by Ruby
Today marks 30 years since the first Servants team arrived in north India, to explore starting life and ministry in a mega-city there. We were there; that was us, thirty years ago!
How to put all that life and learning, serving and surviving, into a few words and pictures? What difference have we made to others, and how have we ourselves grown towards the fullness of Christ – the Kingdom of God around us and within us?
As I look back now, three big themes stand out to me.
No Fool-proof Formula
I’m a mathematician by training. So I love it when things follow patterns and systems that can be captured and predicted in a formula. Yaqoob, my lawyer husband, also thrives on things that follow rules.
Well that’s NOT life on a Servants team, nor life in an Indian slum.
We still look for patterns, rhythms and predictability where we can find them, but have come to accept that there is no magic formula to create change. No predictable program to solve poverty; no special faith-filled prayer guaranteed to bring healing; no method to manipulate people or Jesus into encountering each other. So we keep responding to poverty anyway, praying for healing anyway, and name-dropping Jesus where we can.
Our starkest early lesson in no-formula living, was devastating. Just when our team was bulging with eight keen adults, one child, and two babies coming, tragedy struck. Our team-mate, 8 months pregnant, was found to have a massive fast growing brain tumour. After surgery to deliver her baby and remove the tumour, she regained consciousness. Thousands of people in missions networks around the globe were praying for her healing and recovery. She passed away after a few days on life-support. Instead of praising God for answered prayers, we found ourselves learning how to organise a funeral, while supporting her shell-shocked grieving husband and his new-born daughter.(1)
There is no formula for earning God’s protection from sickness and death, no number of prayers, or holiness-ranking of those praying. We follow all the reasonable safety and health guidelines, but we are not in control. We were hit with personal experience of what is all too common in the lives of the people we came to serve – untimely death.
God’s Plans not Ours
One of the ways I frequently experience God’s hand in my life, is in rearranging my schedule. Sometimes too many things coincide on the same day, but I feel all of them are important things God wants me to commit to. As the day comes closer I experience some nervousness about how it will work out … then things fall into place in a beautifully coordinated way, or just the right things get postponed, or someone else does a fabulous job and I’m not needed. It all works out in ways I couldn’t have predicted or orchestrated.
Sometimes God rearranges our lives on a larger scale.
A huge example of this was the demolition of “our” slum in early 2002.(2) Late 2001 (soon after 9-11), just before our second son was born, about when new team members were arriving, and our local church was splitting, and my husband was busy organising doctors for emergency relief amidst violence in Gujarat … As if enough wasn’t already happening, a notice went up saying the whole slum would be “rehabilitated” in 5 days’ time.
Yaqoob swung into action, running community meetings, securing legal support from Lawyers Collective, negotiating with various city officials, and following through on months of back and forth over the fate of about 6000 people’s homes. In the end most of them were relocated to land on the outskirts of the city, 27km away, where they slowly began to reconstruct their lives. We were not entitled to land in the relocation area, and instead moved to a different part of the city, where the government was not so aggressively “cleaning up” slums. A few deep relationships which formed in that period have weathered the ensuing decades, and we are still recognised and welcomed whenever we visit the relocation area.
Similarly, a huge network of people working on advocacy for the poor (to help them access the services and schemes the government promises), was not something we planned. Rather it grew out of learning and responding, taking the next step, being available. Yaqoob had exactly the necessary skills, and the time was just right in terms of the government passing laws and creating schemes intended to serve the poor.
Even not being granted visas to return to India, turned out to be God’s provision of a much needed season out of India. God’s plan was better than ours.
We are still planners, and like to make plans. I think though I am a little more relaxed about holding our plans a bit lightly, and even a little excited about what God might be up to, when the plan falls apart.
Overcome Evil with Good
So there are no formulas to guarantee safety for ourselves or success in our ministry. And whatever we prayerfully plan is almost sure to change along the way. What do we have left?
Perhaps the thing Jesus has led me to most hold onto is a vision of our purpose based on Paul’s words in Romans 12:
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Rom 12:21, NIV
In my early years as a Christian, evil seemed more of a theological concept than a practical reality. After years of living amidst poverty, a human generated abomination in God’s abundant creation, evil has become very real to me. There is much in this world, and something in each of us, that is simply contrary to God’s character and purpose and will. That’s evil. What are we to do about it? I think Paul summarises beautifully what Jesus lived out perfectly. Our response to evil is not to fight fire with fire, and not to hide away carefully to remain safely untainted. Our response is to overcome evil with good.
Jesus’ cross and resurrection is the culmination of God’s way – overcoming evil once and for all, with the total goodness of Christ, through willing submission and self-sacrifice. This is our template for overcoming evil. Not be being louder, or smarter, or stronger, but by practising the goodness of Christ until evil is overcome.
(Don’t panic about a theology of works – Paul explains it really well in Ephesians 2:
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Eph 2:8-10, NIV
We are saved by grace through faith, a gift from God, so we are God’s handiwork created in Christ to do good works. Part of the gift of salvation is being created in Christ and given a purpose in his good work.)
So with Paul’s pithy motto in mind, and the life of Jesus as my ultimate guide, I persevere in my attempts to overcome evil with good. That means loving our neighbours (even when they throw rubbish on our roof), fighting against corrupt systems that prey on the poor, helping TB patients get proper treatment, taking neighbourhood kids on outings, praying with and for our friends here, and always trying to tune into the Holy Spirit’s whisper about the next change of plans.
(1) see story “She Loved” in Sound of Worlds Colliding, pp146-151 (see our homepage to get a free copy, or the books page to buy a copy); also see this memory of Amy Jo, from her friend Ngaire Gee.
(2) see story “Fighting For Land Rights Of Slum Residents” in Sound of Worlds Colliding, pp82-86
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