September 23 2009

"The soul is not where it lives, but where it loves."

We arrived here in the south of India yesterday after flying a couple of hours from Pune to Chennai; we were met at the airport by a driver who then took us 2.5 hours to Vellore. Finally the car turned off the main drag onto a side street and we passed a sign that said, “Missionary Rest House.” We’d arrived. Once inside the front entry to this 16 bedroom hostel we met with a dozen or so staff led by one J.J. Ratnakumar, the founder and director of Missionary Upholders Trust (http://www.mut.org/), a saint of a man. Age 60, handsome, full head of silver hair, vibrant and alive smile, loquacious, articulate, energetic. He welcomed us and seemed alert to our needs.
As we listened to him it became clear he was a high voltage transceiver of God’s healing energy for missionaries. He seems capable of taking in 220 volts of Holy Spirit energy and passing it out in 12 volt bites to one person at a time. MUT’s ministry is to missionaries who are emotionally injured, medically recuperating from various illnesses, or spiritually going upside down. A large Christian hospital is nearby and missionaries come from all over India to get treatment here, discharge, and recuperate at the Rest House. Retired missionaries from various walks of life compose much of the staff.
MUT works with over 100 different mission agencies, many indigenous to India, others from the West. Missionaries qualify for very low cost care here. If your support level is $300/month or less, as is very common among indigenous missions, then your nightly cost to stay at the rest house is about 25 cents, US; if above $300, it’ll cost you a buck. While we talked for a number of hours together people passed by and he would comment in a kindly way about their situations. He seemed to know very many people by first names and had a great smile and kind word for each of them.
As we listened to JJ it became clear that he was quite savvy to the lifestyle warfare one experiences here day to day with Satan’s spiritual strongholds of animism, Hinduism, and Islam all around--somehow I had forgotten that India, after Indonesia, is the second most populous Muslim nation in the world. Anyway, he spoke of the struggles of his own life, how he came to leave a successful job as director of HR for a large corporation 16 years ago, and the ups and downs of this ministry since that time. Currently his vision is for a larger 6.5 acre campus in the town of ODC, where he personally resides, about 10 hours south of here by train. Phase one of three is complete. Check out the master plan on the website. He has desires for provision of psychological services there on that campus to missionaries, but no one trained to provide them as of yet.