Tough Questions and Challenging Answers

I think everyone here has been struggling with the begging and how to respond; do you ignore the beggar and carry on your way; do you give to the beggar and risk being plagued by beggars the next time you walk by the same area. This is particularly prevalent for those of us staying at the Hotel Heaven as several times daily we walk to the BMS compound and back. Outside the BMS compound live two families – both of which have small children of about 3 or 4 years of age – and when I say live I mean live. They sleep, eat, wash and play on the pavement in the filth of Kolkata.

I have been troubled with this despite of having encountered this before elsewhere in the world, and because of those experiences I mostly ignored the approaches of those outside the BMS compound But the passages that kept coming back to me were Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:40 “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” and James’ advice in chapter 2 about the poor. On Wednesday evening we were all reflecting on this during our prayer time and none of us seem to know what to do. During prayer I asked God to guide me in this, to tell me what I should do, particularly with the families outside the gate. The response I got was to go and talk to them, to try and understand why they were there and how they got there. I had a vision of sitting on the floor talking to them. I was a little uncomfortable with this so decided to sleep on it, but the sleep was troubled, God’s response kept coming back to me.

The next evening I took Sian (our team leader) to one side to share this with her and ask her advice. If I was really going to do this then I should get an interpreter. As usual her advice was solid; talk to the BMS staff to check if they were already doing outreach with the families outside the compound and, if not, ask them how I might make an approach to them without creating a difficult legacy for them and future visitors. After all if what I did made the begging and harassment of visitors even worse then that would be a bad thing.

So what next, well I have prayed about this and this evening during prayer with my good friend and brother Paul I felt that God was making appointments for all of us during our time in Kolkata, Paul has his and this, I believe, is my appointment. I will, of course, keep you posted.