUGE (45,000) and vibrant church in Southern India where she lived a very clean, safe, wonderful life with her husband.

One day she was praying with her husband and she had a vivid vision of a city by the name of “Varanasi.” She hadn’t even heard of Varanasi. First, because she is from southern India, which is like being from another world; second because Varanasi goes by different names she didn’t recognize it.

After a while, they felt God was calling them to pack up their things, their family, and move to Varanasi to plant a church there. They went to their pastor to ask for his blessing. In that church they set personal goals every year, which included commitments you were making in different areas of your life (including people you would lead to the Lord).

The pastor asked if they had met these goals yet, and they admitted they hadn’t. So he said to go and meet these goals and when they had, to come back and see him.

Within an impossibly short time, all the goals were met! So they went back to the pastor and to their surprise he said that he really felt they should not go.

They returned dejected and confused and continued to pray. After quite a bit of time (a year I think) they felt such urgency to go that they went back to the pastor and said that even without his blessing, they had to go; that it was more important for them to obey God than him. He said, “now I know that God is really calling you, because you feel such an urgency and you are willing to obey no matter what.” He blessed them and sent them.

They were so unprepared for what met them in Varanasi. They left a clean and comfortable life for the very, very difficult, exceedingly dark and dirty, broken city of Varanasi. They got off the train station and were shocked by what met them. Oh…this Varanasi, the birthplace of Hinduism with thousands of years of demonic dominion!

They began to reach the Muslim community there, and there seemed to be open doors, but everyone they reached returned to what they were being saved from and the doors were literally closed to them. It was hard work, several years of hard work and prayer with little to show for. Late at night they would bundle up their children and travel the perimeter of the city and pray and pray and finally…breakthroughs (I should add, they were at the medical compound to pray and fast for three days for Varanasi).

Healings led to conversions which led to house churches being planted in this city. Now all their work is in coaching new church leaders as they are starting to spread across the city.

There is no way to really describe their conviction for this city. At the end she said, “We believe that Varanasi is the key to reaching India. We believe that when the strongholds of Varanasi will fall, India will come to Christ and it will create a movement that the world has never seen. When India will come to Christ, the Gospel will spread to all nations and reach the world!”

Ah, I wish I could have captured their passion to bring it home in a bottle!

Ok, I cried again over all of this, so tired of crying; it is exhausting experiencing all of these emotions. But, pretty hard for me to be poised when I see the church in this setting. I love what Jesus has chosen to do through His Bride. We are so helpless, so hapless, so inadequate, so lacking…yet he puts people in places and asks them to just be willing; to just be faithful; to stand firm even in Varanasi and know that the labour is not in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58).

I am praying for Varanasi and for this couple and their children. The ground is hard, hard, hard here. We also heard stories of people working for Christ here who have been so spiritually attacked they have left with psychological disorders and serious marriage breakdowns. The myriad of demons won’t release the city without a fight.

When I walked back into that ridiculous city I saw that place through a new and more hopeful lens. I thought, “If Christ is for us, who can stand against us?” Even Varanasi will bow.

— Teresa Klassen

India: Scene Six — God and gods

Mostly about God and gods

India is, above all, religious. There is no separation between church and state here; while Indians work, play, fight, beg, travel, marry, bury, eat, sleep, govern, gather, conduct business, take a bath, brush their hair whatever Indians do it is married to the spiritual. To illustrate, here is a conversation we had with an Indian man:

Indian: Explain this to me, I recently met an American who said that he does not follow any god. He does not believe in God, do you think this could be true?

Us: Yes, that could be true.

Indian: I can’t believe this is true. Who would ever think there is no god?

Us: it is very common in our country.

Indian: (incredulously) You are saying that people do not believe in any god at all?

Us: Yes.

Indian: Well what do they do when they are in trouble? Who do they speak to?

Us: The don’t speak to anyone. They just rely on themselves.

Indian: Are they stupid?

In most taxis you will find one god or a row of gods (including Jesus at times, just to be safe). There are shrines to at least one of the 39 million gods EVERYWHERE; whether in a city centre or deep in the Indian hills. Some shrines might be small, a foot high, a foot wide with a simple clay model inside. Some shrines are massive, ornately carved or garishly painted like the shrine to the monkey god Hanuman, near our hotel, with a massive statue, crouched over with his grotesque mouth open wide: the door one would pass through to “worship” him.

