The God Who Hears Me

By Dimple McFarland

The God Who Hears Me is a testimony of how Dimple, one of the first believers from her caste of nearly 1 million people, came to follow Jesus Christ. Her family members, like all the others in her caste, were idol-worshiping Hindus who also believed in the spirits of deceased ancestors. They were afflicted with an evil spirit that ruined their family and killed their youngest daughter before Christ set them free. Now the family is working to introduce Jesus to their people to ensure that the evil spirits have no more reign over their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483585109

Book preview

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Introduction

Dimple McFarland is the author of this book. My name is Grant McFarland, and I am her husband, translator and editor. This book is both Dimple’s autobiography and a testimony of God's victory in her life, over the idols of Hinduism. Dimple’s story would be near unbelievable if not for the witnesses who can testify to its authenticity. Hers is a heart-wrenching story of the terror of evil spirits unleashed by black magic and superstition, and God’s victory over those spirits.

Dimple and her family are of the Regar caste. By all accounts, this family represents the first believers of Jesus Christ in the long history of this Untouchable caste of one million Indian people who are entirely trapped in idol worship, black magic, and superstition. The process of God’s redemption of Dimple's family from this bondage was painful and required sacrifices and scars, but He brought them into a Kingdom whose King will wipe away their every tear. Indeed, if Psalm 56:8 is to be taken literally, You’ve kept track of my every toss and turn through the sleepless nights,/Each tear entered in your ledger/each ache written in your book. then there's a veritable library in heaven filled solely with the tears of this family.

Before you embark on this adventure through this wilderness of superstition and into the promised land of Truth, there are some aspects of Dimple's life that are worth mentioning as we begin. Her family's financial status is constantly in flux, and once the evil spirits began ravaging the family, they could be classified as poor, and possibly even destitute. Therefore, Dimple was forced to rely on government-provided health care and hospitals, which in India provide substandard service. So, remember this fact if the decisions the doctors make strike you as questionable, or even ridiculous. And, although consultations were free, most tests and medications did cost the family.

There are many Muslims throughout the story, some of whom will copy the healing techniques of the Hindus exactly. This should strike you as odd, because it is not allowed according to Islam. However, it is the nature of Islam that generally exists in India. This syncretic mix of Islam and Hinduism is referred to as folk Islam.

Another thing to remember is Dimple uses the word baba to refer to God. It means father. It's a popular word to refer to gods and so-called godmen, who are men who present themselves as a greater-than-normal saint, and sometimes even a god. There are various godmen in India today with multitudes of followers who do think of these men as gods. The polytheistic nature of Hinduism is at odds with the qualities that a Christian associates with the God of the Bible, such as His omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. For a Hindu, no one god can possess those qualities and there's little to no difference in the actual nature of the various gods in the minds of the common person. They worship whoever can or will get the job done in a given situation. In Dimple's testimony, there are various times when we, as Christian readers, can clearly ascertain that it's the one true God who is speaking to her, but it should be emphasized that this wasn't clear to her at all. Therefore, I've chosen to use the lower case god to refer to all the gods with whom she conversed and worshiped, to emphasize this point of her story. Even when specifically referring to Jesus, in her mind He was just any other god, any other baba, so I've retained the use of the lower case pronouns, at least until they discover that Jesus isn't just any other god. In the book Two Old Faiths by the nineteenth century Scottish missionary John Murray Mitchell, in regards to the overwhelming number of gods and religions vying for the affections of the common Indian, he laments Poor India! No wonder if her mind is bewildered as she listens to such a Babel of voices. Nothing could describe Dimple's testimony better. It is for this reason that, as she was narrating this story to me, I was struck by the words the God who hears me and knew immediately that this was the defining characteristic of the true God as He presented Himself to her. That was the God she needed: the One who heard her.

