Ahmedabad, India, December, 1978.
I was seven years old, and had just landed in Mumbai after the long flight from San Francisco. The streets were a pageant of color, sound and smells: black and yellow rickshaws bipping through traffic, camels and cows sauntering across roundabouts, beautiful ladies in saris of turquoise, emerald and scarlet, street vendors frying pooris in clouds of peanut oil…it was an assault on the senses which left me spinning.
We arrived at my aunt’s house, six of us stuffed cartoonishly in a three wheeled rickshaw. The night was humid and alive with noise; as I walked up the concrete steps into her house, I encountered a little boy—seven years old, my doppelgänger, really. I recall his arms, stick-like, pushing through a torn t-shirt browned with dust. His eyes looked too big, since his face was shrunken with constant hunger. His mother was cooking a small pot of rice in the dirt field next to the house. She lit cow-dung for fuel, and I could smell the sickly sweet smoke filling the kitchen.
My aunt brought us to the table. Rotlis glistening with ghee; green bean shaak yellowed with turmeric; yogurt with onions and tomatoes, sprinkled brown with cumin; yellow daal with the tips of red chilis, like breaching whales. I involuntarily reached for a rotli, stuffing it in my mouth, to the amusement of all the relatives—I couldn’t help myself.
At that moment, the boy popped his head through the window (in India, they don’t have glass, but just openings). A cloud of dung-smoke rose up behind him. He looked straight through me, putting his empty hands to his mouth, and made the unforgettable “beggar’s plea”: “Oomah! Oomah!”
My stomach crumpled, the flavors vanished from the rotli, and my throat closed. I stared back at him, and even though I was only seven, I became sick with the thought: I have food and he doesn’t. He will be hungry outside and I will be full and in my bed soon. It was a sword that pierced my heart.
Why?
Why did I have food while he went hungry?
That became the compelling question of my life. Not growing up in a Christian home, I searched everywhere for an answer. Why is there pain? Why is there injustice? And if there is a God, what has He done about it? And how could such a God be good, when on that December night I was full and that boy went hungry?
I majored in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and continued the search. I met with gurus, I read the texts of all the world’s religions, traveled to many places, talked with philosophers, professors, and fellow travelers on the mysterious road of life.
Then something happened in my heart, which I know was the grace of the Holy Spirit. The answer came with peace and simplicity: Christmas is the answer.
Christmas was the answer to my question? It was indeed the answer because the God who created everything—including the human freedom which led to a world with pain and injustice—takes personal responsibility for the pain of every precious human being. The Innocent One is born to suffer for His suffering people—a suffering of a magnitude we will never comprehend. He takes flesh in order to take on our pain and by His divine power, redeem His own creation through His suffering. And in so doing, He transforms my suffering into the means of joy—an eternal joy. That was the moment I first believed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the most beautiful moment of my life!
When the One who created everything—who started this whole thing we call human life—accepts the full consequences of our freedom, we know that we worship the true and loving God. The Creator Who Suffers for His Creation. He took personal responsibility for me, for you, and for that little boy in Ahmedabad. And thus, that little boy's suffering will be revealed on the last day to be his portion in the innocent suffering of Christ the Lord: and that little boy will shine with radiance in the Kingdom, feasting at the banquet table of the Master. I pray I will be counted worthy to feast alongside him!
Thus, we must fulfill our calling to co-suffer with every human being. We must give them our time, our attention, our food, our clothing, our home. In this way we follow our Suffering Lord, and will bring joy and comfort to our suffering neighbor. We thus become little Christs, following Him who was born to suffer for us.
This is the God whom we worship. The One, who on Christmas Day, accepted responsibility for our choice. And by His suffering, transforms our suffering into glory on the great Day of His Second Coming: the Christmas to come. Even so, come Lord Jesus! Maranatha!