Eat Mud

I remember when I was a little girl my sisters and I had a tree house in the back yard. We designated an area in the tree house that was our official “kitchen”. We tied a sand bucket to a rope that we attached to a tree branch in the kitchen and would drop the bucket down and whoever got the short end of the stick would have climb down and go fill the bucket up. We would fill the bucket up with white sand (sugar), black sand (chocolate) or water (oil). We then had a little pan that we would mix them in and we would make “cakes”, well mud cakes anyway. We loved doing this because we felt like we were grownups in our kitchen. However, we would never eat them… I mean even at less than 10 years old we all knew not to eat mud. Mud was gross, it made you sick, and it left a gritty taste in your mouth (so mom said). I never really thought about this again until recently I had a friend that emailed me a link to a story by BBC news.
(see full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8682558.stm)
It was a story that hurt my heart to read. To briefly sum it up it talked about families in the slums of India that literally eat mud. They don’t eat it because they are pretending to make a cake; they eat it because they have nothing to eat. It tells a story of a family who usually has one meal a day but recently has gone to sleep with no meals, just mud. I couldn’t believe this! I mean I expected the potbelly kids and situations like this from Africa, but from India! I didn’t realize that 1/3 of the very poorest people in the world live in India.

As usual my mind went to the kids who don’t even have parents. If these children who do have parents eat mud what do the ones who don’t have parents do? In 2007 UNICEF estimated that there were more than 25 million orphans in India with only just over 3,000 adoptions taking place in 2006. Not only are these children not having anything to eat, they also don’t have anyone to care. I recently heard a message about orphans. In this message it talks about when this couple was trying to adopt and the long process they had to go through. They talked about how they were assigned a child and shortly before they were able to go get the child it died. He said this is common and happens sometimes in adoption process, however, one thing he said really stood out to me. He said before they were matched if that little girl would have died she would have had no one. However, since they had been matched to her she didn’t die without anyone caring. She died having a mom and a dad and a family caring for her. I thought this was so profound as I don’t often think of orphans as having absolutely no one. If there are hundreds of families in India eating mud, how many more children are there that are in that situation and no one cares.

You will never guess the most amazing part of this story. The friend who told me this is from India. They felt like for the past year God was telling them to go back to India and start Bible Institutes. These places will be a place where anyone can walk in and be taught the bible (NT or OT) overview in about an hour. They told me how there were so many people coming to know Christ through this because they were just waiting to hear the news. However, they ended their email to me saying “pray for me, I know that in doing this there will be much persecution and loss of life.” That is someone who understands the heart of God. That is someone who understands families eating mud, children becoming orphans from a parent dying of aids, and hearts being forced into Islam. They are truly someone who understands India and they are willing to risk their very life to show them Christ. I’m both convicted and saddened. I’m convicted as to whether I would be that willing to walk into a situation knowing I would most likely be murdered because of my love for Christ. I’m saddened to say that I would prefer my comforts here. I pray more than anything that this person’s life is honored. More than the popular Christian speakers in America, more than the mega-church pastors, and more than the Christian book writers; may this person’s life be one we point at and say “they counted the cost, they knew the need and they took up their cross and followed Him.”