There are shrines and temples for every religion and every expression of that religion (bizarre ones like the “rat temple” or the “snake temple”). On our trip we walked through the Bahai Lotus temple in Delhi, a large Muslim temple in Old Delhi, the spectacular Golden Sikh temple in Amritsar, we saw temples to Shiva and to the bloodthirsty Kali. We saw ashrams (retreat centres for pilgrims and training centres for disciples) and saw “holy men” (sadhus) in their orange robes everywhere we went, these thin wandering men who have renounced all worldly things in hopes of…in hopes of what?

Religion has not freed India, though people still travel here thinking they will find something. Religion here imprisons.

If you are born blind, it is in response to your poor choices in some other life, why would anyone help you now? Your parents might put you in the corner to live out your life in darkness, you might barely survive, and they would have no conscience about it since you obviously deserved it. Hinduism doesn’t require kindness to the less fortunate.

If there are noises in your house at night, if demons haunt your home and physically batter you, you must visit the local shrine more often, ring that bell harder, offer something more or better to appease it.

You must buy more garlands, sacrifice more coconuts (these can replace animals in most cases), you must make a pilgrimage, you must wash in the Ganges, you must take off your shoes, you must perform pujas, and most importantly, you must mind your station in life, and you must not convert to another religion nor redraw the lines that keep everything working as it has for thousands of years. It is fine to be Muslim, just stay a Muslim. It is fine to be Buddhist, just stay a Buddhist. It is even fine to be a Christian to some extent, but keep it all to yourself.

This is how India changes, advances, but still remains the same.

Coming to India, I wanted to know what it looks like to “be the church” in northern India (northern and southern India are very different from each other, as are the east from the west. It is almost like there are countries within this country). Like everything else here, it all seems like a puzzle at first. All along I felt as if I was bring given a little picture and another little picture and another until I got that “aha moment.” Having said that, I don’t begin to claim to know much about this profoundly complicated place or how things work exactly, but here is a slice of it:

After our dark and depressing time in Varanasi, we had two really amazing experiences with church planters here. We went to a city a few hours out, to a medical facility. We were invited into the home of a doctor and his wife (I am not going to mention names here just in case it is a problem) who fed us and then invited us into a circle of church planters. He began by asking me what I wanted to know about church planting in India. To be honest, it was a little intimidating. Who am I? These men were taking time out to talk to me and, having experienced the craziness of Varanasi just a few hours before, I was pretty unprepared for a formal sit-down. No matter, the doctor just began to share his story and I tried to keep up.

Church planting in northern India has been an immense challenge, particularly for “westerners”. Many westerners have come and have tried and have had such frustrations. I have mentioned the anti-conversion law, which is a very serious complication with serious ramifications, but there are many other reasons why the church has struggled to be established here; only 1% to 2% of the population are “Christian” (and Christian can be a loose term as well). Just reading my description of Varanasi might give you some idea as the rituals of this city are played out in thousands of cities across India, but beyond that, there are many other reasons that I don’t have the expertise to explain. Northern India is at the top of the list in terms of the most unreached places in the world.

I don’t know what church planting looks like in other areas of northern India. We attended a well established church in Delhi, and a very large (2500 strong) church in the Punjab, but what I saw and heard in this little meeting made my heart beat as I saw a pretty pure expression of what is uniquely the Indian church growing here.

Fist, you have to know that before the doctor came along, his predecessor prayed and fasted for 40 years for God to do a work in India, and as I understand it, he did not see a single person come to Christ. But those prayers were like seeds in the ground, and now hundreds of people are coming to Christ and are being baptized. Here is how it has been working:

This movement in India is happening through new converts beginning house churches. Christian leaders go into a village and begin to pray over the village, over its strongholds, asking God to lead them to a person. Then they meet someone and ask that person if they can pray for them. Indians, being Indians, are usually very receptive to prayer and will ask for prayer for healing or for specific needs or concerns and when God answers those prayers…please notice that I said “when” not “if”…that person and his family will want to know more and will come to Christ after some time. Then they make that persons’s house a house of prayer so that neighbours can come and be prayed for. When their prayers are answered, they also come to Christ and a little house church forms.

I love how these men talk about prayer. There is such an expectation, and such an experience, of God answering prayer. They are totally reliant on this. There is no plan B, no alternative but to pray. A gentleman from the U.K. whom I met later was saying that he was in India meeting with some Indian believers. He was helping them with some equipment they needed and they talked about a nearby facility they were hoping to buy for their ministry. They asked him to pray that God would give it to them. He prayed, but he admitted that while he prayed he didn’t have any faith that they would actually get it because the building was huge and modern and completely out of their reach. The next year when he was back in India with some more equipment they told him it needed to be put in the new building.

