THE SEEDS OF FUTURE CHANGE !!!!!
# 1 > In 1971 I was invited to spend one month in Singapore at a new institite that had been started by John Haggai. It was still in the formative stages then__a place where Asian church leaders would be trained and challenged to witness for Christ. Haggai was full of stories. In them all, Christians were overcomers and giants__meen and women who received a vision from God and refused to let go of it. Diligence to your calling was a virtue to be highly prized. Haggai was the first person who made me believe that nothing is impossible with God. And in Haggai I found a man who refused to accept impossibilities. The normal boundaries others accepted didn't exist for him. He saw everything in global terms and from God's perspective, refusing to accept sin. If the world was not evangelized, why not? If people were hungry, what could we do about it? Haggai refused to accept the world as it was. And I discovered that he was willing to accept personal responsibility to become an agent of change. Toward the end of my month at the insititute, John Haggai challenged me into the most painful introspection I have ever experienced. I know now it implanted a restlessness in me that would last for years, eventually causing me to leave India to search abroad for God's ultimate will in my life.
# 2 > Haggai's challenge seemed simple at first. He wanted me to go to my room and write down__in one sentence__the single most important thing I was going to do with the rest of my life. He stipulated that it could not be self-centered or worldly in nature. And one more thing__it had to bring glory to God. I went to my room to write that one sentence. But the paper remained blank for hours and days. Disturbed that I might not be reaching my full potential in Christ, I began at that conference to reevaluate every part of my lifestyle and ministry. I left the conference with the question still ringing in my ears, and for years I would continue to hear the words of John Haggai, "One thing . . . by God's grace you have to do one thing." I left Singapore newly liberated to think of myself in terms of an individual for the first time.
# 3 > Up until that time__like most Asians__I always had viewed myself as part of a group, either my family or a Gospel team. Although I had no idea what special work God would have for me as an individual, I began thinking of doing my "personal best" for Him.The seeds for future change had been planted, and nothing could stop the approaching storms in my life. While my greatest passion was still for the unreached villages of the North, I now was traveling all over India. On one of these speaking trips in 1973, I was invited to teach at the spring Operating Mobilization training conference in Madras ( now Chennai ). That was where I first saw the attractive German girl. As a student in one of my classes, she impressed me with the simplicity of her faith. Soon I found myself thinking that if she were an Indian, she would be the kind of woman I would like to marry some day.
# 4 > Once, when our eyes met, we held each other's gaze for a brief, extra moment, until I self-consciously broke the spell and quickly fled the room. I was uncomfortable in such male-female encounters, single people seldom speak to each other. Even in church and on Gospel teams, the sexes are kept strictly separate. Certain that I would never again see her, I pushed the thought of the attractive German girl from my mind. I had made a list of the six qualities I most wanted in a wife and frequently prayed for the right choice to be made for me. Of course, in India, marriages are arranged by the parents, and I would have to rely on their judgment in selecting the right person for my life partner. I wondered where my parents would find a wife who was willing to share my mobile lifestyle and commitment to the work of the Gospel. But as the conference ended, plans for the summer outreach soon crowded out these thoughts.
# 5 > That summer, along with a few co-workers, I turned to all the places we had visited during the last few years in the state of Punjab. I had been in and out of the state many times and was eager to see the fruit of our ministry there. The breadbasket of India, with its population of 24 million, is dominated by turbaned sikhs, a fiercely independent and hardworking people who have been a caste of warriors. Before the partition of India and Pakistan, the state also had a huge Muslim population. It remains one of the least evangelized and most neglected areas of the world. We had trucked and street-preached our way through hundreds of towns and villages in this state over the previous two years. Although British missionaries had founded many hospitals and schools in the state, very few congregations of believers not existed . the intensely nationalistic Sikhs stubbornly refused to consider Christianity because they closely associated it with British colonialism. I traveled with a good-sized team of men. A separate women's team also was assigned to the state, working out of Jullundur.
