This story was shared by Dr. Robert Roegner, former Executive Director of LCMS World Mission. On a summer Sunday in 2004, after he had worshiped with a Lutheran congregation in Nagercoil, India, five pastors of our Indian partner church asked him to travel with them that afternoon to a village where a new church had been started. They were going to baptize the first new believers there. It was about a two-hour drive. When they arrived, they drove up to a tent with open sides that had been pitched for the service. Worship already had begun. About 250 to 300 were at worship. About 40 of them were to be baptized and were in the first four rows, dressed in white. When it was time for the baptisms, the five pastors jumped up. One grabbed a basin of water, one took the certificates, and another had a Bible. After the first person confessed his faith and said he renounced the devil and all his works, he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and gave it to a pastor. The pastor looked at the paper and announced the persons’s name. Then another pastor baptized him in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

They went up one row and down another, baptizing those who were there. In the middle of the third row was a woman in her early 20s. She gave the pastor her paper. She had a little 4- or 5-year-old girl holding onto her. The pastor announced her name, and she was baptized. She began to cry. Then her daughter was baptized, and the woman cried even more. The pastors finished baptizing those in the third row, and she continued to cry. They finished the fourth row, and she was still crying. After the service, Roegner asked a pastor who spoke English to help him talk to this woman. They talked for a couple of minutes, then he said, “I couldn’t help but notice after baptism that you were crying—a lot. I guess those tears are because you are so happy that you were baptized and have become a child of God.”

She said, yes, she was happy that she is a child of God, that Jesus is in her heart, that she has received God’s free grace, and that she has forgiveness for all the sin and bad things she had done in her life. This brought tears of joy to her eyes. “But,” she said, “while I have tears of joy flowing from my left eye, I have tears of sorrow flowing from my right eye.” So he asked, “Why so sad as well?” She looked him square in the eye and said, “While I have received Jesus in my heart today and His grace and forgiveness, my husband, my mother and father, my brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, and all of my cousins do not know God’s grace and forgiveness because they still live in the darkness of all the Hindu gods.”

Roegner shared with her 1 Peter 2:9—“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” He challenged her to not let God’s love, grace, and forgiveness be only for her and her daughter, but to go and tell her husband, her mother, her father, and her other family members about Jesus.

Roegner returned to United States, and kept her in his mind and on his prayer list for three or four months. As happens over time, other prayers came to mind and he forgot about her. In January 2005, he received an e-mail from the pastor who had done the translating for him. He was so happy to tell Roegner that he and the other pastors were returning to this same village on Easter Sunday afternoon and were going to perform at least as many baptisms as they had when he had been there with them the previous summer. He was excited to report that a majority of those Easter baptisms would be members of this woman’s family, including her husband and her mother and father.

When she realized that God had called her out of darkness so that she could be a light to others, she acted. And as a result, many in her family came to know and believe in Jesus as well.

Never stop letting your Gospel light shine for those around you to see. You never know how God will use you to show Jesus and His love to those in your life.