“What building?” he asked.

“The one we prayed for last year, of course,” they replied as if it should be completely obvious that God would give it to them.

The Indians put on a clinic when it comes to faith that God hears and answers prayer.

I have much to learn.

When a house church forms, the leaders who came to pray over the village look for 4 pillars to help establish that church: someone to teach, someone to lead the women, someone to lead the children, and an evangelist. Yes, church of North America, it is a given that from day one, the church is meant to share the gospel with others and to expand to reach more and more…

Now here is where it is all tricky and New Testament-like: new converts are leading these churches. They might know one verse and they will teach that one verse (hopefully correctly) and they might not even have a Bible at this stage. They might not even be literate!

So this is where the leaders of this church planting movement come in. I know I won’t have all the details correct, but this is generally how it works. Under the doctor’s shepherding, he acts as the main helper/director of this (he is a pretty brilliant man, a neurosurgeon plus a few other equally impressive specialties to his name), he meets with leaders who are in charge of an area within their region. These leaders are coaches/mentors to the house church leaders themselves. Their job is to drive around every day and meet with these church planters, many young in their faith and help them, pray with them, encourage them, keep them on track. Their whole job, every day, is to coach. One of these leaders may have 8-10 church planters under their care.

The church painters themselves shepherd their little flock of 15 or so people (some are larger, most meet houses, but some have property), sending people out to plant new churches in nearby villages. It is a movement! I can’t remember the statistics, but the baptisms happening are in the hundreds in each area/grouping of churches.

Each church planter comes to the medical facility once a month for training on how to pastor a flock, and how to teach the word of God (I should add that church planters are bi-vocational, leading their church, or in many cases more than one church, and also working elsewhere). They might be taught one more verse in the Bible; they are taught how to teach it, how to be theologically correct (you can imagine how important this training is in a religiously confusing place like India) so that they are teaching in a truth-filled way, and they are then given opportunity to teach it back so that they can be sure they have understood it correctly. And then they go back to their house church to teach it. Sometimes the church planters are just one step ahead of their flock.

If it all sounds smooth and organized, I don’t think it is. Sharing the Gospel can come at great personal risk, there are serious demonic strongholds that they contend with, and adopting a whole new and more loving and compassionate mindset takes time. Yet the church is alive in northern India and slowly, the statistics will change.

When the sun had gone down, we still had another couple to meet. I wish I could have recorded our conversation because they have an amazing story and incredible passion for a very difficult assignment: Varanasi! Where to begin…

— Teresa Klassen

India: Scene Five – Varanasi

Mostly about Varanasi

How do I begin to describe what is arguably the dirtiest and darkest city on the planet? We arrived in the evening and a driver picked us up. He was a little of everything, a little Buddhist, a little Hindu a little Christian and he was very concerned about us. We were instructed to bring as little with us as possible when we headed out to walk the city, to not let the “holy men” put saffron on our foreheads, to not let the children hold our hands or massage our arms as it is an occultic practice. He asked us to stay close to him and to be very careful of the crowds who would press in on us, to watch for pick-pocketing and other forms of dishonesty or lewdness. We were on our way to the Aarti Puja down at the river Ganges, the river that is the god Shiva, the river people worship and serve.

Thousands of people attend this puja (religious ceremony) every day; Indians and foreigners, devotees and those who are curious, holy men, beggars, it is a mash of people all up the river bank and in boats on the river after the sun goes down.

There are small stages set up all along this section of the river. It is like something out of a movie: towers of fire and priests dressed in yellow, making desperate attempts to appease the demons who demand this of them. Everyone sits in rapt attention as these young priests raise and lower the fire, call out to Shiva, make offerings to try to please the god, to call it to possess the city. And people clap rhythmically and those who are high on hash sway to the music. Ignorant white people get their foreheads painted and lift their hands as if they are in church, unaware that they are inviting demons to sit beside them.

It is very eery. The night air was humid and oppressive and I suddenly noticed my heart was just racing! I asked myself, “What are you feeling?” I have felt this before. It always comes when something is wrong in the room, when I know that whatever is happening, it isn’t God’s way. So my heart raced and I felt this terrible blanket of darkness over that place, and at the same time the incredible contrast of God’s goodness. It was a strange mix, I was singing quietly about the redeeming love of God, buoyed and suffocated at the same time.