# 6 > On my way north to link up with the men's team I would lead, I stopped in the North India headquarters in New Delhi. To my surprise, there she was again__the German girl. This time she was dressed in a Sari, one of the most popular forms of our national dress. I learned she also had been assigned to work in Punjab for the summer with the women's team. The local director asked me to escort her northward as far as Jullundur, and so we rode in the same van. I learned her name was Gisela, and the more I saw of her the more enchanted I became. She ate the food and drank the water and consciously followed all the rules of our culture. The little conversation we had focused on spiritual things and the lost villages of India. I soon realized I had finally found a soul mate who shared my vision and calling.
# 7 > Romantic love, for most Indians, is something you read about only in storybooks. Daring cinema films, while they frequently deal with the concept, are careful to end the film in a proper Indian manner. So I was faced with the big problem of communicating my forbidden and impossible love. I said nothing to Gisela, of course. But something in her eyes told me we both understood. Could God be bringing us together? In a few hours we would be separated again, and I reminded myself I had other things to do. Besides, I thought, at the end of the summer she'll be flying to Germany, and I'll probably never see her again. Throughout the summer, surprisingly, our paths did cross again. Each time I felt my love grow stronger. Then I tentatively took a chance at expressing my love with a letter. Meanwhile, the Punjab survey broke my heart. In village after village, our literature and preaching appeared to have had little lasting impact. The fruit had not remained. Most of the villages was visited appeared just as illiterate and lost as ever. The people still were locked in disease, poverty and suffering. The Gospel, it seemed to me, hadn't taken root. In one town I felt such deep despair I literally sat down on a curb and sobbed. I wept the bitter tears that only a child can cry. "Your work is for nothing," taunted a demon in my ear. "Your words are rolling off these people like water off a duck's back!" Without realizing I was burning out__or what was happening to me spiritually__I fell into listlessness. Like Jonah and Elijah, I was too tired to go on. I could see only one thing. The fruit of my work wasn't remaining. More than ever before, I needed time to reassess my ministry.
8. I corresponded with Gisela. She had, in the meantime, returned to Germany. I decided I would take two years off from the work to study and make some life choices about my ministry and possible marriage. I began writing letters abroad and became interested in the possibility of attending a Bible school in England. I also had invitations to speak in churches in Germany. In December I bought an air ticket out of India planning to be in Europe for Christmas with Gisela's family. While there I got the first tremors of what soon would become an earthquake-size case of culture shock. As the snow fell, it was obvious to everyone I soon would have to buy a winter coat and boots__obvious, that is, to everyone except me. One look at the price tags sent me into deep trauma. For the coat of my coat and boots in Germany, I could have lived comfortably for months back in India. And this concept of living by faith was hard for Gisela's parents to accept. Here was this penniless street preacher from India, without a single dollar of his own, insisting he was going to school but he didn't know where and, by now, asking to marry their daughter. One by one the miracles occurred, though, and God met every need. First, a letter arrived from E.A. Gresham, a total stranger from Dallas Texas, who was then regional director of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
9. - He had heard about me from a Scottish friend and invited me to come to the United States for two years of study at what was then the Criswell Bible Institute in Dallas. I replied positively and booked myself on a low-cost charter flight to New York with the last money I had. This flight, it turned out, also was to become a miracle. Not knowing I needed a special student visa, I brought the ticket without the chance for refund. If I missed the flight, I would lose both my seat and the ticket. Praying with my last ounce of faith, I asked God to intervene and somehow get the paperwork for the visa. As I prayed, a friend in Dallas, Texas, was strangely moved by God to get out of his car, go back to the office, and complete my paperwork and personally take it to the post office. In a continuous series of divinely arranged "coincidences," the forms arrived within hours of the deadline. Before leaving for America, Gisela and I became engaged. I would go on to seminary alone, however. We had no idea when we would see each other again.