Dimple spent several months meeting with her family and talking with the people involved in this story to collect everyone's recollections and place them appropriately with dates to produce as accurate a story as possible. Everyone in this book is a real person and, except for those who have passed away in the recent years, are still alive and in India today. For this reason, Dimple wants to censor the names of individuals, except those of her family and the names of those who helped her, so as not to shame any specific person.

Chapter 1

I come from the Regar caste, a Dalit (formerly Untouchable) caste from the western Indian state of Rajasthan. However, even though my language, culture, religion, dress, and traditions were Rajasthani, my parents had moved to New Delhi and I and my four brothers and sisters were all born there and raised in a colony called Madipur, in the north west of Delhi, India's national capital. We considered ourselves Hindu, and we worshiped many of the Hindu gods such as Durga, Hanuman, and Shiva, but our primary god was Ramdev, a Rajasthani god. My family was well known for our devoutness in idol puja. Puja is a ritualistic worship of an idol. It can be done in a group, in which the priest, called the pujari, performs the puja and the people sing, clap, and give offerings, or it can be done privately where one person, usually an elder, performs the puja and the rest of the family perform the role of the singers. Monetary donations from a family puja are later taken to a temple, or a pujari will come by the house to collect them. A puja typically consists of the burning of incense, the lighting of a candle, the waving of offered items in front of the idol, and singing and chanting. All our relatives and neighbors looked at us as an example of righteous people. Whatever troubles or worries came in life, we had such strong faith that Ramdev would get us through that it properly should be called blind faith. We believed and obeyed all the Hindu teaching for obtaining righteousness.

When I was young Papa would fast during the appointed times. Whenever he fasted there was always a feeling of righteousness in our home. He was a hard worker; responsible, honest, and a shining example of a good human being. He strongly believed in Ramdev. He underwent his fasts because he loved Ramdev and wanted to please him. He worked hard every day of the week, except for the days of fasting. On those days, he only worked a half-day. He would come home from work joyfully singing and would spend the second half of the day deep in reverential worship of Ramdev. He would clean the temple in our home and I was happy to help him and sing along with his worship songs. He taught me about the holy things of the temple. The idols were holy and should never be placed on the floor, so we put them in a bowl while cleaning the temple. The waste products of puja, the remains of burned offerings, were holy and couldn't be thrown in a normal trashcan. We either had to dispose of them in running water, such as a river, or at the base of a tree that was near a temple. I would wash all the idols in running tap water and put them back in the temple. Such would conclude a typical cleaning of the temple and preparing it for the next puja.

My home was seventy five square feet and consisted of two rooms. The inside room, the bedroom, had our bed, TV, and temple. The outside room, the kitchen, had the cooking utensils, a door to the bathroom (which was a room only for bathing), and the front door leading to outside. Our toilet was just outside the front door, in a small room that held only a single person. Whenever there was a special occasion, such as a large community puja, or a festival, we went through a larger routine in our home than for just a typical puja. We all fasted and cleaned the entire home. Mommy cooked food that would be offered to Ramdev and afterwards was distributed to the participants of the puja (this post-puja food is called prashad). Papa took a bath and wore a white kurta and pajama (a kurta is a collar-less shirt that generally extends to the knees). Then we made the oopla.

Oopla comes from buffalo dung. Ooplas are considered a necessary and important part of puja, and required a little bit of preparation. People collect it, dry it out, then sell it at religious shops. Once the puja has started the oopla is lit on a fire and we put butter on it. If the butter melts through the oopla and causes the fire to flare up, it means that Ramdev has come and it's time to put the food on the oopla. If the butter didn't go through, we just waited some time then tried again. The oopla from the store is about the size of a small plate. It would be cut into quarters with one quarter used per idol. If we had eight idols in our home, we had to buy two ooplas to cut into eight smaller ooplas. Oopla was also used for larger pujas performed at community temples or events. At the conclusion of any puja, the participants would always spread some of the remains of the oopla on their ears and forehead, and they would eat a tiny amount.

