16. Returning: God in the Shadows
India is my homeland. Kerala and Tamil Nadu are my heritage. Delhi is the place of my youth.
I make trips to the land of my birth now several times each year, and it looks different each time I return. But in my heart, my love for India only grows deeper with the years. Its people, its colorful pageantry — all add to the mix within my soul. It is a country blessed with enormous intellectual and artistic strength. At this moment in world history, India is rising to the top with incredible accomplishments and skills in computer technology that promise a prominent role in the world for its young minds. At the same time, the past casts a long shadow across the sociocultural landscape that makes for genuine nostalgia. In fact, one of the most dramatic discoveries I made while doing some research on my roots as I began to write this book was found in a statement made by a Hindu historian writing about the impact of Christianity in India. Here are his words: “There is no doubt as to the tradition that Saint Thomas came to Kerala and converted a few families of Nambudiris, some of whom were ordained by him as priests.”
That statement gave me pause to mutter a prayer of gratitude that my caste was mentioned alongside the name of this great apostle! So the seeds of the conversions that took place among my forebears were sown in Keralite soil, within the very generation of our Lord’s walk on this earth. Heaven will bring further light from this work of God in the shadows.
On this trip, I will travel to both cities of my youth — Chennai (yes, Madras, where it all began for me) and Delhi. In Chennai, our RZIM office is holding a groundbreaking ceremony for the building of a new training center. When I arrive, I am surrounded by the smiling friends who do the hard work of RZIM in India: Shalini, our administrator for sixteen years; our apologists, Sudhakar, a former university zoology professor who specializes in scientific subjects and hosts dialogues and open forums with Muslims; Ajoy, our biblical and devotional specialist; and Prakash Yesudian, the prominent evangelist who has just retired from decades of service as our ministry director in India.
As I stand before the group that has gathered for the ceremony, preaching the message I have brought, I am fully aware that I am only a few kilometers from the house on the narrow street where I was born. Two giggling little girls live there now —
Oh, Auntie! Auntie! We love your blue eyes.
— children who have dreams, as I did when I lived there. Perhaps they even have the same dreams I had, and perhaps they’ll see those dreams fulfilled. Their day may come when they are among those who benefit from Wellspring International, which is our outreach — including the offering of scholarships to needy students in the name of Christ — to women and children around the world, particularly in Asia. One student is studying law in a restricted country, two are young women working on their bachelor’s degrees in Chennai, others are pursuing medicine — and RZIM is helping to make it all happen. In this part of the world, it’s not nearly as expensive as in the West. Some students can get through college for around fifteen hundred dollars a year.
I believe that those two little girls’ day will come.
I will never forget the street where I was born, never forget the country where I was raised, never forget the mean times our family struggled through. I remember years ago reading the biography of John Newton. His life was punctuated by tragedy. He was beaten; he was involved in the slave trade. And, at one time, he was himself enslaved. Then, rescued by God, he penned these immortal lines: “Amazing grace — how sweet the sound — that saved a wretch like me!” In his study in Olney, England, are the words to remind him never to forget from whence he came. I also think of Charles Dickens, returning to his hometown after years of being away. He said he remembered it being much bigger than it actually was. He started to write that the city had changed, and then he paused and thought, “Maybe it is more because I had changed.”
Both are true about my trips back to India. Like the gigantic mango tree, once a sapling, that now shades the backyard of our former house in Delhi, so the years have gone by, and the branches of God’s reach through my life seem much more extensive than I ever thought they would be. But through it all, one great lesson stands out: the shadows were not as dark as I thought they were at the time, because His light was always there.
I am an official lecturer at Oxford now, teaching there once a year. Yet, it doesn’t matter if I’m speaking there — in the halls of academia — or here at a groundbreaking ceremony for RZIM India; I still go into every meeting, never forgetting my roots. God can shape us in any way he pleases. He raised Moses in a palace in order to use him in a desert; he raised Joseph in a desert in order to use him in a palace. For me, the best thing that ever happened culturally was the intersection of East and West. While the languages of the tongue and the anguish of experience may vary, the language of the soul is the same all over the world.
That is why I feel more confident all the time that, outside of the gospel, there are no answers for humanity’s most fundamental questions. And I feel a special calling to speak in any arena, for which I am always grateful.
