DownshoreDrift

Noise, pollution, dust, cars, buses, trucks, autorickshaws, motorcycles, ox carts, bicycles, people - all flying at you at a breakneck speed as you travel down broken roads past roadside shops and businesses for an uninterrupted 150 miles from Delhi to Dehradun. India is moving, hurtling forward into the progress of globalization that marks the 21st century, but still stuck in a past that leaves 800 million of her people in abject, horrifying poverty. You can make cell phone calls in the Himalayas (our cell phones do not even work between Montgomery and Birmingham on I-65 in Alabama), but you can't get clean water. There is the high tech, public face of India, depicted in Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, and the shadow side, the real India, the backward India, called by it's ancient name, Bharat. Those two worlds are in collision, and the whole social structure is convulsing with the shock.

Emmanuel, the founder of the children's homes and schools that we worked with said that the British dealt the first blow to Hinduism and the caste structure by introducing education to the country. As they began to teach math, science, and history, over 50% of the power of Hinduism was wiped away. People began to think for themselves and, intellectually they left Hinduism behind. It's hold is now primarily cultural among the intellectual elite yet still religious among the masses. Primarily, Hinduism has it's strength among the women who protect the cultural and religious heritage of the people, but are treated like "dust under the feet" of the men. That is why Emmanuel and his daughter Helena are working to take Hindu orphan children, many of them girls, and educate them, teach them a trade, and give them the gospel. They are working with approximately 2,500 children in 6 different sites throughout the subcontinent and are changing India one life at a time.

Emmanuel believes that the rest of the Hindu structure involving caste and religion is being swept away by globalization. Communication with the West and a desire to enter the global community is causing India to involuntarily leave it's past behind. Traditionalists are madly scrambling to hold onto their culture and religious power, but India is a country of the young, and the young are looking to the future. The question is, as they leave the past behind, what will fill the gap? Materialism? Consumerism? Buddhism? Or maybe, can we seed the future of India with Christianity? Emmanuel thinks so.

Dr. Thom Wolf, who I am now staying with in New Delhi, says that this is India's moment. This is the moment that India is transitioning, and the question is, what will she transition to? He, and many others, are trying to help shape the future of India redemptively by looking to the past through Indian leaders like Phule, who was the father of social revolution in India - the Abraham Lincoln of India, so to speak. Thom has written a book with Sunil Sardar called Phule in His Own Words. This is significant because Phule, almost 150 years ago, called for a change from the Brahminical Hindu system of inequality to the Western Liberal system of equality and inalienable rights that are bestowed by a Creator and Liberator. Thom believes that this is India's moment for such a transition, and he is working to effect that from the top down and the bottom-up.

So, I guess that we are working for similar things. Involving this, I was asked the other day why we decided to work in North India. Years ago, I heard that Northern India was the Heart of Darkness, so to speak, with the largest concentration of unreached people groups in the world. As we visited Hardiwar and Rishikesh on the Ganges the other day, the second and third most holy cities for the Hindus, (Varinasi is the first) I was struck by how much evil pulses out of this place. I was also struck by the large number of Westerners that were trudging the streets, following the path of the Beatles, looking for enlightenment. Then, in a village outside Hardiwar where the children's home has planted a church and opened a day care serving 100 children, I met a man who came to faith through the television ministry of Joyce Meyer. She is doing great work in India and many are being transformed through her testimony. I know that's a lot of topics for one paragraph, but it aptly speaks to what it is like here. Just when you think you get a grasp on one aspect, you see God at work in another way. If this is India's moment, I am not surprised to see the God of history seeding the present and shaping the future.

Today and tomorrow I will spend time in New Delhi studying and putting my thoughts together on the return trip in the Fall for the conferences. I also hope to process what I have seen and learned a bit from a personal perspective. I might be doing some more of that on the blog as I have time. But, I am convinced that India is changing and that the Author of History has his hand on it. Incredible pictures of the trip will be up next week when I get home and they will help you see in a clearer way some of the hope and horror of India, as she lunges for the future while still shackled to her peasant past. May we all be a part of unlocking her chains through prayer, sacrifice, and witness.