Church Dedication Service

January 21, 2010
The Church Dedication Service. Well, as is typical of Nepali church services, the dedication service went for far longer than any other dedication service I’ve ever been to! Everyone was up and going around 8, when we started the morning prayer and worship time. Well, pray and worship we did, until around 11, when the actual service started! The service was supposed to be around 2 hours I think, but sometimes when you get a group of pastors together, they each gravitate toward giving a sermon, and almost 4 hours later, we finally cut the service off! Honestly, there’s not much to write as it was mostly preaching, and I didn’t understand a word of it, so I was a little bored. But the excitement started for me after the service!

We had a big feast of goat and pickle and tons of rice and curry after the service (a great way to entice the locals to come!), and there were several Hindus from the community who came and visited. I had met a girl named Laxmi the day before at our nighttime worship service, but she and her family are Hindus. They had come because someone had visited them that day and had told them they should come that night for the service. They did, and Laxmi immediately attached herself to me. I was probably the first white girl she’d ever seen!

She was around 16 probably, with several younger brothers and sisters in tow! Well, we ate together after the dedication service, and in broken Nepali/English we talked for a couple of hours with her mom, another lady, and several other teenage girls. We talked about school and life and how things are different in America and Nepal. She was pretty upset that I was leaving the next day, so I decided to go out on a limb and give her a Bible. I wrote “To: Laxmi, Love: Anneliese” inside of it. Her eyes lit up, but a quick reprimand from her mother forced her to pass it on to one of the other girls nearby. I later found out that her mother would not allow her to keep a Bible in the house, so, her friend was to take it.

Knowing that she LOVED the songs we sing at church though, I grabbed Monoj and took his small pocket song-book (most Nepali Christians have their own hymnals that are pocket-sized) and wrote the same thing inside the cover, assuring Monoj that upon returning to Kathmandu, I would buy him another one, as that was his “special one”. I gave this to her, and her mom approved, Praise God! Well, I’ve always known that worship is powerful, but now I pray that it would be sharper than a double-edged sword as she reads these Gospel-proclaiming lyrics! I pray that God would continue to blind her mother to the reality that most of these songs have as much Scripture in them as a chapter of the Bible, at least until God opens Laxmi to himself! And as worship tells the story of our Jesus, I pray that Laxmi would see the truth as she reads and sings these songs to herself! One day Jesus will grab ahold of her, and He’ll use whatever it takes to get to her!