Shaji's Story

Intro

The person who greeted me at 1:00am last Monday morning was someone I initially knew little about. Shaji, the founder and now head of Kolkata City Mission, waited with a smile for me at the baggage claim, ready to take me into his home and family for the span of my trip. Driving home with him that night, I mentioned that I would love to hear his testimony. He told me it was a very long story, and since that moment, the words, “I will tell you later today” were heard far too often and past many “todays”. There was always a new slum or a new village or a new experience in the city to delay the story.

The delay was fortunate, because it afforded me time to learn about Shaji’s present--full of God’s miraculous movement and work (some of which I’ve shared with you)--which only served to enrich the eventual story of his past. With each passing day of living with him and his family, witnessing KCM’s work in the slums, and enjoying his friendly perspective on life in Kolkata, I developed an amazement and care for a man Christ uses so powerfully in the lives of so many. And so, a greater appetite for his story grew in me over time. Finally, on the heels of returning from our expedition to the village, Shaji sat Kyle and I down late at night and asked if we were ready to hear where he came from.

Early Childhood

God’s mission and Kingdom have always been a part of Shaji’s life, long before he allowed them into his heart, because they originated in the life of his father first. Having become a Christian in his teenage years, Shaji’s father became a missionary to the rural areas of the southern state of Kerala (and eventually, West Bengal) early in life. For him, “being called to the mission” (as Shaji puts it) meant embracing a life of poverty from the start. Much as the disciples were sent out by Jesus without staff or provision for their harvesting work, so his father was sent to the excluded and poor “like a lamb amongst wolves” (Luke 10), working in the remotest parts of India with unreached villagers and living in deadly desperation for basic provision.

Once married, Jesus invited his new family into this lifestyle as well. They often migrated from village to village, literally without money or extra clothing, finding shelter wherever they could as his father did God’s work amongst the Hindu villagers. When his father left for days into the surrounding villages to work with those starving for physical and spiritual sustenance, his family was all too often left slowly dying in a small hut, awaiting his return. Time and time again, Shaji’s mother, two older sisters and younger brother were one vegetable or edible shrub (which can be used for stew for days) away from malnutrition or worse, death. For years, God gave them their daily bread one day at a time, and sometimes after many days without.

Cow Dung

This led Shaji, as a young bout of 7 or 8, to bury in his heart a deep aversion to the weakness and humiliation of poverty. His father’s lifestyle became his Ninevah and he decided to sail the opposite direction in life. Accordingly, the second or third grade boy established a business in these early years: every morning, around 6:00am or earlier, he and his younger brother would travel to the fields, collecting heaps of cow feces, which they would stack in enormous piles. These piles of excrement were then sold to farmers as fertilizer and fuel, bringing in a small amount of pocket change daily, a small sustenance for the struggling family. Unfortunately for Shaji’s plans, his mother believed in school and fought for it, eventually wrestling away the cow dung business from her son and sending him to school. The family could afford one uniform, which he wore every day, washed every day, and rewore the next. For the next few years and through the Lord’s provision, the family eked by a living. Shaji often went hungry but he also went to school. But all that changed when Shaji (10 or 11) overheard a secret conversation no child should ever hear.

"I don't want to die..."

One night, he stumbled upon his parents having an argument. After months of deteriorating conditions, the family had no money and little hope for food for weeks. Shaji’s eavesdropping ears heard his mother wailing in hunger and desperation with her husband. The children were starving, and she could no longer bear watching her children slowly die in agony. In a desperation that we will never understand, she begged her husband to allow her to poison the family, ending their suffering and the threat of slow, painful decay. This may seem absurd to westerners, but many in Kolkata alone live lives that seem worse than death to me, like the teenage girl in the red the light district who is raped dozens of times a day for money. Or the children in the slums I visited, who suffer from malnutrition and all forms of physical abuse from alcoholic fathers. I do not know what that’s like and thank God I never will, but I can guess I would wish for death too if I or my children experienced anything approaching it.

The family did not get death, however. For later that night, Shaji came into his mother’s room and told her he did not want to die, that he wanted to live. She collapsed on the floor in another moment of lost dignity, but conceded to her young child’s request. Fortunately, in these days of despair God again provided in meager daily ways, and starvation distanced itself for a time. This and other episodes, however, convinced Shaji that a return to work was necessary for the family. And he found opportunities in bricks.

Hope in Bricks

Local brickmakers--operating kiln ovens that dot the countryside--offered Shaji a child labor job hauling stacked bricks on his head for several hours a day in withering heat. Now almost a teenager, Shaji began a divided lifestyle. For three days a week, he hauled heavy loads on his head for miles a day, earning living wages. For the other two days, he attended school to appease his mother and recuperate from the work. His skin became a caked and cracked black from extensive time in the sun each day, but he managed to continue in this way for years despite the obstacles. Still set on becoming a business man and providing for his family, Shaji took out a local loan and invested some of his accumulated money in a tool set and basic equipment for fixing bicycles. The move paid off, as Shaji was soon able to upgrade his roadside fix-it service to a small shop. This small shop eventually sold bicycles in addition to fixing them, slowly setting Shaji on the gradual financial footing he so desired.

