The Open Gates of Mukti

During the devastating Indian famine of 1896, Pandita Ramabai — a Sanskrit scholar turned Christian — threw open the gates of her mission compound in Kedgaon, India. She sent ox carts into the countryside to gather starving widows and abandoned girls whom no one else would touch.

They arrived skeletal, dressed in rags, many too weak to walk. Ramabai asked nothing of them — no caste credentials, no payment, no religious test. She simply fed them, clothed them, taught them to read, and told them about a God who offered living water to the thirsty.

By 1900, nearly two thousand women and children lived at Mukti Mission. Critics called her reckless. How could she promise shelter when her own funds were nearly gone? But Ramabai understood something her critics did not: she was not the source. The Almighty was.

"Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters," Isaiah wrote. "You who have no money, come, buy and eat." This is the scandal of divine grace — it costs us nothing because it cost God everything. Ramabai's open gates were a dim reflection of God's own invitation: not a transaction but a gift, extended to the desperate, the forgotten, and the empty-handed.

God's economy has always bewildered the world's accountants. His ways are higher than ours. And His table never runs dry.