Mamuni

After singing and dancing from the villagers (see above), we moved on to a new village and a small, modest house. Outside, cows reclined in hay and we side stepped their excrement left all over the road and doorway as we entered a dark hallway. A mat is laid out on the floor and we sit down. This is the household of Mamuni, a young Christian woman we have come to visit in this community. She is pregnant with her first child, due in a matter of weeks, and her warm smile invites us into her home. We’ve come to pray for her and her family, but first we are treated to a variety of snacks and, of course, tea.

Mamuni is not from this village. She is actually from a nearby town and well educated, having gone to secondary school and received a university degree. Accordingly, she is the most educated person in the entire village. After her education, her marriage was arranged and she traveled to the village she will now likely spend most of her life in. At the time, neither her nor anyone else in the village were Christian. Soon after her arrival, CSSI came to the village and initiated a relationship with her, gifting a Bible. Being one of the only literate people in the village, Mamuni began reading the New Testament and, after getting through the Gospels, became interested in accepting Jesus as her Lord. She took initiative and decided to takte steps to bring her closer to Him.

For anyone in the village, let alone a woman, this has dire consequences. With no Christian community, Mamuni began traveling several miles by bike to come to a Sunday service orchestrated by CSSI. This alone generates visceral social ostracism, as married women are strictly forbidden from traveling alone. Mamuni did so anyway, enduring hours of questioning concerning where she was going and withstanding suspicions to her motives and purity (after all, why would a married woman need to travel alone to unknown places for a few hours?).This is an enormous cost in communal, village culture, where the 300 people living around you are your entire life. Mamuni’s stubbornness and education, along with the grace afforded her by the Holy Spirit, enabled her to continue on like this for nearly year. Eventually, she began witnessing to her uncle and he soon became a companion on her trips to the church. After some time, he became a Christian as well. Now, there are two Christians in the village. As a new believer in these villages, one instantly becomes a missionary, stranded alone in a community ready for apostolic work. Mamuni and her uncle continue to labor for and reflect Jesus to the rest of their community, and those in CSSI hope they will some day bring the spark that brings many more to faith. Mamuni has opened the door for the gospel to an entire community. In doing so, she has also allowed for CSSI to do new work in the village in the future, bringing education and children's learning centers to another community. As of right now, there are not enough workers or funding to go.

Within this context we arrived and drank her tea. It is a blessing to be served by a woman who has taken on more of a cost in her relationship with Jesus from her family and community than I ever will. She and now her uncle are a light to a community where there was previously no hope of the Good News. The persistence of God’s faithfulness and love through CSSI born in the stubbornness of a woman in a small village no one knows exists has created a foothold for God to change an entire community. For the rest of her life, she will likely continue on in a very humble, simple (and to Westerners, likely insulting) life of servitude to her family and Hindu husband, yet she will probably be the start of more eternal things than many of us will ever do. Even through this blog and my future testimony, God is being faithful to her in taking her story of His love to places she will never visit or know. Though I did not even get the pleasure of speaking to her (she doesn’t speak English), Mamuni is yet another example of why Jesus so often identifies Himself with the poor and calls us to them. It is humbling to see the ways He shows up once we go.