Bible Women

When I was in India teaching, I encountered many strange and exotic things. It is said that India assaults all of your senses at once. This was in a way true for me. As my family and I went to great, expansive megalopolis such as Madras (now called Chennai) and then to New Delhi, our next stop was up to the beautiful northern area where Dehradun sits near the Ganges River that flows majestically, mysteriously down from the misty, green distant but visible Himalayan Mountains. There we found something -- or someone -- who I recognized. I want to talk to you about her. I found her coming to me in several persons.

In one place I found her as an elderly, toothless woman, her body wrapped in traditional Southern Indian costume, and her face etched with years of hard labor. My interpreters told me that she was uneducated and from a remote place. She went from tribe to tribe, from village to village. In another place, she was younger with children still at her side, not as revered; but she seemed just as wise, just as authoritative in the community. Yet in another case, I found her to be a middle-aged woman, roaming through the sprawling ghettos of the Indian capital, through the neon, down the boulevards of piled up rubbish, past the lowing of the ghoulish-grey Brahma cattle. Who were they? They were "Bible women."

This is what the Indian Christians called them. The Bible woman is so called because she knows the Word of God, and though not ordained to "preach" or to be a "minister of the gospel" by a congregation of any particular Christian church, she goes about, evangelist-like, telling Bible stories to the communities. She is revered by all -- ordained and lay people, men and women, boys and girls, believer and unbeliever. Back to why I recognized her amid this strange land with its strange customs. I recognized her because I was reared by a Bible woman.

I was orphaned as a little child. I was adopted by my Aunt Eva. She was about 65 when I was 9 months old and placed in her arms. I never knew a day when my Aunt Eva did not read the Bible to me, pray for me and lay her hands on my head. That is not why she reminds me of the Bible women of India. It is this: She was a teacher of the Word of God to the people in our little backward area of Louisiana. She never held a class or lectured. She was not educated at a seminary or Bible college. She had been taught by her father and mother and through what would end up being almost 99 years of faithful gospel preaching and teaching. She took the Word she had been given in those ways and ministered to others.

She ministered to the poor. She ministered to the merchants. Many times I have seen Aunt Eva opening her Bible to counsel, to teach a child or in some cases to lay her hands on the heads of grown men who came to her, weeping in the midst of business or marriage failures.

She taught me. She taught me, and she modeled ministry for me in ways that I aspire to even today. She was a Bible woman.