As I finished my cleaning round my head was filled with various research possibilities.  This was my outside circumstance and the innermost being interwoven and inseparable.  I was in an upper middle class suburban home.  They treated me really nice.  Still there was an underlying factor that I clean their home and their toilets.  What about my Christian friends?  They would not want to know about it.  It makes them uncomfortable.They would find it even hard to fellowship with me and really be open.
This is my journey – a journey of a little girl saved from a middle class Brahmin family in India.  I have yet to find a Christian in town who would understand me.  Their question would be –  Why was I doing it when there were so many jobs around?  What if I turned around and say, ” I love cleaning.  I have never enjoyed so much as it involves serving others and making something look nicer!  It is also an opportunity to pray for the homes that I clean.  I love it.  Thank goodness God found me worthy to do this job even though I am not physically strong.!”

Words are cheap they don’t amount to much.  What about Jesus?  He lived out a life that reflected a classless society.  He mixed with the rich and the poor and his twelve disciples came from different backgrounds with different gifts.  He treated them same and saw in them the potential to work for God and to be used for His Kingdom expansion.  He treated man, woman and child same.  In fact he treated the weaker with greater compassion and forebearance.

Western society aims at classlessness but is far from it.  Christians are well equipped if they would only study and understand the Bible and practise it in their own lives through transforming of the self at first hand.  Instead a country like India cops it all the time in the sight of the western world for the untouchables and the caste system without any understanding that it had its use in the past.  For one thing the upper class Indians did not force the lower castes to forcefully adopt their highly esteemed ways nor did they steal children from their parents to raise them according to their standards.  Neither did they recourse to mass killings and wiping out of communities to create a pristine society for it to look near perfect and acceptable in world standards.  India is what it is, warts and all for everyone to see.

Arrogance and exclusivity exist in western modern society as much as it did in ancient times.  It is more subtle and devious.  It tends to make individuals complacent about who they are.  Worse it gives them a false identity.  Christians themselves need to understand the “operation” of the gospel in the times of Jesus and the apostles.  The tools are available in the Bible we only need to seek the truth.  But we don’t as we wear rose coloured glasses in the West. This does not exclude me.

There is much that is awesome about the West.  Why it still draws boatloads and plane loads of people to come from developing countries like myself.  The amazing growth and expansion of western culture has gone beyond one’s wildest imagination and dreams from northern hemisphere to the remotest jungles of even subsaharan Africa in one form or the other.  Certainly it is God who allows such phenomena to take place.  I am myself a product of western culture and the very little that I have from my ancestors I tend to cling with a desperate need to express myself the way God had intended me and my community to be.  I believe this is our hope for our future generations.

Human beings are same no matter which part of the world they come from  and are capable of both good and bad.  What makes the western societies unique is the administrative systems which involve  complex  planning and a desire to do good for the greatest possible number in the society.  This is certainly laudable but  still falls short of God’s glory.   The followers of Christ could certainly play a greater role through deeper understanding of what Jesus was talking about while operating in the world.  We have still a long way to go in understanding the teachings of Jesus and the lives that he intended his followers to lead.

May we come to a new age of greater understanding of our Bible and applying it in the world.  Starting from self to the community at large.  Christians have the formula to create a classless society which they are not fully applying!

© christinemukherjee

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