“To follow Christ and bear His cross is so sweet and precious that, if I find no cross to bear in heaven, I shall plead before him to send me as a missionary, if need be to hell... I am not worthy to follow in the steps of my Lord, but like Him, I want no home, no possessions. Like Him I will belong to the road, sharing the suffering of my people, eating with those who will give me shelter, and telling all people of the love of God...
People call us heathens, Just fancy! My mother a heathen! If she were alive now she would certainly be a Christian. But even while she followed her ancestral faith she was so religious that the term 'heathen' makes me smile. She prayed to God, she served God, she loved God, far more warmly and deeply than many Christians... If I do not see my mother in heaven, I shall ask God to send me to hell so that I may be with her.
There are many more people among us in India who lead a spiritual life than in the West, although they do not know or confess Christ. It is of course true that people who live in India worship idols; but here in England people worship themselves, and that is still worse. Idol-worshippers seek the truth, but people over here, so far as I can see, seek pleasure and comfort. The people of the West understand how to use electricity and how to fly in the air. The men of the East have sought the truth. Of the three Wise Men who went to Palestine to see Jesus not one was from the West...
If the Divine spark in the soul cannot be destroyed, then we need despair of no sinner... Since God created men to have fellowship with Himself, they cannot for ever be separated from Him... After long wandering, and by devious paths, sinful man will at last return to Him in whose Image he was created; for this is his final destiny...
For the first two or three years after my conversion, I used to ask for specific things. Now I ask for God. Supposing there is a tree full of fruits -- you will have to go and buy or beg the fruits from the owner of the tree. Every day you would have to go for one or two fruits. But if you can make the tree your own property, then all the fruits will be your own. In the same way, if God is your own, then all things in Heaven and on earth will be your own, because He is your Father and is everything to you; otherwise you will have to go and ask like a beggar for certain things. When they are used up, you will have to ask again. So ask not for gifts but for the Giver of Gifts: not for life but for the Giver of Life -- then life and the things needed for life will be added unto you...
There is a great difference between knowing about Jesus and knowing Him... If we only know of Jesus as a good man, a great example, it is no help to us. Those who know Him know Who He is. When we know Him everything is different and we are living in a new world -- a new atmosphere. Heaven begins on earth for us... Hinduism has been digging channels. Christ is the water to flow through these channels. There are many beautiful things in Hinduism; but the fullest light is from Jesus Christ”
- Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889- 1929) was an Indian Christian missionary. He is believed to have died in the foothills of the Himalayas.
“Sundar Singh woke up at three in the morning and went out into the moonlit courtyard for the ceremonial bath observed by devout Hindus and Sikhs before worship. He then returned to his room and knelt down, bowed his head to the ground and pleaded that God would reveal himself. Yet nothing happened. He was thinking of throwing himself in front of the train that would pass at 5 a.m. every morning behind their house, in the hope that he would find peacefulness in his future reincarnation. He repeated his prayer once again. He lifted his head and opened his eyes, and was rather surprised to see a faint cloud of light in the room… He then thought that it might be an answer to his prayer.
While watching the light, he suddenly saw Jesus’ figure in the radiance. To his sheer amazement he saw not the face of any of his traditional gods, but of Jesus the Christ. Jesus Christ was there in the room, shining, radiating an inexpressible joy and peace and love, looking at him with compassion and asking, “Why do you persecute me? I died for you …” At that time, Sundar realised that Jesus was not dead but alive. Sundar fell on his knees before Him and experienced an astonishing peacefulness which he had never felt before. The vision disappeared, but peace and joy lingered within him.
Sundar announced to his father, Sher Singh, that henceforth he would follow Christ. His father denounced him, and his brother Rajender Singh attempted to poison him. He was not poisoned just once but a number of times. People of that area threw snakes in his house. People used to possess his house but his life was saved by the help of a nearby Christian community.
On his sixteenth birthday, he was publicly baptised as a Christian in the parish church in Simla, in the Himalayan foothills. In October 1906, he set out on his journey as a new Christian, wearing a turban and the yellow robe of a Hindu sadhu, an ascetic devoted to spiritual practice. Singh viewed himself as a sadhu, albeit one within Christianity rather than Hinduism, because he realised Christianity could not penetrate India unless it was in an Indian way. "I am not worthy to follow in the steps of my Lord," he said, "but, like Him, I want no home, no possessions. Like Him I will belong to the road, sharing the suffering of my people, eating with those who will give me shelter, and telling all men of the love of God."
After returning to his home village, where he was given an unexpectedly warm welcome, Sundar Singh travelled northward through the Punjab, over the Bannihal Pass into Kashmir, and then back through Muslim Afghanistan and into the brigand-infested North-West Frontier and Baluchistan. He was referred to as "the apostle with the bleeding feet" by the Christian communities of the north. He suffered arrest and stoning for his beliefs, and experienced mystical encounters. In 1908, he crossed the frontier of Tibet, where he was appalled by the living conditions. He was stoned as he bathed in cold water because it was believed that "holy men never washed."
