I was shocked to learn Dr. Zacharias studied with the JWs and why he never became a JW, it was the JWs incompetence that lead to Dr. Zacharias leading a different path in life. He's one of the best speakers and logicians in my opinion, he's got two phDs and works with extraordinary men and women willing to speak at any University or Mormon Temple because the word he uses is based off the Word. How come the Governing Body are afraid to attend Q/As at Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, UCLA, Harvard, Rutgers ect..?? Why won't they teach their message and allow students in college chances to ask "Why" instead of cowardly hiding behind the choir like they always do!
"Sometimes we can convince ourselves that the answer to everything lies in economic well-being. Obviously, this is a very important facet of life. When you can afford a meal, a bed, a home for your family, you can be content. But it does not ultimately solve the deepest questions that haunt you. That is where religion is supposed to help, to offer answers.
Whether we like to admit it or not, many religions of the world are concocted to hold fear and control over people. Nobody likes to talk about this, but it’s the way it is. The human psyche is vulnerable because of its built-in fear of failure, and becomes an easy prey.
That’s the way I remember first experiencing religion—as something involving fear: A man rolling down the street, chanting the name of his god. Men and women with deep gashes in their faces. Tales of goats being sacrificed in temples to procure answers to prayers. Each time I asked my mother about these things, she explained, “They do it to worship their god.”
Worship? It was an empty word to me, steeped in some mysterious expression that didn’t make ordinary sense. It was a magic wand to ward off tragedy. The one thing I learned from observing such rituals was a palpable sense of fear. Everything had to follow a certain sequence. If you didn’t do it right, something bad was going to happen to you. If I didn’t make my offering, what would befall me? If I didn’t do this one thing correctly, what price would I have to pay to some sharp, implacable divine being? Was all that just superstition born out of fear, dressed up into a system, and embedded into a culture?
There was one wonderful aspect of the religious world I grew up in that held my fascination—and that was its stories. I loved the pictures; the mythologies; and the ideas of rescue, of winning wars, of magical potions, of how your mother could be saved by some god who came down and carried her away from harm. It was a bit of folklore here, a bit of drama there, a bit of religion, a bit of historical fact, all mixed together.
I used to go with my friends and their families to watch the religious plays at the festivals, and I became quite fond of them. To me, it wasn’t so much religious as that it was part of a family’s annual routine. Each year, when the Hindu god Ram’s birthday came around, I went with my friends to see the plays that reenacted stories about Ram. I loved these dramas, because my little brother Ramesh was named after Ram.
~~~
My siblings and I got our first taste of Western religion when two Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking on our door one day. A Mr. and Mrs. Smith appeared, telling my father they wanted to teach us children to read and to know the Bible. They assured our dad how very important this was.
So the Smiths came to our home once a week, and for the next year and a half they sat in our living room and taught us for an hour or two at a time. I remember reading the Witnesses’ book Let God Be True and the magazines The Watchtower and Awake. Most impressive, though, were the assemblies where they gathered groups and showed movies. One of these movies featured tens of thousands of people attending a Jehovah’s Witnesses rally at Yankee Stadium in New York City. When my siblings and I saw that spectacle, we couldn’t help being awed by it.
Yet, in retrospect, it shows how easily the human mind and heart can be manipulated. Ours was a small family with very little in comparison to most families in the West. And seeing that movie, with all those highly successful-looking people gathered in a magnificent stadium, my siblings’ hearts must have raced as my heart did. I’m sure they also thought, “This has to be true.” It made us want to be part of such a great event, in a great city like New York.
So we continued to study with the Smiths until the day Mr. Smith came to the chapter on heaven in the book of Revelation. He stopped there and told us that, according to Jehovah’s Witnesses’ teaching, only 144,000 people were going to make it to paradise.
That hit me like a ton of bricks. Here my siblings and I had thought we were becoming very spiritual. These Western missionaries had sat with us each week, giving us homework and encouraging our studies. But now I scratched my head over this news. I asked Mr. Smith, “Only 144,000?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Sir, how many people are there in your organization?”
“Oh, we have many.”
“Do you have more than 144,000?”
“Oh yes.”
“So even all of your people aren’t going to make it to heaven?”
I thought of the Smiths’ constant praying, of all their efforts to reach more and more people—and yet even they had no way of knowing where they were going after death. So they certainly couldn’t assure me of where I might be going.
“Mr. Smith, before you came, I didn’t know where I was going after I died,” I said. “But now, after all this study, I still don’t know where I’m going after I die.”
They probably sensed they were up against something difficult at that point. Or perhaps my outright shock over this curious point of doctrine registered with them more deeply than normal. But not long afterward, the Smiths were succeeded by another couple, and when they sensed they were getting nowhere, they stopped coming to our house. Who knows, in another six or eight months, maybe we would have been convinced by them. But at that stage, I told myself, “I don’t much care for this. I’m done with Christianity.”
I didn’t know that it wasn’t Christianity I was rejecting, but I really had no idea how to distinguish one sect from another. At best, each of us was only thinking pragmatically, “What is it that’s going to work for me?”
~~~
Like most of India, my mother was very spiritual and at the same time very superstitious. In our home hung a picture of Saint Philomena, a Catholic saint, because of a commitment my mom had made after my sister Shyamala (Sham to us) was diagnosed with polio at five days old. The doctor gave Sham no hope of surviving, and in desperation my mother decided to send a gift to the Saint Philomena shrine in South India. She pledged that if my sister would get through this, my mother would give money to the shrine faithfully.
Sham survived. In her younger years she wore a crude knee brace from just above the knee to her ankle and walked with a bit of a hop. (Today, after a surgery, she has only a slight limp that is virtually undetectable.) But what was most important to my mother was that her daughter’s life was spared. That is why, almost until the day Mom died, she faithfully sent money to the Saint Philomena shrine. It is also why my sister Sham was given the middle name Philomena.
