Jeremiah's Testimony (Part 1)
A Bitter Heart Healed by A Song and A Hug.
My name is Jeremiah and I am 32 years old. I grew up in a family that I would call “totally Hindu”, the second oldest of four brothers. My mother died early. My father never found a new wife, but he married the bottle. He was not kind; every time he came home drunk he would yell at us boys: “Where are you? What are you doing?” We tried to get away as soon as possible.
As a teenager, I was full of bitterness. I started using pills to numb the pain. When I was seventeen, I moved to Daarjeling on the border with Nepal to work. One day I happened to hear a girl singing a Christian song. The chorus was: “Look at all the beauty in nature and understand how beautiful our God is!” This song touched my heart. I felt that something was missing in my life. The phrase from the song stuck with me, and all day long I sang it over and over. In the evening I asked out loud: “If you are really God, send me someone who believes in you tomorrow morning.” The next morning a man came into the house and gave me a New Testament.
I decided to become a Christian, and now it was urgent. One of my brothers had already accepted the Lord, and we went together to a pastor and knocked on his door in the middle of the night. He asked me: “Why do you want to become a Christian? It is easy to become a lama, guru or Brahmin, but to become a Christian is difficult.” He explained all the problems I could expect to face and asked if I would be ready to hold on to my faith in Jesus. I replied that whether I live or die, I will never leave Jesus Christ. He asked me to kneel on the floor to pray with me for salvation. As he prayed, I began to cry, for a long time. Afterwards I felt peace and joy that I had never experienced. The next day I prayed my first prayer to Jesus: “I am not able to do anything for you, but you are able to use me. I will live my life serving you among my own people in Nepal.” When my father found out about this, he kicked both me and my brother out of the house. We had no place to live, often we didn’t have food. We just prayed to God for everything we needed. Many Christians helped us, and this love made our faith grow strong. In 2010 I was a student at the bible school for three months, and in 2013 I was in invited to Kathmandu for a conference for former students at this seminar. A Norwegian pastor came to preach at that time. I was washing the floors and preparing the room when God spoke to me and asked: “Do you know why you are in Kathmandu?” I didn’t know what to say, but during the conference, this pastor prayed for me and my wife and hugged us. As he prayed, he gave me a word I will never forget: “You are precious to Jesus Christ.” I remember thinking, “Am I precious to Jesus Christ?” He also said, “Your mother may forget you, your father may forget you, but Jesus Christ can never forget you.” These words changed my life. In 2015, that same pastor came again visited Asia and I heard him teach about God as the loving Father. He hugged me again, and then God did a miracle. My heart was healed. I went home and hugged my wife first and then my two sons. I had never shown them love, because I had never experienced fatherly love myself. Over the past four years, our family has been completely transformed. I never loved my siblings either, but after this incident in 2015, we have become so close.