We had launched our Wellspring initiative just prior to my trip. As I have mentioned, the mission was primarily to come alongside existing ministries that reach out to women in Third World countries who have been sexually abused or victimized, or who have been caught up in the brutal sex-trafficking industry in Asia. But there is much more to this mission now, as needs have become known. In Thailand, we’re helping an orphanage that provides a home for children orphaned or victimized by AIDS, and we’re carrying out a ministry that reaches women who have been sold into prostitution. In India, we are working with a ministry that provides housing and medical attention for destitute elderly people, and we’ve come alongside a ministry in Mumbai that works with prostitutes and provides both the message and means out of that horrific lifestyle, helping them to build their lives on a different foundation. We have been able to buy fishing boats and nets to give to the fishing families near Chennai who lost everything in the tsunami of December 26, 2004. In Indonesia, we are working with a ministry that prepares disadvantaged young people to compete for jobs, as well as with different agencies and ministries providing life-giving sustenance to tsunami survivors. Beyond this, there are numerous individuals we met as we have traveled all over the world, to whom we have the joy of being able to give some financial assistance.
On my flight from Chennai to Delhi, I read a startling headline in the newspaper: “17 Suicides in Kerala.” It had been exam week at the university, and grades were about to be posted. The article narrated the stories of two students who killed themselves, one of whom left a note saying he didn’t want to be a burden to his parents. That’s exactly who I had been.
Four decades later, it is still difficult for me to put myself back in those shoes, yet I know that’s why I keep coming back here. I keep coming back because there are thousands of young people who are that close to annihilation — as close as I was. I believe if they could be guaranteed that there is nothing beyond the grave — that when they finish off their lives, that would be the end of it — thousands, if not millions more, would do it. They are in that kind of despair.
I turn my attention away from the newspaper to work on my speech to the ambassadors to the United Nations, whom I’ll address in another month. The topic will be “Navigating with Absolutes in a Relativistic World.” At this time in world cultural history, when East and West seem to be getting closer and closer through communication and travel, you would think our understanding of each other would be better, but it isn’t. It’s as if we have been able to bridge the distances but not cross the differences.
As I work on the speech, some old familiar but fleeting feelings come back: “I am so unfit for this. I am unsure of myself. Why do these people want to listen to me? I would never have wanted this. It’s not my natural inclination.”
Slowly, those thoughts are aligned into the right perspective: “Only the Lord could have put these pieces together. No human being could have engineered this.”
Thirty days from now, I will have delivered the speech about the four absolutes we all have in our minds: love, justice, evil, and forgiveness.
We know what it means to have a loving parent, or to love our spouse, or to love our children. Love is a motivating, guiding concept in life.
Beyond love, we all cry for justice, I will tell the ambassadors. The UN exists as a body to make sure that justice is applied to global situations.
But the third area is a nebulous one called evil. Even though we may not like to use the term, we know what it is. If somebody deceives or cheats or betrays or hurts us, we know it is morally wrong. We’re more likely to talk of the fact of evil when we’re on the receiving end of it.
Finally, the fourth absolute is forgiveness, and any one of us who has ever done wrong recognizes the grace that’s expressed when someone says, “I forgive you.”
I will give the ambassadors the illustration of a little boy I saw wearing a helmet as he played soccer on the campus of the college where I once taught. As I got closer to the boy, I saw that there was something radically wrong with his face and hands. When I asked a colleague about it, he said, “That’s the son of a science professor. The family was rear-ended when the boy was a baby, and the car burst into flames. He was covered from head to toe with bad burns. And the truck driver who ran into them got away. He jumped out of his truck and eluded capture.”
Almost twenty years later, the truck driver was stopped on the highway during a routine license check, and the case came to trial. The boy was now a college graduate and was doing well in life, despite having suffered so much. During the trial, he was allowed to confront the man who had done this to him. The young man said to the man who caused his disfigurement, “I want you to look at me. Look at what you’ve done to my life.” But the man kept his head down the whole time.
The young man then unfolded the story of a lifetime of pain, suffering, and deformity. He demanded one more time that the truck driver look him in the eye. As the man looked up, the young man said, “Now that you see me, I want you to know that because of Jesus Christ, I forgive you.” At that, the courtroom fell silent.
