From Despair to Hope: A Story About Two Ladies in India Whose Lives Were Changed by the Gospel

Two ladies, mother and daughter, who have a Brahman (high caste) background and who used to follow the Krishna branch of Hinduism are now believers and attend the church in Serampore, West Bengal, India. The mother is a widow and the daughter was in an abusive marriage. Due to the psychological pressure from her husband, the daughter had a mental breakdown and was put in a psychiatric hospital. When the mother found out that her son-in-law was offering to pay the doctors to inject his wife with a lethal dose of medicine, she rescued her daughter and they fled to West Bengal.

The two women were frightened and desperate. In one of the Krishna texts in the temple where they worshiped, there was a quote from the Bible. The verse cited really caught the attention of the daughter and she and her mother decided to start reading the Bible. They both came to faith in Christ and desired to be baptized, but they didn’t know who could help them with baptism and teach them more about Christianity. They started inquiring in the shops around their neighborhood to see if anyone could point them to a Christian leader. A shopkeeper directed them to Pastor Sindhu Pani and his wife Minati, affiliated with Free Will Baptists, who lived close by. The two ladies knocked on their apartment door and asked for baptism.

This initiated a discipleship process that culminated in baptism. Both women wanted to be useful. The Pani’s had just rented an apartment in the neighborhood to serve as a “counseling center” and the women got involved. This center has a dual function. Certain hours during the week it serves as a crisis pregnancy center, counseling women considering abortion and providing them with resources that would be necessary for them to keep their babies. During the after-school hours, it functions as a tutoring center to help the poor children in the neighborhood with their homework as well as teach them songs and stories from the Bible. Most of the children that attend are from Hindu families. The children return home singing Scripture-based songs and telling Bible stories in their homes.

When I heard these two ladies give their testimonies, they made it clear that they are now fulfilled and insisted that they will never leave Christ. They count it a privilege to take the hope of the gospel to other Hindu families so that they too can hear.

Kenneth Eagleton

March 2023