After that ordeal, our family was brought to the brink again years later over our baby brother Ramesh. I especially was very close to him, so it struck me hard when little Ramesh, only six or seven years old, became ill with double pneumonia and typhoid. Very little could be done in those days for someone in his condition, and the doctors offered us no hope.
I remember the evening my parents decided to take us to the hospital to visit our brother in what we sensed might be our last time to see him. I was deeply shaken when I witnessed what had happened to Ramesh. He was shriveled down to a bag of bones. I barely recognized him; he looked like a picture of a starved child. After seeing him, we all expected that this would be the night he would die.
My mother stayed at the hospital with my brother while my dad took us home. We gathered for prayer in my parents’ bedroom around a picture of Jesus that hung on the wall beside the picture of Saint Philomena. I recall that night clearly, on our knees in that room, my father’s voice cracking as he prayed. I couldn’t believe we were losing him. My little brother was really dying.
One of the people my dad had called to come and pray with us was a certain Pentecostal minister. Mr. Dennis had come to our house occasionally on his motorbike to talk with my dad and pray with him. We used to make a lot of fun of Mr. Dennis and to joke behind his back because he always sang when he prayed. He simply broke out into song, and it sounded so odd to us. We were unkind because we had no clue what this was all about, and our Hindu servants in the house reprimanded us for making fun.
But now, with my brother dying, I prayed as I never had, alongside Mr. Dennis and the others in the room that night. In a voice of deep reverence, this man asked God for a touch of healing, for a miracle. There was nothing funny now. I was moved to tears as he called on the Lord to have mercy on my brother.
Meanwhile, the doctor had come to my mother soon after we left the hospital. He uttered to her the worst news of her life. “Sometime between midnight and 5:00 a.m.,” he said, “it will be over.”
My mother had not slept for several days. She had sat by Ramesh’s side the entire time. Now, as she faced the torturous hours ahead, she was overcome with exhaustion. She simply couldn’t keep her eyes open. As the night wore on, she fell sound asleep at my brother’s bedside.
Hours later, my mother suddenly shocked herself awake. When she realized what had happened, she feared the worst. The hour had long passed at which Ramesh was to have gone. Yet when she looked at my brother, she saw that he was still breathing. In fact, his chest now rose and fell with a stronger rhythm than before. Something had happened during the night.
When morning came, my mom sent a message to us that Ramesh was looking stronger and better. None of us were sure what this meant. But the same message came to us on the second day, then the third day, then the fourth. Our brother had made the turn, and his strength was restored.
In our family’s collective memory, this was one of our most defining moments. I don’t know to what degree Mr. Dennis’s prayer consciously played a role in this monumental episode of our history. But to me, there was something of God in it.
I don’t recall ever seeing Mr. Dennis again, though I have often thought of him. He was a missionary living on a meager salary, a living saint. Somebody must have supported him. Why did he pick our family to visit? Was this not God in the shadows, keeping watch over His own? I did not think of it then, but I see it now. I made an association with the life of prayer and calling in that man, and with the miracle we all had witnessed—my brother’s life had been spared.
~~~
Being back here in my mother’s brother’s home brings me closer, I sense, to the reality of a sovereign God. I can never forget that sovereignty behind my life, and it brings to mind a great Indian custom.
If you travel to the north of India, you will see the most magnificent saris ever made, and Varanasi is where the wedding saris are handwoven. The gold, the silver, the reds, the blues—all the marvelous colors threaded together are spectacular. These saris are usually made by just two people—a father who sits on a platform and a son who sits two steps down from him. The father has all the spools of silk threads around him. As he begins to pull the threads together, he nods, and the son responds by moving the shuttle from one side to the other. Then the process begins again, with the dad nodding and the son responding. Everything is done with a simple nod from the father. It’s a long, tedious process to watch. But if you come back in two or three weeks, you’ll see a magnificent pattern emerging.
This is an image I always remind myself of: we may be moving the shuttle, but the design is in the mind of the Father. The son has no idea what pattern is emerging. He just responds to the father’s nod.
Back here in my homeland, I see the threads. My family, my home city, my spartan beginnings, a life having come out of nothing—I’m reminded again that the threads are all being pulled together.
This is the only explanation for the great irony in my being here now. You see, of all five siblings in my family, I had the unhappiest childhood. Yet I am the one who is most drawn to come back.
It’s unexplainable. All of my siblings are natural leaders, and all live in Toronto today. Each had the beginnings of his or her success and happiness sown here, in India. Ajit, the oldest, was an engineer with IBM in the 1970s who later went on to his own commercial success as an entrepreneur. You would think he’d want to come back to the place where his mind was shaped, where all his dreams and hopes and promises were formed. You would think the same of my younger brother, Ramesh, now a successful surgeon, and my two sisters, Sham and Prem. I have no doubt they have this desire, but not one shares the deep, soul-wrenching, unshakable tug that I feel. Ramesh does tell me, “I want to go back sometime. But I want to do it with you, Ravi.”
I’m the one who keeps coming back—and who wants to keep coming back. I have maintained the language and the contacts, mainly by walking these streets. When I return and see the buildings and the beauty and the people, I reminisce, “This is where my life was shaped. This is where my calling began. And this is where I very nearly ended it all, out of my own despair.”
The sound of a voice crying out to God, a voice that once spelled terror in my heart, is now the very cry to which I respond with a sense of privilege all over the world. Still, to me, coming back is a dip into an ocean too deep for me to fully fathom. The full story only the tapestry can explain.
Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries."