I grew up in the Deep South Bible Belt, but neither of my parents are from there. My mom is from South Asia, and she met my dad while they were both participating in a cross-cultural program there. Because of my heritage, I have always wanted to live and work outside of the US.
In high school I visited my mom’s hometown for a few weeks. It was neat to stay in the house she grew up in, visit her school, meet relatives, and just be immersed in the community that shaped her into the woman she is. I noticed that every house I visited had a system to boil and filter tap water for drinking because the failing pipe infrastructure leads to contamination. I also noticed that the hundreds of homeless adults and kids I saw every day had no access to such water treatment. Rather, they relied on water spouting out of pipes on the sidewalk to drink, putting them at high risk for waterborne diseases in their everyday effort to survive. Witnessing this inequity broke my heart, and I realized how privileged I was to live a life full of opportunities. Wanting to “be the change,” I decided to study civil and environmental engineering in college with an interest in sustainable community development.
During college, I became good friends with a guy of another religion. We both loved discussing theology and spent countless hours comparing our beliefs. I realized that we had similar personalities and concluded that if I had been born to his family, I would likely follow his religion as sincerely as I followed Christianity. That really troubled me because it suggested that my faith was simply the product of my personality and environmental factors, not rooted in logic or reality.
Soon after this realization, I participated in a two-semester exchange program in Latin America. While I was there, I hung out with several non-Christians who felt strongly against my faith. They asked me a lot of questions, and while I felt compelled to defend Christianity to them, I internally questioned if I believed my own words.
I wanted a break. To step back and reevaluate my beliefs. I wanted to erase all my preconceived notions and start from square one. I had a lot of questions about Christianity that I had ignored for years. And deep down, I felt like the sovereign God of the Bible was evil for creating this world and then blaming humanity for sin and punishing us for it. I started researching other religions and watching scholars of different faiths debate with one another.
Around this time, I ran into a campus ministry at the Latin American university where I was an exchange student. They invited me to join a discipleship group. Not wanting to join another Christian group, I reluctantly agreed because I wanted to practice Spanish in a small group and make some friends. I was open about my doubts and the exploration I was doing. They were comfortable with that and encouraged me on this journey. I met with one woman every week to just talk about whatever questions I had. Perhaps more importantly, they were not scared of my questions but embraced them, wanting to find answers alongside me and pointing me to various resources. I decided that Christianity seemed like the most reasonable and likely worldview. Yet while the bulk of my questions were answered, I was still hung up on God’s character and the tension between God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility for sin.
This struggle culminated one night at a campus ministry event. A student was speaking, and for the first time, I understood more than a few words in Spanish. I followed the entire sermon. I realized that like Adam in the Garden of Eden, I wanted to blame God for my sin (Genesis 3:12). But the reality is, I alone am responsible for my sin - my rebellion against God - and it breaks God’s heart. He cannot be the author of evil (James 1:13; 1 John 1:5). Throughout the Bible, God expresses mourning over sin (Genesis 6:6; Psalm 78:40; Hosea 11:8). Yet in his incomprehensible love, God became human and took on his own wrath in my place (John 3:16; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Philippians 2:6-8). It still did not make complete sense to me and still does not, but in that moment, I felt the words, “This is true” come over me, and I could not resist God any longer. I surrendered. I am glad that I serve a God who is too big for me to comprehend (Isaiah 40:13-14, 28).
...His understanding no one can fathom.
Isaiah 40:28
Following my surrender, I saw in myself a radical change. I was no longer defending my faith out of obligation but out of the joyful desire to share what God had done in my life. The second semester of my exchange program, I met other students who were wrestling with a lot of the same questions I had been, and it was a delight to walk with them as others had walked with me. Seeing this change in me, the campus ministry asked me to consider joining their staff after I graduated college. That is when I started considering using my career as an avenue to share God’s love with others.
I still had a passion and education in sustainable community development, so I was looking for a way to combine that type of work with a desire to see God’s love shared with those who have never heard about it. In my search for that, for a “Christian Peace Corps,” I found GoCorps, which connected me with my placement in Southeast Asia, where I will get to use my education and skills to serve and equip people in a spiritually and physically impoverished area.