Manasa!

       I will have to admit that coming into the country of India, I was fearful of the fact that I wouldn’t be allowed to share about God and Jesus openly- being that India is a closed country. Also, there are not many Christians in India, India is predominately Hindu with some Muslim mixed in. So based on those 2 facts, I felt very uneasy about potentially saying something that I shouldn’t- and possibly getting kicked out of the country.

     However, after arriving here and seeing the many smiling faces of the people here- God began to change my feelings of being scared into feelings of excitement and joy! It didn’t take long for me to feel like India was “home”

       It was only a few hours into arriving to the village and we began exchanging smiles and making friends with some of our surrounding neighbors! A few of my team mates and I were hanging out in the church where most of us ended up spending a lot of our time before ministry and we heard the cry of a very small baby! We looked out the window and we saw a woman holding the very tiny baby! After a few moments of glancing  the woman looked up and motioned for us to come over! We were so excited! We then went and asked our host mom if she could go over with us- she happily agreed to go with us, so we went!

       A few of my teammates, our host mom, and her daughter went with us and the family greeted us with open arms!

       We introduced ourselves and communicated with them the best we could with the language barrier that was between us. We found out that the small baby was only 11 days old! We each got to take a turn holding the tiny, very cute baby! When we asked what the baby’s name was, we found out that they weren’t going to name the baby until after 20 days. We weren’t really able to find out exactly why they do this but I think that it is part of their religion which is Hindu. The family was all very nice and welcoming to us and they even gave us cold sprite!

       We would see members of the family here and there and heard the little one crying when she was being given a bath- but otherwise we hardly would hear her cry! One day, when we were getting close to our last day in the village we met a little girl who was related to the baby. She was such a pretty girl- and was interested in my teammates and I- she even allowed us to take pictures of her and then she asked us to come over! We checked with our host mom to make sure it was ok and then Kasey, Amanda and I headed over. It turned out that it was the day that they were going to be naming the baby! Again, they welcomed us openly and invited us to sit down and relax! Like usual, we took turns holding the baby and we were also able to have some conversation with some of the other family members that did speak some English! In our conversation with one of the baby’s aunts- we found out that she attends church on Sundays and that she wants to become a christian! We were able to encourage her in that and it was such a sweet moment!

       The sweetest moment of the whole night though was after the baby was named- one of her grandmothers asked us to sing, and Kasey told her that we only know christian songs- she was ok with that~ so we sang 3 christian children songs including Jesus loves me to this beautiful baby that they named Manasa, which means heart!

Our hope in this is that this little baby will grow up knowing that Jesus loves her regardless of the religion that she will grow up learning and practicing.