I will conclude with these words to the UN ambassadors: “When you can see horror and grace put together, you realize there is no place, humanly speaking, where we can find an absolute way to understand these things. Only on the cross of Jesus Christ do love, justice, evil, and forgiveness converge. Evil, in the heart of man, shown in the crucifixion; love, in the heart of God who gave his Son; forgiveness, because of the grace of Christ; and justice, because of the law of God revealed.”
That speech has now been delivered. At its close, there was silence among the ambassadors. Afterward, the president of the United Nations asked me to come to his office to pray for him. Also, an ambassador from an Eastern European country confided in me. “When I came here, I wondered why I was ever brought to a position like this,” he said. “I am very lonely out here. I don’t like all that is involved. But today, I have been given an answer. God has a cause greater than we have, and unless we find out his course, we will not be able to solve our problems. I come from an atheistic country, but today God has spoken to me.” He embraced me in tears.
The intersection of the streets where we used to live in Delhi — Cornwallis Road and Wellesley Road — has different names on the street signs now — named after Indian patriots. I can see the desire for that kind of honor, but a nation should not forget its history either. People also need to remember what a place was before, especially after you’re on peaceful terms.
As I pass the park where we used to play cricket, my old passion rises up with wisdom for today. In cricket, there is a saying, “You have to ‘get your eye in’ ” — which means that when you go to bat, you don’t start flailing away at the beginning. You’ve got to watch the ball carefully at first and see how the bowler is moving the ball. You’ve got to see the ball “big,” to recognize how it’s going to take its turn off the ground, how it’s going to come up into the air in front of you. That’s “getting your eye in.”
Life is like this. There are times when you really have to “get your eye in” to see what’s going on — to train your eye to have discernment, insight, understanding.
A second lesson from cricket is to be careful of a “sticky wicket.” This refers to the unpredictable bounce the ball can take after the rains. It is the equivalent of a knuckleball in baseball, when the batter has no clue what the ball is going to do, which way it will turn or dip. Life often presents a sticky wicket, but we know the One who guards the soul through all of it. None of us know what tomorrow holds. In fact, at this point of writing, my wife has just found out that her dad has been diagnosed with an untreatable cancer, and his days are suddenly numbered. None of us know the hour we will be called, but called we will be. In this sticky wicket of life, we must know the One who controls all things.
Cricket has yet another term — we call it “being stumped.” It is a terrible way to get out — you are trapped by the wicket-keeper (the equivalent of the catcher in baseball), and he tags you as you are out of position. The best analogy is being picked off when you’re getting ready to steal a base. In other words, in life there are lines and boundaries. If caught outside the lines while the ball is in play, you are out. It is a helpless feeling to turn around and find yourself out of position and tagged. We must ever remember that the game is not there to protect the rules; the rules are there to protect the game. Cricket, like all sports, has many life lessons to teach.
Now I come to Sweets Corner, with its little candies of pure milk, reduced until there is nothing but sweetness and then wrapped in thinly pounded silver paper. When Margie and I came here a decade ago, it had been twenty-seven years since I’d walked through those doors. Naomi and Nathan were with us at the time, and as soon as our family walked in, I noticed that the owner was there but was on the phone. Assuming that he wouldn’t recognize me, I just escorted my family in to find a table. But as we walked passed him, with his other arm he reached out and grabbed me, putting the phone aside, and said, “Ravi, baba! (little boy!), how are you?” My children were amazed. He ordered that the tables be thoroughly cleaned (which, being interpreted, means please spread the dirt with a greasy cloth) because one of his favorite customers was here “with foreigners.”
Soon I arrive at the Cathedral Church of the Redemption, where over the past decade I have visited every couple of years just to sit and meditate. I thank the Lord that, even though things were so wrong in my life here, I finally was brought to a realization of what all those struggles were about. There are some wonderful things from your painful past, things with a beauty you may not have realized at the time. As I sit here now, I remember the names of the people, the homes we went to, the food we ate, the young people I met. Now it all seems like a chapter far in the past, and it causes me to remember that my life didn’t begin yesterday. I can hear my father’s voice in the choir loft.
Several years ago, Margie and I were visiting Delhi, and she suggested we try to find my grandmother’s grave. I had not been there since the day she was buried.