In 1908 he went to Bombay, hoping to board a ship to visit Palestine but was refused a permit, and had to return to the north. On this trip he recognised a basic dilemma of the Christian mission to India. A brahmin had collapsed in a hot, crowded railway carriage and was offered water by the Anglo-Indian stationmaster. The brahmin could accept it in only his own drinking vessel. Sundar Singh realised that India would not readily convert to Western-style Christianity, although people had responded to his sadhu's robe.
In December 1909 Singh began training for the Christian ministry at the Anglican college in Lahore. According to his biographers, he did not form close relationships with fellow students, meeting them only at meal times and designated prayer sessions. He was ostracised for being "different". Although Singh had been baptised by an Anglican priest, he was ignorant of the ecclesiastical culture and conventions of Anglicanism. His inability to adapt hindered him from fitting in with the routines of academic study. Much in the college course seemed irrelevant to the gospel as India needed to hear it. After eight months in the college, Singh left in July 1910.
It has been claimed by his biographers that Singh's withdrawal was due to stipulations laid down by Bishop Lefroy. As an ordained Anglican priest, Singh was told to discard his sadhu's robe and wear "respectable" European clerical dress, use formal Anglican worship, sing English hymns; and not preach outside his parish without permission. To not visit Tibet, however, seemed to him an unthinkable rejection of God's call.
Stories from those years are astonishing and sometimes incredible. Indeed, there were those, who insisted that they were mystical rather than real happenings. That first year, 1912, he returned with an extraordinary account of finding a three-hundred-year-old hermit in a mountain cave—the Maharishi of Kailas, with whom he spent some weeks in deep fellowship. According to Singh, in a town called Rasar he had been thrown into a dry well full of bones and rotting flesh and left to die, but three days later he was rescued. At these and at other times Singh was said to have been rescued by members of the "Sannyasi Mission" (reputedly 24,000 secret disciples of Jesus wearing Hindu markings, whom he claimed to have found all over India.)
The origins of this brotherhood were reputed to be linked to one of the Magi at Christ's nativity and then the second century AD disciples of the apostle Thomas circulating in India. Nothing was heard of this evangelistic fellowship until William Carey began his missionary work in Serampore. The Maharishi of Kailas experienced ecstatic visions about the secret fellowship that he retold to Sundar Singh, and Singh himself built his spiritual life around visions. Whether he won many continuing disciples on these hazardous Tibetan treks is not known. Singh did not keep written records and he was unaccompanied by any other Christian disciples who might have witnessed the events.
During his twenties, Sundar Singh's ministry widened greatly, and long before he was thirty, his name and picture were familiar all over the Christian world. He described a struggle with Satan to retain his humility, but people described him as always human, approachable and humble, with a sense of fun and a love of nature. This character, with his illustrations from ordinary life, gave his addresses great impact. Many people said, "He not only looks like Jesus, he talks like Jesus must have talked." His talks and his personal speech were informed by his habitual early morning meditation, especially on the gospels. In 1918 he made a long tour of South India and Ceylon, and the following year he was invited to Burma, Malaya, China and Japan. Some of the stories from these tours were as strange as any of his Tibetan adventures. He claimed power over wild things. He claimed even to have power over disease and illness, though he never allowed his presumed healing gifts to be publicized.
For a long time Sundar Singh had wanted to visit Britain, and the opportunity came when his father, Sher Singh, came to tell him that he too had become a Christian and wished to give him the money for his fare to Britain. He visited the West twice, travelling to Britain, the United States and Australia in 1920, and to Europe again in 1922. He was welcomed by Christians of many traditions, and his words searched the hearts of people who now faced the aftermath of World War I and who seemed to evidence a shallow attitude to life. Singh was appalled by what he saw as the materialism, emptiness and irreligion he found everywhere, contrasting it with Asia's awareness of God, no matter how limited that might be.
Once back in India he continued his ministry, though it was clear that he was getting more physically frail. In 1923 Sundar Singh made the last of his regular summer visits to Tibet and came back exhausted. His preaching days were apparently over, and in the next years, in his own home or those of his friends in the Simla hills he gave himself to meditation, fellowship, and writing some of the things he had lived to preach. In 1929, against all his friends' advice, Singh determined to make one last journey to Tibet. He was last seen on 18 April 1929 setting off on this journey. In April he reached Kalka, a small town below Simla, a prematurely aged figure in his yellow robe among pilgrims and holy men who were beginning their own trek to one of Hinduism's holy places some miles away.
Where he went after that is unknown. Whether he died of exhaustion or reached the mountains remains a mystery. Some said that Singh was murdered or he was caught in the cholera epidemic and his body thrown into the river along with deceased devotees; another account says he was caught up into heaven with the angels. Sadhu Sundar Singh is treasured by many as a formative figure in the development of the Christian church in India.” ~ Wikipedia & other sources
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