Easter Special

March 5,2008

Today at my office 5.00 pm,I was seriously breaking my brains to get ideas to write the skeleton for a case study. There is only one christian apart from me in my office. Her name is Kondamal, the house keeping lady. A 40+ year old very devout christian women, always kind and very soft spoken. She used to do all the cleaning, sweeping, toilet cleaning at my office. She often rejoices when talking about Christ to all at office. Very openly she will share about prayer, her christian beliefs and church to all.

Today she brought a tamil bible to my collegue and asked my colleague to explain the scripture. My colleague asked me to explain as I am a christian.

I asked, "Is it a bible passage?". My colleague said, "you are a christian, you should be able to explain"

As often with me, I thought, how am I going to explain this?, what passage it is?.....etc..

She showed me the bible passage in the tamil bible said, "Arun Sir, this is the one page that I am getting everytime I opened the bible. Can you just explain?"

I said, "Ma, It is in tamil, you do know to read tamil, right? or you know how to read only in Telugu?".

She ( her mother tongue is telugu, not tamil) said, "Sir, I don't know how to read telugu. Tamil, I'm trying to read by adding the tamil aphabets. My parents and my grand parents never allowed us to go to school or taught to us."

I said," Ma, I will just read the passage, ok?" meaning, that I won't give any explanation. She gleefully nodded her head.

I read the scripture she showed me to read as best as I could in tamil. I was reading from my table. She was leaning towards my table.
The scripture I read to her is:

1Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. 2The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in a purple robe 3and went up to him again and again, saying, "Hail, king of the Jews!" And they struck him in the face.
4Once more Pilate came out and said to the Jews, "Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him." 5When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, "Here is the man!"
6As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, "Crucify! Crucify!"
But Pilate answered, "You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against him."
John 19:1-6.

Suddenly, I heard some sound, I just looked up at her. Both her eyes was filled with tears and tears were just streaming down.

Realising that I saw her, she just wiped her tears and with smiles displaying all over her face, tilting her head (meaning thanks to me) took the bible from my hand and left.Inside me, sensing the impact of this small incident, I started wondering....

God, are we missing something?