A Treasure “Seek” to a Spiritual Pilgrimmage: Surveying India PART ONE

A small survey group traveled on trains, planes, rickshaws and overnight in automobiles from Delhi east, then south into the heart of India on a survey of one of the most strategic places for the reach of the Gospel on this earth. This is PART ONE of our survey.

The state we surveyed in India would be the fifth largest country in the world—if it was a country—with 200 million mostly Muslims and Hindus, and less than 0.1 percent identifying as Christian, with only a handful of cross-cultural workers focused on movements of disciples to Christ.

Dust swirled in frenzied clouds, coating our sandals and salwar cami Indian outfits, seeping through the dupatta shawls pressed against our mouths. We shuffled through the cardboard houses in the dusky evening with fires lit and music blaring, traipsing past toothless staring men wrapped in a single white dhoti linen skirt, chewing tobacco, watching skinny, bare-skinned children play with trash and sticks.

*Praying God’s glory where the rivers Ganges and Yumuna converge*

The Holy Spirit led us here this night, to the convergence of two spiritually significant rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna. Millions of Hindu pilgrims travel here every year to dip in the sacred waters and wash their sins away in the Kumba Mela annual event, the largest religious gathering in the world.

Fort Akbar’s stone wall reached high into the dark sky on our left, remembering the Mughal empire and Persian kings of the past. Squatters and people desperate for healing offered sacrifices to their favorite idols just outside its granite protection, and waited for a miracle. The looming wall cast eerie shadows on the dusty path leading to the river's edge, devoid of people now because night had come.

We walked the path of past pilgrims to the Yamuna and the Ganges, the only westerners today in this city of a million and a half souls.

The spiritual darkness filled our lungs in a physical way. We clasped our hands and pressed them to our chests to relieve the heaviness we felt—thick, dark, oh so painful. The ghosts of pilgrims desperate for forgiveness, healing, and grief for their dead mixed with the sense of evil from the underworld deceiving so many, suffocated our senses.

We whispered to each other, struggling to breathe, in cautious wonder, “Do you feel it too?”

The night before, we had rolled into this strategic, unreached, unengaged city in a rented SUV chatting lightly with our Muslim driver about the buffalo biryani his wife might make for us, listening to worship music on our phone.

The main street of the city seemed oddly familiar and comforting—the wide lanes, triangular roofs, planted trees, and modern stores. Later, we learned the British built this road during their 300-year occupation of India—blocking off the street to anyone of Indian descent in a colonial hideaway from the local people.

We had booked a hotel run by Muslims, clean and happily devoid of the idols and shrines in most other Hindu-run hotels. That morning we walked to breakfast next door at a charming Indian Coffee House. We delighted over a lovely South Indian breakfast offering ten kinds of Masala Dosas, the flaky crepe wrapped around a potato mixture topped with coconut chutney, sipping our cold coffees with ice cream.

Fresh and positive, with only one day to glimpse this pass-through city, we decided our objective for the day: to invite God to show us how he viewed this city and its people.

We agreed to do what I call a Spiritual Treasure Seek (I think the word “hunt” is too brash and prefer a gentler way of “seek”). It this way, we follow Holy Spirit clues to lead us to the people and places He wants us to know about, learn from, and bless.

So, after breakfast, we sat cross-legged on the floor and chairs of one of our rooms, to simply listen first to the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Christ—who lives in us, loves to speak to us, and enjoys a good adventure! We sat silent for about fifteen minutes, asking God to populate our thoughts with impressions, colors, descriptions, pictures of places or people, names that we should look for that day in our spiritual treasure seeking.

We asked God for specific scripture, wrote down our impressions, and then compared our listening prayer experience. Such similarities! Five out of seven pictured some sort of water, rivers, flowing streams—and several received specific names, specific descriptions, and even clothing colors and styles.

In a series of events that can not be described as coincidental, we followed the clues God gave us.

They led to meeting a specific woman with an uncommon name someone wrote on their paper during our listening prayer, wearing specific clothing, in a specific description of a place. The woman actually pinned a location of a place with the water and rivers God that five of the group had pictured in our minds.

Now, here’s where the story of our spiritual scavenger seek gets cloudy, and we almost didn’t follow through.

We had actually visited that location first in the morning, because we knew about the Ganges and Yamuna rivers converging next to Fort Akbar. Instead of going to the river area, we thought we’d tour Fort Akbar first. It was closed.

A quick video from a rickshaw as we drove along theYumuna and Ganges river describing why the spiritual vortex is so important to Hindus.

Next to a famous Hindu temple, the incense from prayers offered to idols wafting in the wind, professional beggars lining the walkway, in 112 fahrenheit degree heat, I felt a sudden physical sickness overwhelm me.

I felt so sick that I had to take a rickshaw back to the hotel. Back in my room, I asked God to show me in the spiritual realm what it looked like by that river at the temples by the Fort because I also felt the sudden physical sickness might be a spiritual attack as well.