A Call to the Mission

Through it all, his father and family continued as missionaries, and Shaji developed in wisdom and knowledge of the Lord. Eventually, he came into a personal relationship with Jesus during his brick and bicycle years, recognizing the God his father had sacrificed so much for. In this context, Shaji received an invitation from a friend to a missions program a little ways from the town his family had settled in. After some convincing, he agreed to be a companion to his friend to the program. This decision changed his life forever.

The conference ended up being a invitational interest meeting for new missionaries, and Shaji stood out to Operation Mission recruiters. Representatives of OM eventually invited him to “join the mission” with them, which he promptly refused. They asked him to reconsider and pray about it. He refused again. They assured him he could expect another invitation in the mail in another few weeks. He told them not to bother. The invitation came anyway, and with it, a talk with his father he had never had before. During this talk, Shaji learned his father had been praying that the Lord would anoint him as a missionary since birth. The time had come, so his father said, to walk into a long awaited open door. Despite reservation, fear, and a determination to remain in control of provision for his family, God spoke to Shaji and he agreed to walk through the door.

The training program was to last two years. Shaji agreed to 6 months, pledging to return to his bike shop and go on missions some other time. But as is typical in my experience, God used the time Shaji allotted to knock down as many excuses as it took to extend his time to two years—providing financially for his family and confirming his calling in other ways. When the time came to be “sent”, again he pledged he would only go for one or two years, and once again return to work for the family. He was to go to the physically and spiritually poor in villages, towns, and eventually Kolkata through the holistic ministry of OM—much like his father had done before him (founding Compassion Service Society of India, sister movement of KCM). This ministry and God’s loving will stole Shaji’s heart and turned 1 year into 22, and he never returned to his home or the bike shop.

Living Like Royalty

But he wasn’t needed. God looked after his family and siblings without the bike shop. And later in life, after numerous occasions of the Lord’s provision, Shaji’s mother lay dying in a house that was recently provided for the family. It was the first they ever owned. Shaji told us the story of her lying on her own bed, in her own house, and sharing in her final days. She told him she felt like royalty, looking back on a hard life, rewarded by God in his graciousness, now allowing her to die with the dignity the world denied her when her son had to ask his mother not to poison them in the course of their costly following of Jesus. She and her family never enjoyed worldly pleasure, but their lives changed entire villages, and so they were rich. As, scripture says of great people of faith in Hebrews 11:

“…these people were still living by faith when they died…admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

Redemption

Shaji is following in his father and mother’s footsteps, advancing the kingdom of God in places few others will go. He founded KCM in 2007, and the Lord has blessed the ministry and changed numerous lives, even in its infancy. Shaji told us that He believes God saw in him those brick fields, laboring like a slave in Egypt as a child. But the Lord pays no attention to the surface, and sees only who we truly are and are to be. Shaji believes God didn’t see a child slave in the fields, but one of his own children, destined by His love to minister to those in future slavery in Kolkata. He saw a child He knew since before time, and even the worst of us and the worst of life washes away when God redefines us as His children with a future.

I really believe that is true. Scripture tells over and over again the story of God’s beautiful redemption: a slave named Joseph who becomes a king in Egypt, an exiled son of pharaoh who becomes the leader of Israel (Moses), a prostitute who becomes the great great great great great (etc.) grandmother of the Christ (Rahab), a poor and unimpressive shepherd boy who become king of Israel (David), and a poor infant born in a barn, destined to be crucified on earth, yet now sitting as the Most High God (Jesus). Because of this, I cannot lose hope for a place like Kolkata, or the people in its slums. God does not see them a worthless or repulsive or hopeless, but with hope and love and an offering of more, in this life and the next.

Invitation

KCM gives people without a worldly future the dignity God gave us, in the hope that some may know Him, even though neither we nor they can earn such a privilege. I am so happy God marked Shaji as the head of such an amazing ministry, that he gave him a past that has set in motion the present, that the fruit of struggling, starving missionaries and their children is still being seen today. Shaji’s parents never saw enough food on their plates or every village come to know the Lord, and Shaji may never see Kolkata come out of physical or spiritual poverty, yet Hebrews 11 continues on to remind us:

“They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated—the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in the deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.”

God intends for us to be part of their story…part of their promise, so that we can be made perfect with them through Jesus. It is embarrassingly sad that I so often turn down the invitation, for the rags of comfort and security. Praise God that Shaji has accepted something better, and that the Lord’s faithfulness blessed me to see and participate in it. I hope that going forward, God will do much more with what He has started on this trip, even if the road is difficult and the rewards are few. Pray that Kyle and I would live the life of obedience we witnesses so clearly in the story of Shaji and his family.