A very powerful testimony of how God called a young lady out of depression and darkness into His light, not only to deliver her but to raise her up to reach out to many, many others!
Pinky Buniyan Samuel, Hubli/Siliguri
Lonely Dark Days As the orange sun sank in the city of Hubli, Karnataka, my hometown, I felt waves of depression submerge me under their crippling diabolic power. Life seemed so hopeless and useless and I thought bitterly for the umpteenth time, “I wonder why I was born!” I almost felt an exasperated sigh from Heaven because I always sank in the doldrums! I as a child was rejected from both parent’s side, my grandparents. When my mother would go out for some work, she would leave me at her mother’s place and my grandmother would immediately segregate me from my cousins as I was the untouchable Christian. (As we know, in India, the shadow of the caste system still lurks around among many Hindus, and Christian are considered the low casts, untouchables even today!). My cousins kept a safe distance from me, eyeing me suspiciously as if I was an alien from outer space. I was often bitter with my parents for dropping me at my grandparents’ homes. Our house was born out of mayhem because my father, a nominal Christian had married my mother, a Hindu Brahmin. Love marriages are very rare in India as parents usually arrange their children’s marriages so society was scandalized to see a love marriage and that too, a Hindu Brahmin with a Christian! Our two families became rivals right from the beginning and hatred spewed out. In the atmosphere of rage, grudge and violence, I grew up as a young child with my mind soaking up the negativity in the air and perhaps also from broodings spirits that hung around our home. Things became so bad that there were even attempts to murder my mom and dad! One day, a poojari (Hindu priest) attempted to kill my mother and she managed to escape just in time!
My Mother’s Story My mother had a pooja room in her bedroom, a sectioned off area where she had her gods lined up, she also added a little Christian cross along with her gods and burned incense and prayed fervently each day and evening to her gods, bringing them aromatic roses, jasmines and frangipani. She was a Saraswati bhakt (a devotee of the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, art, wisdom). My mother prayed and fasted fervently for my father those days especially hard as a big problem brewed in the horizon. Our rivals conjured a web of lies to trap him and implicate him falsely in a case. The situation was so complicated and nothing budged and with the big boulder stones blocking their path, it seemed my parents’ lives were obstructed. One night, she cried out in distress at her pooja room, “Please hear me, I am fasting and praying, but nothing is happening. Today, I say that whichever god here hears my prayers, I will consider you my god, and I will dedicate my life to you and follow you!” With that prayer, she finally fell asleep exhausted, broken, hopeless and sad. Then she had the strangest dream. She saw the devil chasing her and in terror, she ran from him. As she kept running, a man with a white robe approached her along the road, he stopped her and said, “Don’t run, show this to the devil and put it on his head.” She saw it was a Bible and she took it from the man, and turned around. She saw the devil trembling in her dream as he saw the Bible in her hand. She then boldly without fear put the Bible on his head! As she did that, the devil disintegrated into powder! My mother got up from the dream feeling very joyful and victorious. She then got the smell of smoke and gave a gasp, the pooja room was on fire! She hurried to douse out the flames, and as she did that, her heart was singing and she said, “I know Jesus is my God, He saved me and I am now a Christian because that was the Bible that helped me and that white man in the robe was perhaps a Christian angel or pastor!” After this dream, she met a Christian friend and asked her for a Bible. After she received the Bible, all the problems dissolved and things got better. My father’s situations sorted out miraculously. My mother’s faith got stronger and she got involved in ministry, specifically helping in a leprosy mission and also attended prayer meetings and prayed for others.
My Search Now, before I was born, my mother had a miscarriage and then, I was born later. My mother’s faith did not reach mine. I felt dead inside. Nothing touched me and I could not understand her new life in Christ and enthusiasm. My mother sensed my loneliness, bitterness and isolation and when I was ten years old, she adopted a baby boy. However, with my baby brother, I started to feel more lonely because my baby brother naturally got all the attention at that time. I started to feel my parents loved him more than me. I started to search for God in different religions, I read the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita desperately trying to find a connect with God in their pages, but thick dark clouds surrounded me and I felt I was drowning in darkness.