A veil ripped the scene of the river and the Fort away, and I saw an army of demonic forces swirling over the waters and in and through the temples, in a massive dark spiritual cloud. It looked like the orcs in the Lord of the Rings, or the creatures in Dante’s inferno. I felt the creatures whispering lies to the millions of pilgrims who passed through there, desperate for forgiveness, healing, and relief from pain.

I prayed the powerful name of Jesus over myself and the survey team. I didn’t feel afraid or sense anything attached to me or any of the group. But God revealed the demonic stronghold that will require believers who move here to arrive trained and ready for the spiritual realities in the heavenlies.

Cross cultural workers who move here must know how to fight not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and rulers of this world in Ephesians 6, equipped with the sword of the Spirit, the breastplate of truth, the helmet of salvation, the belt of righteousness, and sandals of peace.

So, when the woman we found in our Treasure Seeking literally grab one of our phones and dropped a pin back at the same location by the river—and said we must go after 7pm at night—all of us were not sure if we should continue following the clues later that night.

A few of us decided to meet with a like-minded Indian Christian professor at a college nearby in the late afternoon, a pre-arranged contact from a previous survey trip. As often happens when meeting with people in India, time stretches and he took us to tour his college, away from the river.

7pm came and went.

Three others on our survey team, who had no previous experience in India, were resting back at our hotel a half hour away.

We kept texting back and forth, Should we go? It’s getting dark and it’s late. Surely, it’s nothing.

Some said, But remember, we were doing a spiritual scavenger hunt today, shouldn’t we obey a clear sign to be there at that time, even though we don’t know why?

Yes, others replied, the ones at the hotel can go because the rest of us are with this professor.

Then one person with spiritual gifts of discernment said, No, we’re not supposed to go alone. Let’s tell the professor we must go, and we’ll meet there together.

That’s how the seven of us and the professor (who said he had never done anything like this before) found ourselves near the path of pain for millions of previous pilgrims, leading away from the slum and the Akbar Fort walls, towards the convergence of the River Ganges and the River Yamuna, and a spiritual vortex.

We looked to the heavens, Lord of Heaven’s Hosts, What would you have us do here?

We felt God’s answer deeply in our Spirits. Go to where the rivers converge. Pray, worship. Pray the glory of God into this place. Pray light into the darkness. Don’t engage the darkness or the evil spirits, just worship me here.

And so we did.

We walked boldly down to the river's edge in the dark, away from the people and the noise, praying out loud. We prayed scripture and God’s glory so hard. We identified with past pilgrims coming to release their evil spirits, trying to clean themselves and their sin in the river and wash away the depression and grief of their dead.

Tears came unbidden, as we still struggled to breathe, feeling the pain pressing in on our chests. A glimpse of how Jesus must have felt in the Garden of Gethsemane, as he anticipated carrying the pain and sin of everyone in the whole world on himself, feeling it, and knowing the weight of it.

At the river's edge, we prayed more, from our gut, deeply interceding for those that came before and will come again to the next Kumba Mela, literally millions of Hindus who come every year. Praying over the gentleman in the striped black and white shirt (another clue) that rode his motorcycle to the rivers edge that night and dipped his feet in the river beside us, praying for healing.

The lights across the river flickered and the breeze blew a wind stirring the waters. Fires burned in the distance as people cremated the bodies of their loved ones, and would later throw their ashes in these rivers, praying for their reincarnation to a better life. They were desperately trapped in a never-ending cycle of existence with no hope, no confidence, no knowledge of the next life.

Then, we worshiped God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.

As we sang a feeble but heartfelt Holy, there is none beside you, there is no one like you, lead me in love to those around me, the darkness seemed to part. The heaviness on our chests started to lift, and we could sense the presence of good and of angelic beings nearby.

[Video of us singing]

I’ve never experienced the physical and the spiritual realm interact so visibly in my body before.

We re-traced the path of the pilgrims to the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers, back to Fort Akbar and the slums, and the noise, fires, and chaos.

But the heaviness in our chest felt lighter, and the darkness dimmed.

We continued to pray hope over the people who would walk this path in the future, that they would experience a King who could wash away their sins and their grief with his own blood, rescue them from an uncertain future, and give them a place in the Kingdom of God as citizens of light.

Yes, we saw this city and its people the way God sees it.

It hurt. God hurts.

Who will keep praying for the city, its people, and their future freedom?

Who will move here to love, learn the language, mobilize the few believers, and bring light to the darkness?

If you love the idea of learning tools like doing a Spiritual Treasure Seek or learning how to do Listening Prayer, I teach you how step-by-step (along with dozens of other spiritual outreach practices) in The Neighbors & Nations Course. Read all about it and get on the Waitlist to be the first to know when enrollment is open again.