A woman approached. She was burned from the chin down. Her skin was pulled tight, stretching her lower lip down unnaturally, showing a row of small sharp teeth. She looked frightening. Her eyes we’re large and dark and there was a darkness about her. She wanted to sell us something and Paul, who speaks Hindi told her we had nothing to offer her in terms of money, but that we offered to pray for her in the name of the one true God, Jesus. Most Hindus will let you pray for them, since any god will do, but in this place she looked at us sort of sideways and just walked away. She stood at a distance and stared at us with hollow eyes.

There were a lot of staring eyes, and sadhus (holy men) high on drugs pointing bony fingers and calling us to receive their “blessing”. I can tell you, I have never experienced anything like this. It is absolutely oppressive and we all came back to the hotel room feeling dirt on our skin, not just from the filth of this city (it is disgustingly dirty) and the ash from then occultic ceremony, but the dirt of sin and darkness that hangs over this city like smog.

We went to bed to the beating of drums and firecrackers, preparing for Diwali, a Hindu religious day that looks like Christmas.

That was day one in Varanasi. The next day, oh the next day went so far beyond what we saw the night before. We were out the door at 6:00 a.m. Our rickshaws took us down to the filthy river Ganges. We hopped onto a long wooden boat and we were rowed out and along the river to see the city from that view.

The city is all built on one side of the river, the bank that looks at the sun as it rises. The other bank is completely bare of buildings, because they don’t want the sun to rise on their backs. All along the “ghats” people bathed in the putrid water, some of the most toxic water on the planet. They bathed in it, men and women, stripping down to let the river wash away their sins. They drank it. They buried their dead in it. They worshiped it.

If you are a pregnant woman, a boat driver, someone under 13, someone with a snake bite (a blessing from shiva), a leper, or a holy man you wouldn’t be cremated if you died. You would have your body wrapped and weighted down with stones and thrown into the river. Unfortunately the stones weren’t always attached really well, so bodies float up. We saw several bodies and a random head bobbing along, being picked at by birds or chewed on by dogs. I will leave it at that; it was pretty disgusting and kids and adults were bathing not 20 feet away from some of this.

We went to the largest cremation site where 36,000 bodies are burned a year. It is a place of death, no mistaking it. Gigantic towers of wood, blackened buildings. We saw a a man (presumably) being burned, his head charred, his legs sticking out from the wood. They took a stick and bent his legs back so that they would burn and we saw them, still with the flesh on, gradually become “sweaty” and then the flesh get eaten away by flames while people casually looked on.

Overlooking the cremation site is the temple of Kali, the god who loves death. Its holy men are very black and haunted. As a part of their worship they have been known to consume human flesh from the charred remains below. Calcutta, incidentally, is a city devoted to this god and has a very large temple there where animal sacrifice happens regularly, blood flowing outside the temple. And human sacrifice still happens to appease the god Kali. Street children regularly disappear and though it isn’t legal to murder a child, somehow it isn’t necessarily investigated either. It is one of those things that gets covered up as modern sensibilities live along side ancient superstitions.

We walked the streets and looked at rotting buildings, a myriad of shrines and temples, ashrams, and holy sites. One place was particularly sad to me, Lolark Kund, means “reflection of the sun.” it is an ancient deep, deep man-made cavern lined with stone, with steep steps leading down to a pool. It is hard to describe, but the god Shiva is represented by symbols of male and male sexuality. All over the city you see shrines with a post (male) and a roundish disc (female) called the Shiva-lingam and this deep well is also patterned after that (if you google this you will find images). The steep steps lead down to the round pool, hundreds of feet down and here barren women come, and in particular, one day a year where they practically trample one another to get to the water.

They carry a vegetable under their sari and leave it here as an offering, vowing to give up eating it for a year as a sign of their desperation. They leave all their clothing and jewelry there as a sign of their shame, and put on something new after they have dipped in the waters hoping that their prayers will be answered.

We stood and looked at this deep well with all the saris draped over every ledge to dry, all these bright colours masking such sadness, each sari representing someone calling out to a false god to save them from their shame.

If you google Varanasi you will find blogs where people describe Varanasi rapturously, as a place of spiritual enlightenment, light and goodness. It is absurd. Varanasi is FILTHY in every way from the mixture of urine, cow dung, and rotting garbage on the streets, to the absolutely polluted waters of the Ganges, the sooty buildings that stand guard around the cremation sites, and the children defecating beside the roads 5 feet away from where they eat. It is dirty and smelly and heavy with spiritual darkness. The only way you would say this place is beautiful is if you were blind.

Varanasi feels like the monster in the world’s closet and if we would have left there with only the story I just told, I think I would have felt it was beyond hope. God, however, has other plans for Varanasi. More about that in my next post.

— Teresa Klassen