The Sweeper

“Bring ye the whole tithe into the store-house, that there may be food in my house, and prove me now herewith, saith Jehovah of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.” — Malachi 3:10 (ASV)

When Ramabai brought her famine girls back to Poona in 1897, bubonic plague had reached the city. The magistrate ordered her to remove more than a hundred girls within forty-eight hours. “To have brought the girls here to save them from starvation and death,” she wrote bitterly, “was my great sin.” They camped in the open in fierce heat, and some died. The only place left was a bare farm the school owned at Kedgaon, some thirty-five or forty miles away. The girls lived in sheds fenced with thorn bushes. That was the beginning of Mukti.

She had read about George Müller, who cared for thousands of orphans in England without asking anyone but God for money. She wished someone would start such a work in India. Then, she said, she was rebuked:

Then the Lord said to me, “Why don't you begin to do this yourself, instead of wishing for others to do it? How easy it is for any one to wish that some one else would do a difficult thing instead of doing it himself.”

So she did. She named the settlement Mukti. In Hindu thought, mukti means liberation from the endless cycle of births and deaths, the very thing she had been taught a woman could never reach. To her it now meant salvation in Christ, freely given.

Mukti had no endowment, no guaranteed income and no bank account. More and more, Ramabai stopped asking people for money at all. She prayed, told what God had done, and waited. “I own nothing on earth except a few clothes and my Bible,” she wrote. It was not always easy. Once, in a crisis, she stopped her workers' salaries and asked them to trust God as she did, and some of the best left. Living by faith can become a burden on other people too. But for twenty-five years, through famine, plague and war, the people at Mukti were fed. “I have responded to the Lord's challenge, 'Prove Me now',” she wrote, “and have found Him faithful and true.”

In 1899 she laid the foundation stone of Kripa Sadan, the House of Grace, a home where women and girls who had been sexually exploited could be cared for without shame. There was “not a single pice in hand” to build it. It was built anyway, and sheltered hundreds of women most of society treated as beyond help.

Famine struck Gujarat that year, and by August 1900 more than thirteen hundred and fifty Gujarati girls had come to Mukti. Many were ill, and many died. But a visitor in 1901 found some two thousand women and girls living in stone buildings, with schools, a hospital, workrooms and a church. “Five years ago,” he wrote, “there was nothing here but an open field.” The girls learned to read, farm, weave and print.

When a new missionary arrived in 1901, Ramabai told her:

I am a sweeper; that is all I am. I sweep into this compound as many as I can get; child-widows, deserted wives, and orphans of every kind, and I want you missionaries to preach to them.

In India, sweeping was work for the lowest castes. For a Brahman woman honoured by the scholars of Calcutta to call herself a sweeper turned everything she had been raised to believe upside down. It was also exactly what she did.

Not everyone saw it that way. To many Hindus, Mukti was a place where famine children, who could not really choose, were made into Christians. That is a fair question, still asked today. Ramabai never hid that she hoped they would believe. What she would not accept was that the gospel made them outcasts. In her eyes they had been outcasts already. Now they had a home.

One thing to do this week: instead of wishing someone would meet a need you've noticed, take one small first step yourself this week, even if it is one phone call or one hour of help.