Neighbors Opening Doors

My neighbors are from Manang, an ethnic Tibetan village in the northern Himalayas.  Our team partners with a national SC whose work is primarily among the Manangi people.  Yesterday, this partner and I went to visit this Manangi family.  As we visited with them, my partner shared about his love for Manangi people and about his work in Manang.  This national believer is musically gifted.  As his entry strategy, he teaches the traditional Tibetan instrument called the “Drumyin” to people in Manang.  He has recorded gospel stories and praise music using the drumyin in the Manangi language.  After nearly 45 minutes of my partner and this family discussing people and locations they had in common in Manang, I asked the father of the household if I could share with him from my heart.  He granted my request.  I began to share with him my observations of the Tibetan Buddhist peoples, including the Manangis, worship at the temple near our home.  I told him how devout the worshipers seemed to be and how much I appreciated their zeal and earnestness in their daily rituals.  Then I turned the corner and began to share about how these actions don’t really bring them closer to God.  In fact, they practice traditions and rituals but they really don’t know God.  I shared with him my story about how I tried many things to make me happy and bring me peace in my life but how none of these things satisfied.  I told him of my salvation experience, how God has blessed me spiritually since then, and about my calling to bring hope and light to all ethnic Tibetan peoples of Nepal.  I sincerely explained to him that I wanted these people, his people, to have the opportunity to genuinely know God and not just worship from afar.  Then I told him of my plans to go into his home village next month to share this message with the Manangi people and to teach the few believers that have already turned to Christ there.  This led me to the purpose for our current visit in his home.  He is my neighbor and, firstly, I wanted him to know about the opportunity to repent and turn to the Most High God.  

The father did not express any opposition to my purpose for being in Nepal or to anything that I shared with him.  Instead, he began to tell how he has been watching a television program and listening to radio about Christianity.  He said that all religions were good and it is really all about “oneness.”  He did not express any desire to know more about what I had been saying but he did ask me to take some things to his relatives in his home village in Manang.  I graciously jumped at this opportunity to serve him and at the chance to meet his relatives in Manang.  This could be a fantastic entry strategy into the home of a man of peace.  I told that I would come by again before my trip to pick up the items he wants to send to his brother and I also told him to come to my home anytime if he has an interest in knowing more about the Most High God and how to know Him.  As we prepared to leave, we looked out over Kathmandu Valley from his roof and I asked him who made the mountains in which we were surrounded by.  He said god of course and then I offered him a gift.  I gave him a Creation-to-Christ DVD and told him that it was a movie that explained where creation came from and how God made it.  He received the DVD graciously.