“We’ll never find it,” I said.
“Let’s just go,” she insisted.
At the time of my grandmother’s burial, there was only one Christian cemetery in Delhi, and because I could remember its name, the taxi had no trouble getting us there.
As we entered the cemetery office, a man I took for the attendant sat puffing on a bidi, a self-rolled cigarette made of strong tobacco and a dried leaf. He just kept staring at Margie and me as he puffed away. I thought maybe it was because my wife was a Westerner, so I broke the ice by saying, “Kya hal hai,” which means, “How are you?”
He nodded, broke into a quizzical look, and asked, “Did you arrive in Delhi at one o’clock this morning?”
I was floored. “Yes,” I answered. “How did you know that?”
“I was the immigration officer who stamped your passport when you came in.”
I had to grin. That’s India for you! He had come to visit the manager of the cemetery. So I turned to the manager and said, “Do you think you can help us? We want to find my grandmother’s grave.”
“Her name, sir?”
“Manickam. Agnes Manickam.”
“What year did she die, sir?”
“I wish I knew, but I was a little boy. Why don’t I guess at 1955?”
“Let’s start at 1950,” he said.
“No, that’s too early.”
He insisted that there was no point arguing, and he brought out a massive register, about two-and-a-half-feet wide and one-and-a-half-feet tall. He motioned for us to sit down across from him while he ponderously studied each page written in fountain-pen ink, approximately ten names per page, with all the details. He kept moistening his finger and turning page after page. I could tell this was going to take an eternity, so I finally convinced him to start at 1955.
Suddenly, there it was! Agnes D. Manickam; Officiant: Rev. Father Ernest T. John. He summoned the gardener.
“He will take you,” he said.
The gardener arrived carrying a little can of water and a broom, and gestured for us to follow him. As we walked through the rows of stones, surrounded by tangles of growth and vines, I muttered to Margie, “I can’t believe we’ll be able to find it in all this dirt.”
We located the plot amid a bushy overgrowth. The gardener knelt and began working, clearing away the caked-on dirt, the rubble collected over years of no one taking care of it.
I recalled the day I had stood on this very spot as a child and sung the hymn that has stayed so close to my heart, a hymn I still believe is one of the greatest ever written — “Abide with Me.” I hadn’t understood then the significance of my sweet grandmother’s faith.
As the gardener brushed away the last of the vines and dirt, I strained to see the dates of my grandmother’s life on earth. Then suddenly, Margie grabbed my arm. “Look, Ravi!” she said. “I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!”
Her name, the dates she was born and died, and then the words carved into my grandmother’s stone: “Because I live, ye shall live also” — John 14:19.
I was astounded. The words in the hospital — the Bible passage that Fred David shared. They were the very words that had rescued me when my mother read them to me. The very words I had put on my mother’s grave when she died.
What a closure to the story of a life and a verse! God was no longer in the shadows. He was reading me like a book in the light. This was no grave. This was the resurrection reminder.
In that swirling moment, the connections all came into focus: the simple exchange between Jesus and Thomas; the apostle’s impact on the Indian culture; my own life being shaped by the verse as I lay in the hospital near death. For the first time, I thought that my precious grandmother had probably prayed for me in her own way; I do know that somewhere deep in her heart, she was a godly person.
Hidden gold.
I tipped the gardener for his service of cleaning off the stone, telling him in Hindi, “I’m going to give you a larger sum, because I want you to do me a favor. I want you to tend this grave as long as you work here.”
He nodded.
“I want you to brush away the dirt regularly. And I want you to water the plants around it.”
He gave me his word that he would. I have contracted for a gravestone that is upright, so it is more visible. My parents could not afford that at the time, but we can now do our part.
Coming to India was a cultural journey for each of my children. I think they didn’t know how to relate to the Indian side of their heritage. Our middle child, Naomi, came with us for the first time when she was about fifteen, and it was a terrible shock to her system. She got an eye infection from the pollution in the air, and she was taken aback when a leprous man reached his hand through our car window to ask for money. But she seemed to gain her footing after a few days, and on the day we were scheduled to leave India, she asked if we could go again to my grandmother’s grave.
“Of course we can do that, honey. Why do you want to go there?”