Around seven in the evening everyone would have completed their puja preparations and the family would gather around for the puja. For a family puja there was no need for a pundit (a Hindu priest of the Brahmin caste); Papa served that role. He sat by the idols with the necessary puja preparations and we sat behind him. He garlanded every idol and lit a diya underneath it. A diya is a small, bowl-shaped lamp that held oil and a cotton wick. Next to each diya, Papa sat one dhoop, or bit of incense. While Papa was doing all this, we sat behind him singing and smiling for Ramdev. Then it was time for the oopla. Papa sat one in front of each idol and had a small bowl of butter next to him. He poured the butter on each oopla until the flames flared up, signifying that Ramdev was there to receive our puja. So the food Mommy had prepared was hastily placed on each oopla. After some time, once the fire had consumed the food (which we believed meant Ramdev had consumed the food), we were free to eat the remaining food from the plate, which was distributed among us as prashad. We would also give extra prashad to family and neighbors. Puja could be large or small, with special festivals like Holi and Diwali and Ramdev's birthday receiving large pujas, and routine days receiving smaller ones. Sometimes our relatives joined our pujas; sometimes we did them alone. But we did thousands of them in our earlier life.

Most Dalits in India believe in ancestor worship, and so did we. When a good person died unexpectedly they became a pitra. A pitra is the spirit of that person which has the ability to bless us. The sign of a pitra is a snake, so anytime we saw a snake, either in a dream or real life, we believed our pitra was appearing to us and that we should listen to what it has to say (if in a dream) or feed it milk (if in real life). The pitra had its own temple, separate from the god's temple, and was set up outside of the home. We filled up a pot with water and sat it at that temple every day. If the water level was lower at the end of the day then that meant the pitra was drinking our water. Papa's elder brother maintained this pitra temple, which also meant he was the one through whom the pitra would speak during our pitra puja. After his death, however, Papa took over that job, and that required my family to now hold a special pitra puja every year, as well as when a wedding or birth happened. Those pujas were more expensive, costing nearly 5000 rupees ($100).

Before doing a pitra puja the entire home needed to be cleaned and whitewashed. After the home was cleaned it couldn't be polluted by unclean things like menstruating women, non-vegetarian food, pregnant women, or a woman who had given birth less than 40 days before. If anyone had attended a funeral or anything to do with the processing of a deceased relative, they couldn't enter the home, nor could anyone who had visited a newborn infant. Pitra puja required more items, such as a new stool on which to sit, a new towel, perfume, henna, and white, gender specific clothes for the pitra, depending on if the pitra was male or female. Our pitra was our grandfather, so we bought a kurta and dhoti (a piece of cloth, like a bed sheet, that's wrapped around the legs and knotted at the waist) for him that had been specially hand made with local cotton.

To perform the puja, all the relatives would sit in the room that had been whitewashed. The items for the pitra were placed on the stool, along with a diya and oopla. The women sang for hours, and around midnight the pitra would come and take over the body of the person performing the puja, which was Papa in our case (if the pitra was a female, then a female was required to do the puja). The first thing the pitra did was ensure that the items had been gathered appropriately. If they had been, then the pitra continued with the puja and spoke to everyone in the room, one by one, giving solutions to whatever problems that person presented to the pitra. He blew on each person to bless them and heal them of any sicknesses. This went on until early morning and required continued maintenance of the diya, the oopla, and the incense, all of which were burning the whole night. In the morning the pitra smelled the fragrance of these items and if it smelled good, he declared the puja a success and everyone would be blessed and would come out of whatever life problems they were facing. However, the pitra usually declared the conclusion of the puja to be a failure, which meant that the family would continue in their life struggles and would have to do the puja again with more care.

We asked Papa how he felt while channeling the pitra. He never called the spirits to him, he would just sit in the puja, worshiping deeply in his heart and signing songs with the women. Then his body felt heavy, he would