I feel like I'm on the threshold of a "new birth" experience! Its one thing to have a mental assent, knowledge or understanding about what you believe and why you believe what you believe. I stood in the middle of a slum, preached the gospel, and heard the testimonies of God's goodness, faithfulness and protection over these women and children in the middle of what I perceive to be the WORST place on earth to LIVE. This has brought me to the edge of a whole new conversion experience!

I passed slum after slum - they are everywhere!

You don't need to go to a certain place, or village - you only need to drive down a street anywhere and see slums.

I went inside one.

I was shocked. I was horrified. I was speechless! I walked through the slum and witnessed hundreds of children, and lots of women and some men with almost nothing - little water, little food (maybe), malnourished men, women and children with their bellies sticking out and their bones showing - very much like the many pictures we've all seen of the hungry children in Africa. This is the poorest of the poor, the weakest of the weak, and more brokenness than can be articulated!

The children, whose Indian hair is normally black, sleek and shiny was a RATS NEST.

Not some of them, most of them! Their clothing looked like it had been worn and played in the mud or shall I say the sewer for 365 days and never washed! Babies were running around naked and bare foot. Their noses were running, and their upper lip was raw and bleeding. Thousands and thousands of flies, and mosquitoes were in their faces and seasoned the uncooked fish which would be cooked for dinner.

Much of the slum is a garbage dump.

The sewers, which are open, run right between the houses, and children play and occasionally fall into them. Pools of stagnant water, which are everywhere, breed malaria. The whole slum is pervaded by a stench which remains with you hours after you have left the site. Typhoid runs rampant through the slum and spreads through oral-fecal contact.

To get water in the slum, the women have to line up and take a number.

Most wait in line for two hours.

Today was a scorching 102 degrees.

Each person, in groups of thirty, get two buckets of water for household needs. Your religion determines how often you bathe, and where you will do your "business", let the reader understand. In some areas the toilets have been stopped for one year. You can see women and children looking for a private place to squat. It is a terrible thing, a degrading thing.

Slum dwellers have almost nothing by natural outward means - no money, almost no clothing, little food and water.

Consequently, the Believers among them experience God in ways that our lifestyle will never allow.

They see the face of God in a way that only life's experiences and circumstances permit.

For example, I sat with a woman in her early thirties with three children. She and her children had been beaten the day before when they used the name of Jesus in their home. Her Hindu husband had come home after a long day at work with a migraine headache. So the wife, a new believer, anointed him with oil and prayed for Jesus to heal him. And He did! He was healed! He acknowledged that his headache was gone.

Then, he began to shout at her about why her Jesus can heal him of his headache but her Jesus didn't have his dinner ready. He began to physically hit her and the kids and shouted at un curso de milagros  , "I'm your god." The wife began to pray inwardly as her husband beat her. She testified that she did not feel the pain or have any marks on her body after he beat her as she had many, many times before she met the Lord. She testified that the Lord protected her.

In India, believers are taught the power of "forgiveness" and "the fellowship of suffering with Christ and for Christ".

They do not counsel as we, Westerners, might - "you have to leave your husband and report the abuse and for the sake of the children remove them from the home and abuse". Rather, in many places in India, if the children or wife report the abuse, most will never be heard and if heard and removed, they will lose everything! They have no place to go!

Abuse is rarely reported.

What to do? Believers teach them Matthew 5, 6 & 7, how to forgive, to love, to honor the parent, to endure the sufferings and persecution - "Blessed are you when you suffer for Christ". The result?

They experience the tangible, raw power of God, the faithfulness of God, the protection of God and the comfort of God in miraculous ways.

It's the hard sayings of Jesus that radically convert the worldly mind and heart and they learn the "blessedness or happiness" of embracing the beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. I am truly shaken to the core and confronted with the hard sayings of Jesus. "You have heard it said, but I say unto you..." I've heard the same testimonies over and over again!

These people are not afforded the so-called "rights" we know as Westerners!

Jesus has to show up or they die! And, He shows up, and He acts on their behalf.

When I arrived at the slum, I was asked to preach. "Oh no," I thought! What do you preach about in a place like the slums? What can I say? I looked into the faces of utter hopelessness and despair where a spirit of oppression, depression and poverty loomed in the atmosphere. "God, what is your heart for them?" I prayed.