Children -- India; India -- Social life and customs; Missions -- India
THEY come in many ways through the help of many friends. We have told
before[A] how our first two babies came to us through two pastors, one
in the north, the other in the south of our district. Since then many
Indian pastors and workers, and several warm-hearted Christian
apothecaries and nurses in Government service, have become interested;
with the result that little children who must otherwise have perished
have been saved.
One little babe, who has since become one of our very dearest, was
redeemed from Temple life by the wife of a leading pastor, who was
wonderfully brought to the very place where the little child was waiting
for the arrival of the Temple people. We have seldom known a more
definite leading. "I being in the way, the Lord led me," was surely true
of that friend that day, and of other Indian sisters who helped her.
Later, when she came to stay with us, she told us about it. "When first
I heard of this new work, I was not in sympathy with it. I even talked
against it to others. But when I saw that little babe, so innocent and
helpless, and so beautiful too, then all my heart went out to it. And
now----" Tears filled her eyes. She could not finish her sentence. Nor
was there any need; the loving Indian heart had been won.
My mother was with us when this baby came; and she adopted her as her
own from the first, and always had the little basket in which the baby
slept put by her bedside. When the mosquitoes began to be troublesome,
the basket was slipped under her own mosquito net, lest the little pink
blossom should be disturbed. But the baby did not thrive at first; and
the pink, instead of passing into buff, began to fade into something too
near ivory for our peace of mind. It was then the friend who had saved
the little one came to stay with us; and she proposed taking her and her
nurse out to her country village, in hopes of getting a foster-mother
for her there. So my mother, the pastor's wife, the baby, and her nurse,
went out to the Good News Village, and stayed in the pastor's hospitable
home. The hope which had drawn them there was not fulfilled; but the
memory of that visit is fresh and fragrant. We read of alienation
between Indian Christians and missionaries. We are told there cannot be
much mutual affection and contact. We often wonder why it should be so,
and are glad we know by experience so little of the difficulty, that we
cannot understand it. We have found India friendly, and her Christians
are our friends. In these matters each can only speak from personal
experience. Ours has been happy. There may be unkindness and
misunderstanding in India, as in England; but nowhere could there be
warmer love, more tender affection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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