By Michael Ashcraft –
A pious and proud Brahmin Hindu, Uma Moorthy worshiped idols at the temple every day, and the fact that she went to a Catholic school did nothing to change her convictions. But one day in the 12th grade, she heard a teaching from Isaiah 44, when God points out that part of the log gets used to make an idol and the other part gets used to cook food.
“If you have a brain, think and see,” the sister said to the group at the Scripture Union Bible camp to which Uma went for fun with friends.
The message was confrontational and rattled her.
“That night was a sleepless night because as a teenager I felt so bad in front of all my friends,” Uma says on a StrongTower27 video. She hadn’t been singled out from the crowd by the sister. But the Spirit went to work.
“Just out of curiosity and also to go and fight with that sister, I opened the Bible to the Book of Isaiah and started reading. I was reading just to fight with the sister the next day, but as I was reading, I don’t know what happened. The Holy Spirit just transformed me. For the first time in my life, I got to know that the true living God hates idol worship.”
Uma Moorthy was raised in a staunch Hindu family in Chennai, India. She was proud of her heritage and diligent with her duties. She never missed prayers at the temple. She always had the vermilion “third eye” pasted on her forehead. She washed in the Ganges River and planned to go to the Himalayas.
But the religious strivings collapsed upon reading the word of God.
“I cannot compress this omnipresent god to (the confines of) a statue,” Uma says. “This God of the Bible wants to have a relationship with me. When I was a Hindu, I used to worship a thousand gods. But none of those gods wanted to have a relationship with me. But the God of the Bible wanted to have a personal relationship with me. I can call this God Abba Father, my dad.”
As she read the scriptures, Uma also learned that Jesus’ sacrifice was enough for humanity to be forgiven, thereby making all religious striving pointless.
“I used to do a lot of ritualistic sacrifices,” she says. “This God sacrificed himself on the cross of Calvary while I was yet a sinner.”
Intending to stand up for her faith against the sister, she wound up bending her knee to the Savior.
“That day I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior when I was in 12th grade,” she says.
Inevitably, she was persecuted by her family. They threw out her Bibles and wouldn’t let her pray. She had to lock herself in the bathroom at home to pray.
The Lord healed Uma of stammering. She is now an eloquent speaker, and she became a college lecturer.
Her parents eventually relented and allowed her to marry a Christian man, as long as he was original Hindu and still vegan, she says. They now live in California as missionaries with their two children.
When Uma left India, she left one little Bible on a shelf upstairs. She hoped her parents, who always threw out the bigger Bibles, might stumble across it one day in a special moment and open it.
“One day I was feeling down in the spirit and called my dad and shared that I was worried,” she relates.
“He quoted scripture verses from the Bible, and he said, ‘Jesus is with you. Though we are not there, he is there. He is the living God. He did so many miracles in the Bible.’”
Uma was floored.
“Dad, how do you know this?” she asked. “You were against the Bible. How do you know scripture verses?”
He confided that he had found the Bible one day when he was lonely. He had started reading and couldn’t stop.
Furthermore, it was a miracle that he was able to read the tiny print because his failing eyesight, he said, wouldn’t permit him to read the newspaper. He was 77 at the time.
Uma bought and sent him a big letter Bible.
“Every day he’s sending me verses,” Uma says.
When Mom found out that Dad had converted, she was incensed.
However, the pandemic struck fear into the heart of many Indians, including her mom.
One day, Uma shared Psalm 91 to calm her mother’s fears.
The inevitable happened. The Word and the Spirit touched her heart. Today, Mom is a Christian too, and she’s spreading the truth among all the Hindu relatives, Uma says.
“No one can convert anyone,” Uma says. “Only the word of God can convert a man. God has used the pandemic to bring a revival to India. There’s a lot of people who used to be against Christianity, and God is using the pandemic to bring people to Christ.”
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About this writer: Michael Ashcraft is a financial professional in California.