The Indian Boy Who Tore Apart the Missionary's Bible

In December 1904, fifteen-year-old Sundar Singh of Rampur, Punjab, was consumed with rage against Christianity. Grieving his mother's death and furious at the missionaries who had come to his village school, he tore a Bible apart page by page and burned it in his courtyard. His family and neighbors watched approvingly. Nothing good, they agreed, could come from these foreigners and their strange teachings.

Three days later, Sundar stood in the dark before dawn, ready to throw himself beneath the 5 a.m. express train. But first, he cried out one desperate prayer: "If there is a God, reveal yourself to me before I die." In the silence of that room, he later testified, Christ appeared to him — not as a stranger, but as One who already knew him, who had watched him weep, watched him rage, watched him tear the sacred pages.

"I saw you," Christ seemed to say, "even then."

Sundar Singh spent the next twenty-five years as a barefoot sadhu, walking the roads of India and Tibet, telling everyone who would listen about the God who had seen him before he ever thought to look.

Nathanael sat under his fig tree, perhaps praying, perhaps wrestling with doubt, certain he was alone. But Jesus told him, "I saw you." The Most High does not wait for our seeking to begin His knowing. He sees us in our hidden places — in our anger, our longing, our quiet desperation — and still He says, "Follow Me."