Nepal…the country where my heart aches.

We’ve been back in Nepal for eight days now, and we’ve had wonderful opportunities to meet with a variety of different people.  The reunions with old friends have been wonderful.  When we have asked how things have been in our absence, stories have surfaced that rend my heart over and over again.  I hope that we can bring a ray of hope and light into this dark world.

There is the young lady who just took a chance on marriage to a man from a completely different culture with a different language, different foods, different customs, etc.  She doesn’t know the man well, but she is hoping for something better.  Why didn’t her parents arrange her marriage in typical Nepali fashion, you ask?  Well, you see, at eleven years old, she was sent to the big city, to make money that her family could take.  She was lucky; her sisters were sold into prostitution.  She has worked for more than fifteen years, so that her family could have her money.  Have they thanked her, or shown her tender loving care?  No; they have simply used her for what they could get.  And since it costs a family much to marry off a daughter, they haven’t chosen that.  So, taking a chance on a foreign man sounded better than her life of lonely servitude in Nepal.  I wonder how she is coping with culture shock, let alone all the adjustments of married life.

Then there is the family with three children, ages three through eight.  They look like they may be two, four and five; they are so small and undernourished.  They have no clean clothes and no regular meals.  They sit in feces and sometimes sleep on the street.  Nobody can tell if they have ever been bathed.  People recoil from them, treating them more like animals.  You see, their mother ran off when she could no longer tolerate the beatings from her husband.  And in his drunkenness, he has failed to provide basic care for his kids.  The Christian neighbor, along with some of the local missionaries, has noticed the plight of these children.  They have washed the children, given them clean clothes, fed them and offered them alternative shelter for one month.  The father does not choose to relinquish them.  Perhaps he truly loves them; it’s just that alcohol has mastered him and he seems unable to choose well for the kids.

There is a new friend of mine here who is raising her three children by herself.  She had an extensive stay in the mission hospital many years ago, after a severe beating, if I understood her correctly.  During her months in the hospital, she heard the Gospel preached; she saw the Gospel lived.  In time, she came to believe that Jesus came to give her life also.  So, with hope now, she works and raises her children by herself, a daunting task for a woman in Nepal.  I do not understand all of the reasons, but her Muslim husband has left her to fend for herself and care for their children.  God watches over the orphans and widows (of sorts).

At church on Saturday, we were challenged to consider Stephen.  He was faithful in the little things, like the distribution of food.  And he was faithful in bigger things, like continuing to love people even in his hour of death.  Like his LORD, Stephen prayed that God would forgive his assailants, choosing not to count their sins against them.  Stephen was in an intimate relationship with the LORD, and it showed in the way that he lived.  I hope that my relationship with the LORD will someday bear similar fruit.

Lord, Jesus, please turn my heartache to love and use me to shine your light.  I find myself wanting to relieve the suffering in some way.  There is so much pain all around me; come near, Lord Jesus.