“I want to put some flowers on her grave.”
Paradoxically, maybe her great-grandmother’s grave represented a birthplace of sorts in Naomi’s mind — a beginning place, a place that did as much to explain her roots as anyplace else. Now our kids love to go back, and they plead to be taken to visit India as often as they can.
I think of another child’s magnetic attraction to a loved one’s grave. Just before I made this recent trip back to my homeland, I answered a letter from a young woman named Martina. Here’s part of what she wrote me: “I heard you speak in Burlington, Ontario, last month. I wish I could have stolen you away and sat across the table from you to talk to you about my dad.”
Martina’s father was my friend — Koos Fietje.
“Seeing you was like seeing my dad,” she went on to write, “and because I hardly knew him, I wanted to talk to somebody who knew him.”
Martina told me that after her father was killed, her Uncle Bill, Koos’s younger brother, signed up to take his place in Thailand. I knew Bill as well. He became a missionary in Thailand until he returned to Canada some years later.
She concluded her letter, “I want one day to go and see his grave in Thailand.”
I have told her we will make sure that happens. She is now expecting her first child, and when she is ready to travel, we will make the visit to her father’s grave a reality.
After our dad died, there was no glue left for us kids, no place to go home for Christmas. So, in the succeeding years, we took turns, with each of us hosting the entire family for the holiday. Everyone lives in the Toronto area now — except for my family, having made Atlanta our home, and my sister Prem, who lives in St. Catherine’s, Ontario. For twenty years we gathered together at Christmas, the five families, and spent several days together. It doesn’t happen much anymore, with our children all grown-up, but we keep in touch, of course, by phone or through family letters, on special occasions and on birthdays.
Whenever we’re together, the difficult early days rarely come up. But every once in a while, something will.
“Remember the couple above us who sang Hindu chants after a terrible fight the night before?” I ask.
“I sure do,” Ajit says. Then I sing the hymn as I remember it, and remember also the total disjunction of it.
“Ahh,” Ajit says with amusement. “I don’t know how you remember even those words.” But that’s me; I’ve always had a strong memory for lyrics.
Sunder is family now, after marrying my sister Sham. But then, Sunder had always felt like family, and I had always felt like a son in his family.
A few years ago, when Sunder’s dad was in his late seventies, he went into the hospital quite ill. As his Hindu friends gathered around him, Mr. Krishnan sat up in bed and spoke to them about what was most important to him.
“All these years we have been friends, and we’ve gone to the temple,” he said. “Now I’m dying. I want you to know that I have been asking myself a question: Who is the answer to life’s questions? I have pondered this for seventy-some years. I now want to share the answer with you.” In the presence of his wife, his Hindu friends, my sister, and Sunder, he paused and raised his voice: “The answer is Jesus.”
That shocked everyone, especially his devout Hindu wife. Sunder said it was the best parting gift he could have received from his father.
Not only was it a dramatic deathbed conversion; it was a dramatic deathbed evangelistic message, and a glorious ending to a wonderful man’s life.
My parents are buried in Toronto, side by side. They have been gone for twenty-five and thirty years now, and I often wonder what they would think, had they lived to see where God has taken me to this point in life.
I know my mother would be delighted at my calling and with her grandchildren. And I think my father would tilt his head back in gratitude to God at what has become of my life. I am keenly aware that the race is not over yet, and caution laced with wisdom and commitment must always be the key to an onward step. But even this far, none of us were deserving of what we received, and yet ultimately God shone his light in our home. I believe both of my parents would have rested in the consolation that sometimes, as hopeless as things may look, God has a greater plan and is always working in the shadows on our behalf. I know they would marvel at the legacy the Lord has given them.
Sarah, our oldest, is a gifted writer; indeed, she has already authored her first book, Confessions of an Honest Wife: On the Mess, Mystery, and Miracle of Marriage. The loyal, quiet little girl who used to leave her mother notes on her nightstand has blossomed in her art of expression and is married to a young man who practices law. She is a lovely, statuesque young lady with an artistic bent and a creative mind. She started her career with CNN in the marketing department and now uses her creativity to do marketing for RZIM.
