That Time We Sang In Hindi

“Your Love is a symphony, all around me, running through me.  Your Love is a melody, underneath me, running to me.  Your Love is a song.” – Switchfoot

“Do you hear that, Shine?”  It was a sound straight out of my church childhood – the all too familiar tempo of clapping in unison with every | single | beat.  “What is that?” Shiny pushed the door open and we looked right at the platform.  Boto was strumming a guitar, but I was hearing notes played with the exotic twang of a sitar.  The dude striking the djembe produced tones and rhythm I might hear from a tabla.  By this time, I was locked in because I knew what I was about to hear would not be found in the CCLI catalog.  But the vocals began – “Ooooohhhhh…aaaahhhhh…”  I blinked several times.  It sounded like we were about to sing Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To but instead we sang Rabb Ki Howe Sanna.  I never heard this before.  Neither did most of my fellow second gen mallus (or ABCD’s – American Born Confused Desis – depending on your cultural identity perspective).  Yet it wasn’t long before most of us were clapping and singing along in Hindi, a tongue most of us do not know and can’t help being familiar with.  I cannot remember how many times we repeated the stanzas.  But I do recall looking around the room and seeing ear to ear smiles, hearing the clapping, and feeling the passion.  When the Jackson Heights Community Church team led us in the call and response of Amrit Vani Teri, my mind and heart were divided.  I was singing as loud as I could, but I was also wondering what I was experiencing?  Why so much resonance?

Since October, my family of five have sung along with the Dhanyavad album at home and in the car.  Shiny and I have also talked through why singing in Hindi at Advance Initiative 2017 wrought such an impact in our hearts.  We also enlarged the conversation to include others who attended the conference, as well as those who didn’t, to help us rightfully be grateful to God for the experience, but to also ensure we do not ascribe undue attention to music instead of the Maker.

Singing A New Song

We both remembered early on in our involvement with global missions (before we even knew each other), the seminal quote from John Piper’s Let The Nations Be Glad!, “Missions exists because worship doesn’t.”  Even as I type those words, I am stirred.  This is the fuel of church planting, is it not?  For the sake of worship all over the world among every people group and coming from every language, we together, make every effort to tell the Good News of the Gospel.

Dozens of Malayalam  hymns and choruses are permanently lodged in my memory.  Many of those I vaguely understand (no small feat given that I only speak conversational Malayalam).  But I have often lamented that beyond the borders of my immigrant church, or even the borders of Kerala, I had no song to sing to Indians who weren’t like me.  I was deeply saddened that though doubting Thomas brought the Gospel to India, the Saving knowledge of Christ has yet to sweep over her.

Imagine, then, the mercy of God as He met us through singing in Hindi at the conference.  What a delight to have scales fall from our eyes and behold the risen Christ building His church from Kerala to New Delhi to Nagaland to Maharashtra.  As we sang, the Narnian-like winter of our souls began to thaw and melt, and the Lord of the color green was giving us fresh courage and confidence. Not even the Gateway of India can stop the coming Kingdom, our promised resurrection foretold in His.

There’s a story in the Bible about three young men who were cast into the fire for their unrelenting faith in Yahweh whether or not He actually delivered them.  At one point, when the heat of the fiery furnace is at its deadliest height, the ruler who ordered the execution asks, “Didn’t we throw three men in the fire?”  When this is confirmed, the ruler exclaims, “Then why do I see four?  And the fourth looks like a son of the gods!”  Have you ever seen the national emblem of India?  You know, the one with three lions?  Did you know there are actually four?  Well, since our family added Hindi songs to our worship playlist, we’ve been inspired to wonder and pray expectantly that the fourth might look like the Lion of Judah reigning over India.

It had been 18 years since Shiny and I sang in corporate worship with 10,000+ people at the Urbana Missions conference.  There, we had our first taste of praise songs filling the earth with a thousand tongues including English, Spanish, Chinese, Creole, and Swahili.  The memories of that time have become almost painful stabs of joy – what CS Lewis called sehnsucht, the German word for “inconsolable longing.”  At the Advance Conference, we experienced sehnsucht again.  Now, we don’t speak Hindi (yet – I’m looking at you Rosetta Stone!), our ability to sing in Malayalam is a little rusty, and we are still unapologetically more comfortable singing western Christian songs in English.  But our song is still being shaped by the Conductor.  We are all portraits being drawn into continually sharper focus.  We are part of a global ensemble with acoustic and electric guitars and sitars, drums and tablas, keys and brass, and beatbox and dancing.  As sure as the dimensions of the Gospel are higher, wider, deeper and longer than we can ask or imagine, so too, is the Gospel harmony we are learning as it fills the earth as far as the east is to the west.

Though it won’t come easy, Jesus is making all things new. And He seems to sing, too.  In the Gospels according to Matthew and Mark, at the end of the final meal on the night Jesus was betrayed, the story says Jesus and His disciples did not leave the upper room before singing together. “When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. Then Jesus said to them, ‘You will all fall away because of Me this night.’” Historians and scholars say they likely sang from Psalm 118, the last of the Passover Psalms. The repeated chorus of Psalm 118 is, “His steadfast love endures forever.”  Just imagine it.  Imagine a Singing Savior.  Imagine the Man of Sorrows and His disciples singing Psalm 118 together before heading for Gethsemane.  It’s enough to move us to worship.  And because we’re learning to sing in Hindi, maybe, just maybe next time, we will sing and dance with shoulders shrugging, feet bouncing, and fingers and thumbs stretched out and pointing up like our Punjabi brothers and sisters, to the Truth that His steadfast love endures forever.