Remember the Days of Old

“Remember the days of old, Consider the years of many generations: Ask thy father, and he will show thee; Thine elders, and they will tell thee.” — Deuteronomy 32:7 (ASV)

In 1896 the rains failed and famine spread across the Central Provinces. Ramabai did not want to go. She was thirty-eight, partly deaf and tired, and her school was still recovering. She argued with herself: “what can a weak woman do to help the dying thousands?” Others were helping. “There is nothing for you to do.”

“I tried to quiet my conscience in this manner,” she wrote, “but louder and louder spoke the voice of God from within my heart: 'Remember the days of old'.” She remembered her father in the forest and her mother at Raichur. She had been a famine child herself. “I could no longer keep still.”

At Sohagpur she saw three small children outside the hospital, crying for food. Their mother had died the day before. Thinking she needed official permission to take them, she went to find the officer. When she came back they were gone. She never found them. “The memory of the three little ones, especially of the youngest child, who, I am sure, could not have lived many days after that, haunts me to this day.” She did not blame the officials. She blamed herself.

In the relief camps, she said, some officials were kind, but many overseers stole the food and abused the people. Worst of all, girls and young widows were being lured away and sold into prostitution. In one camp a girl of about fourteen told her she was “kept” there by someone. An old woman explained what that meant. The official in charge of the district, when told, “nodded his head, and said that it is quite possible that such things are happening in the poorhouses, but he cannot help it.”

Ramabai would not accept that. She even warned the British rulers, who had once licensed prostitution for their soldiers and were under pressure to do it again, that if they did, “British iniquity will reach its climax.” Her admiring British biographers left that line out. Being a Christian, to her, did not mean excusing a Christian nation's sins against Indian women.

“The Lord has put it into my mind to save three hundred girls out of the famine districts,” she wrote, “and I shall go to work in His name.” She did not have the money. “I do not know, but the Lord knows what I need.”

On one journey home, a hungry girl picked some green gram, a kind of bean, from a field. Ramabai made her give it back. When the ringleader later ran away and was brought back, Ramabai decided to make an example of her and leave her behind. The carts started. The girl sat down on the ground in the dusk.

The world seemed very, very wide; and on it was thrown one little girl, friendless, homeless, and helpless. The picture is everlastingly engraved on my heart. ... The sad picture was too much, too much for me. I ordered the driver to stop the cart, for I could not move an inch from that place.

Sitting there, she thought of how often she had gone her own way, and how often God had called her back: “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” She waved. The girl saw the hand “and at once bounded and ran toward me.” Her name was Girija, “a child of the mountain.”

It is a story about a hard woman learning to be soft, and she told it against herself. By the rules, she was right to leave the girl. She was also wrong. God had not waited for her to prove she was sorry before he called her.

She would not tell herself it was someone else's problem; what she had suffered became the reason she acted. And she was honest about her failures. You can be someone who acts and someone who admits where you got it wrong.

One thing to do this week: think of a time someone gave you a second chance you didn't deserve. This week, give someone else one: a friend, a sibling, someone who annoyed you. Call them back instead of driving off.