Naomi, a marvelous combination of passion and energy, also has chosen to work with her family in RZIM, directing the Wellspring International work, after some exciting stints with Coca-Cola and then in the Bush White House as an events coordinator. A keen mind with a loveliness to match, she wants to take on the world.
When I look at my son, Nathan, today — how he chums around and chats with me, how he puts his arm around me and sees me as a friend — I think of the distance God has brought me to have such a relationship after my own childhood with my dad. Nate is a tenderhearted gentleman and a diehard Atlanta Braves fan, and he now follows cricket as closely and well as I do after seeing only one match. Our son loves the Lord deeply and shares Sarah’s gift for writing, working for Focus on the Family.
I know our kids’ grandfather would have been proud.
The demands that are made on a spouse who is linked in a calling like mine are greater than you could imagine. The hours alone at home; the willingness to move forward whenever God calls; the trust required to live solely on love offerings in the early days, unsure where the next meal will come from — all these are enough to cause constant tension, and worse. Yet Margie has never, ever complained about the calling we have shared. The cost extracted from us has been beyond what we might have endured were it not for the Lord’s grace; yet the blessing that has come has been beyond our imagining.
Many times, I have said to my wife (and not in jest), “You know, your life would have been so much easier if you had married someone without all of these challenges and demands.” Her response is so sweet every time — with words of fond commitment, playfully rapping my knuckles or grabbing my hand and squeezing, sending such powerful signals of love through her simple touch that only a partner of thirty-three years could understand them all. I will never forget the first time we met, and that sweet face is always in my mind as I travel, ever longing to be back home.
As I reflect on these things now, I recall being touched by the biography of David Livingstone years ago. As a young man, he had studied diligently for the ministry, and as he looked toward Africa he declared, “The haunting specter of the smoke of a thousand villages in the morning sun is burned within my heart.” Livingstone then prayed this famous prayer: “Lord, send me anywhere, only go with me. Lay any burden on me, only sustain me. Sever any ties but the ties that bind me to your service and to your heart.”
His story is well known. He was attacked by a lion, blinded in an eye when he walked into a tree branch, had a shoulder torn. He lost so much along the way, even having to bury his wife in Africa. By her grave he prayed, “My Jesus, my King, my life, my all, I again consecrate my life to You. I shall place no value in anything I possess, except as it relates to Your kingdom and to Your service.” He later testified, “Through it all came the words of Christ to me, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.’ ”
David Livingstone carried on, going from village to village and making a profound impact for the gospel. When he died, two African men who loved him carried his body fifteen hundred miles to place it on a boat bound for England, so he could be buried in his homeland.
When I think of a life like this man’s, I am inspired also to pray, “Lord, send me anywhere, only go with me. Lay any burden on me, only sustain me. Oh, my Jesus, my King, my life, my all, I again consecrate my life to You.” If you’ve committed your life to Christ from the beginning and you make new commitments all along the journey, in the end you will see that He has been with you always.
God is in the shadows in many ways, but He is also in the bright light of what His servants do every day. My prayer is that He will find me faithful, and that until He calls me home I’ll be willing to go anywhere, to bear any burden for Him, and to recommit to Him afresh. It’s a tall dream, and without His strength it cannot be done. Yet with His strength, all things are possible.
When I look at the life I’ve had and at what the Lord has given me — my calling, my friendships, my beautiful wife and children — it is what dreams are made of. I have seen the world. I have walked with great leaders. I have slept in the villages and homes of the poor. I have had to stop at moments along the way and say, “I can never believe this is what the Lord had in mind for me when He started to rebuild my life.” Only as you keep in perspective your roots, your ordinary day-to-day life, and the grace that called you, are you able to see clearly the extraordinary privilege of speaking to people who make a difference in our world.
To try to begin to take it all in is to dip your toe into an ocean that’s too deep to fathom. It is nothing less than a tapestry woven skillfully and mysteriously by father and son — the elder nodding and the younger responding — a work whose beauty is revealed in fullness only upon its completion.
T. S. Eliot once wrote:
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Life is not merely a geographical journey — not just east to west, or north to south. There is also an up and a down — God’s way, or our way. My prayer for you the reader is that you, too, will see it His way, both in the shadows and in the light. There is no greater discovery than seeing God as the author of your destiny.
I can hardly wait for heaven to put it all together — yes, even more.