My heart laments

I’ve just come back to the office after having spent two months in South Asia with Serving in Mission. Here I tell the story of one of the believers I met there—I’ll call her T. As I sat in her living room eating the traditional sweet dessert she’d served me (like many things there, it was made from rice), I asked her how she had become a believer. This is what she said:

“It all started with my husband.”

As a young woman, T had an arranged marriage. This would have been very normal, except for the fact that—unlike herself, her family, and almost everyone else in the region—her new husband was not the Muslim T had assumed he would be. It was only after she married him that she discovered, to her alarm, that he was in fact a Christian.

Her family advised her to get divorced at once, but T knew she would have no hope of getting married again. In any case, her husband seemed like a good, caring man. “I was on this path”, she told me, “so I thought I might as well see where it led.”

It led her somewhere she didn’t expect: to Christ for herself. It didn’t happen overnight; it took quite some time before she agreed to go to church with her husband, and when she did, she didn’t like it. They lived in the capital city at the time so were able to try another where she felt more comfortable. T saw her husband reading the Bible everyday and one day she decided that she would start reading it too. This man, Jesus, who claimed to be the anointed one sent by "Allah", intrigued her.

So T kept going to church and reading the Bible, and after several months their pastor invited the couple to a picnic by the river that the church was holding—although it turned out that it wasn’t just a picnic, it was a baptism. The pastor suggested that T might like to get baptised too, but she adamantly refused. “If I’d known it was going to be a baptism I wouldn’t have gone!” she told me. She felt like she’d been tricked into being there.

But over the course of her conversation with the pastor, T’s resistance crumbled. She felt God telling her to get baptised; she knew it was commanded in Scripture. The time had come to decide whether or not she was going to follow Jesus. She realised that she was ready to make a commitment. The pastor again invited her to get baptised. She hadn’t brought any clothes to change into, so she got baptised wrapped in a white banner that had been advertising the church.

That was 20 years ago. T and her husband now live in a small town of about 100,000 people, a couple of hours’ journey away from the capital. They meet with about a dozen other believers once a month in somebody’s home to sing, pray and hear God’s word taught. T is the only local woman in her church fellowship, which can feel very isolating. It’s a problem that many similar groups face in this country. Female SIM workers often find it difficult to meet other women, and a glance down the street illustrates why; for every one woman you see, there are at least 12 men. Quite simply, women spend a lot of time in their homes. It’s even the men who do the shopping!

So pray that God would be building church fellowships in South Asia into real families. Families which are made up of men, women and children loving and serving one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, growing together towards maturity.

Pray too that T, and churches like hers, would have a heart like Isaiah for the people around them. When Isaiah saw a vision of God’s judgment on the people of Moab, this was his response:

My heart laments for Moab like a harp,
my inmost being for Kir Hareseth.
When Moab appears at her high place,
she only wears herself out;
when she goes to her shrine to pray,
it is to no avail.

- Isaiah 16:11-12

I’m back in southwest London now, but there are still plenty of people around me who are earnestly seeking God in the wrong places. Perhaps, like me, you’ll ask God to give you a heart that laments for them too.