In the Valley of Suicide From the age of twelve to sixteen, I was hit by a terrible attack of suicide, but my attempts were unsuccessful! In 1980, I went for Pastor Manohar’s meeting of praise and worship and surrendered myself to Jesus. The Holy Spirit touched me with His mighty presence and infilling. I received the gift of tongues and those were ten glorious days. When I returned home, the same old problems surfaced again, and I felt lonely, and depression surrounded me again. At that time I had finished my graduation, my computer engineering and was a software engineer, working in Microsoft. All this meant nothing to me. At the age of 21, in a final attempt at suicide, I walked to ten different pharmacies, got ten tablets of 50 mg of Avomine so accumulated hundred tablets and then gulped them all down! After taking the tablets, I heard a voice say, “Now where will you go?” I stood on my tracks, shocked! The impact of what I had done struck me for the first time and I knew in a moment of epiphany that I did not want to die. I hurried home and told my mother to take me to the hospital because I had consumed tablets. My mother was stunned, but perhaps she did not realize how serious it was because I looked absolutely normal, so she did not take it as seriously as it was! I then urgently told my aunt to take me to the hospital immediately as I had taken tablets. My aunt whisked me to the family doctor who immediately realized I was going to die if they didn’t act fast and they rushed me to the ICU. By that time, my body, started swelling, the signs of death were coming as my body started closing down. I remember an oxygen mask placed over my nose. At that moment, I started weeping and repented calling unto Jesus and said, “Jesus, I will do whatever You want me to do, I dedicate myself to You. Save me, don’t let me die!” The last thing I remember sends shivers down my spine until today. I saw my soul rise over my body. The next thing was I passed out and don’t remember anything. I was out for three days! When I came out of that coma, that spirit of depression left me forever. I never got it back again! I was healed, delivered and a new calmness settled over me. The Holy Spirit scooped me up into His presence and lavished His Love on me!
Rising On His Wings True to my word to Jesus, I left my software engineering job and immediately looked out on where I would study the Bible and serve in His calling. The Lord led me to Lonavala, a beautiful hilly town in Maharashtra surrounded by green valleys. There I joined a Discipleship Training from YWAM. The training was a deep blessing to me. The Holy Spirit began to recalibrate my soul in His dimensions and my spiritual capacity grew. There was a young man there by the name of Swadeep Samuel Rana and we were good friends, nothing more. One day, an incident took place and as Swadeep Samuel saw that event unfold, he observed it fascinated as this incident took him to a vision he had in 2001 when he was in Lucknow. At that time, after a night of intense prayer, he saw a vision and the vision revealed the exact thing that I did years later in Lonavala. At that moment, he knew that the Lord was confirming to him that I was the girl he was to marry! The breezes of Heaven were flying over us! Well, to cut a long story short, he proposed and we got engaged in 2005. He then went to Maharashtra for higher Biblical studies and I went to Bangalore for theological studies. We got married in 2008. After our marriage, the Lord took us to Bihar for a season. This was a tough field of learning, and I got a culture shock because it was a very rural setting and everything ran differently there. Then the dreams came, a haunting series of dreams of dead girls. In these dreams, I would go around the girls and try to revive them but none awoke. Those dreams disturbed me, but I felt the Lord was showing me something. We sensed a direction from the Lord to move towards Siliguri and in 2012 we arrived in Siliguri.
Call to Ministry The defining moment came upon me during a meeting we held in Amarjyoti in Siliguri where we heard a very horrific incident of a father who sold his eight year old daughter to a human trafficker. She was returned dead, decimated when she was 12 years old. This really shook us up! After this, we got to know of other heinous incidents committed by human traffickers who lured thousands of innocent unsuspecting girls into the dark dens of the nefarious trade and the horrors that transpired there. I remembered the dreams of the dead girls and I suddenly knew God was calling me to rescue girls from the grip of trafficking and revive them, give them “life” again. We soon got involved with the Antihuman Trafficking Program and over seven years, have helped over 340 girls set free. Our global networking comes under the name of Arise. We perform on the streets to create awareness through song, dance, chorography and skits. The Lord has also led us in outreaches in villages over the hills and suburbs of Siliguri. We also started a Bible College to teach young new believers from the nearby towns who would otherwise have never had an opportunity to study the Bible and this has been a big blessing to us. People have come from as far as Sikkim, Bihar, Bhutan to our Bible College. We have also started a shelter home as there are many children whose parents are unable to take care of them or they are not in a safe environment at their own homes. In 2018, He led us to start an English Fellowship.
In all this we are learning God uses broken yielded vessels, and He fills us with His love and light to blaze brightly in a dark world and equip us mightily for all that He calls us to do growing from strength to strength and glory to glory. Our spiritual walk is always progressive. The places of dead dry bones is transforming as Jesus pours His life into willing people giving them new life!
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