April 5th,  2011

"Miracle well brings Hindu villagers to Jesus"

For fifteen years, Pastor Ravi and his wife, Komaloom, have been laboring among over forty villages in rural Tamil Nadu, where the Gospel of Jesus had never been heard before.  One village of about 300 families, Mangalravu, had long proven to be a hard challenge.  After many years, Ravi counted only a few souls there willing to follow Jesus. . .

Over a year ago, Church of The King from southern Louisiana sent a ministry team to India for two weeks, to labor with Body of Christ Ministries.  They elected to drill wells in needy Tamil villages, as a way to serve the people there, and to prepare the way for Gospel outreach.  BCM chose that same village of Mangalravu as the site for their first well project.  The villagers there were trekking for two miles just to get water.  The village elders readily agreed for these foreign visitors to drill a well for them.  Through long, hot hours the hired crew drilled through solid rock until, at a depth of 600 feet, the project was stopped, having brought up nothing but dry rock dust.  The Hindus wasted no time in mocking the Christians, and crowing that “this Jesus is a weak and useless god.”  Undaunted, the team moved on to another selected village, where the drill found excellent water for a thirsty village, and the ministry found a great open door there for the Gospel.

Those few disciples living in Mangalravu then stood alone under the derision of the Hindus, but they refused to give in to doubt and despair.  During the months that followed, those believers chose to gather every few days, kneeling around that dry pipe, to publicly cry out to the Lord Jesus, that He would bring water to their dry well.  It became a great sport for the Hindus to mock and curse the little handful of Christians, every time they met to pray by the pipe.  The priests would extoll all their idols arrayed in the village’s three Hindu temples, but those few disciples kept openly praying to Jesus for a miracle.

A year has now passed since the dry well was drilled.  On March 12th, the people of Mangalravu were very surprised one morning to find a clear stream coursing down the dirt road in the middle of their village.  A curious crowd followed it to the edge of town, and there watched in astonishment as cold, sweet water poured out of the Christian’s well, with no pump even needed, but pushed to the surface from some mysterious force below.  Pastor Ravi and his family were in another state at the time, visiting Komaloom’s kin.  When they received an excited call from Mangalravu, exclaiming that the well had been quickened by God, they left at once for the all-day journey back to their home church.

The Sunday of their return, Ravi’s family gathered with the hundreds of believers from their own village of Seda Pati.  In the middle of their church service, a noise outside the church building heralded the arrival of about 35 Hindus from Mangalravu.  Ravi met them at the doorway, and besought them to not cause any trouble or disturbance.  But, they explained to him that they had come looking for the Jesus God, who had answered the prayers of those few Christians, to bring water from the dry well.

The rejoicing among them all that day was uncontainable.  As soon as word came to the Americans in Louisiana, a family volunteered to purchase a pump and distribution system for the newly filled well.  Their next scheduled team already had plans to return to work with BCM again this coming May.  Now, the U.S. team has added to their outreach plans, to include baptizing at least fifteen of those same villagers who had previously rejected the Gospel of Jesus.  The public baptisms will take place in a tank now being constructed right next to the new well, where those few disciples had kneeled week after week last year, in persistent, powerful prayer.