Saving India’s Daughters

But in 2007, the year both colleges began offering graduate-level courses, tragedy struck again. Job’s oldest son, John, had moved to Dubai, where he operated a computer business as a cover for an underground Christian printing press. He distributed Bibles throughout Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other nations officially closed to Christian evangelism, and untold thousands had been reached with the gospel. But Jobs says, “Unfortunately, I got a dead body from Dubai.”

Job says his son’s murder by radical Muslims made him want to do even more to help girls in need. “We cannot sit there and cry,” he says. “When they are gone, they are gone. They will not come back. Only we can go there. So I thought, God is giving me an opportunity to surrender full time, 100 percent, for these girls. So I told God, ‘If You give me a chance, I will adopt 1,000 girls.’”

The numbers grew rapidly in 2008, when Hindu radicals killed dozens of Christians in Orissa state and forced some 24,000 to flee into the jungles. Job took in 200 girls from Orissa state alone whose parents had been murdered or displaced in the violence. “Suddenly, they came like a wild wind,” he says.

With support from donors worldwide and a staff of 128, Job now cares for 504 girls from 22 Indian states and neighboring nations such as Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, China and Tibet. Some are the children of martyred Christians. Others have parents ministering in places too dangerous for their daughters. Many of the girls have survived horrific circumstances.

As a newborn, Amy was buried alive behind a factory. Because her head peeked out from the ground, an elderly man heard her crying. “He took his torchlight and went behind the factory, and saw this girl,” Job says. “He pulled the girl out, and she’s in our orphanage now.” Job named the child Amy Carmichael after the 20th century British missionary to India.

There’s a Corrie ten Boom at Job’s center too, and a Naomi, an Esther and a Shekinah. He named one girl Lois, after Timothy’s grandmother in 2 Timothy. She was found between the bodies of her father and mother the morning after Hindu radicals murdered them and other Christians. “They spared her because she’s a girl nobody wants,” Job says. “You kill a girl in the Hindu religion, you’ll be born as a girl. So usually they don’t kill girls.”

A local pastor brought her to Job’s orphanage, but initially she wouldn’t speak. “She was afraid,” Job says. “She had seen the dead bodies, the killing.”

When an elderly volunteer from Norway visited the orphanage on a missions outreach, Job assigned the woman to be Lois’ roommate. She got Lois to smile and talk as she showed the little girl picture books telling the story of Jesus.

“She was showing these pictures, photographs, books, pages after pages, telling the story to our Lois,” Job recalls. “And Lois says, ‘Mama, this man in the picture came to my home when my parents were killed and told me: “Don’t cry, Lois. I will take you to a good place where you will have good food, good rest, good education.” ’ That is my Michael Job Center.”

Girls like Lois will one day become change agents in India, says Cindy Collins, global outreach director for Operation Outcry, a ministry that reaches out to women who have been hurt by abortion. “[The center] is a place of preparation for these young women that have been rescued out of death, out of seeing their parents martyred, out of abandonment, out of being buried alive,” says Collins, who has volunteered at Job’s center three times in the last two years, most recently in June. “It is a place of preparation and destiny for these women to bring change in their nation.”

‘He Holds My Hands’

Despite officially having religious freedom, India remains a dangerous place to be a Christian. In 2009 there were more than 152 attacks on Christians, according to the Evangelical Fellowship of India. And though the government espouses religious tolerance, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom placed India on its watch list again this year because of ongoing communal violence and a largely inadequate government response.

Much of the violence is politically motivated, with Hindu nationalist political parties seeking both religious and political dominance. Five states, including Orissa, have passed anti-conversion laws, which have led to dozens of arrests this year.

Because all the world’s major religions are represented in India—the nation has a Hindu majority and one of the world’s largest Muslim populations—Job says evangelism is fiercely competitive.

“We have to fight for our existence when we say we are Christians,” Job says. “When you say Christianity is the only way to heaven, people will kill you.”

But suffering isn’t something Christians should shy away from, the evangelist claims. “It is by suffering that one learns to surrender to the Lord,” he writes in Turn Your Sorrow. “Therefore, suffering is a means of coming closer to God.”

That is how his faith survived his sons’ deaths, how he continued working in ministry despite his loss. He says God held his hand.

“When my sons were killed, I got the strength from above,” he says. “Jesus is holding our hands. That is called grace.

“It is not only Paul’s experience in the darkness of life. … It is also my personal experience that He holds my hands,” Job adds. “It is not easy, but I have experienced that power, that grace, in the midst of darkness.”

Six months after Michael’s murder, Job told his wife that they wouldn’t understand why God allowed their son to die until they reached heaven. But he’s changed his mind.

“Now I can tell her [504] children are living, they have life, they have education, they have a hope, they have a future,” he says. “So now I have an answer on this earth before I reach heaven.

“So you don’t need to wait to be in heaven to know. This is the kingdom on earth.”

Adrienne S. Gaines is news editor of Charisma.

To give to the ministry of Rev. P.P. Job, go to christianlifemissions.com

Take a picture tour through The Michael Job Center for orphaned girls at jobcenter.charismamag.com