The Song That Outlasts the Day

Sundar Singh grew up in a Sikh family in Punjab, and by the time he was a teenager he had made up his mind about Christianity — against it. The hostility was not casual. It was the settled position of a young man who took God seriously enough to argue about him. But the arguing did not settle anything. What followed was a period of religious searching, the kind that wears a person down, where the questions stop being interesting and start being heavy. He was looking for something he could not name, and the answers he had inherited were not holding. Then, in his own account, he saw Jesus. Not an argument, not a book, not someone else's reasoning — a vision. Whatever else that moment held, it ended the search. He embraced Christian faith, and the young man who had set himself against the name of Christ became the young man who belonged to him. His family opposed the conversion. That is the account's plain sentence, and it carries a whole world inside it: a household that had raised him, a faith that had shaped his childhood, a future that had been assumed for him. The opposition was real, and it cost him. What he did next was strange and deliberate. He adopted the clothing and the itinerant way of life of an Indian sadhu — the wandering holy man, owning little, settled nowhere in particular — and he preached about Christ. Not from a fixed post, but on the road. He travelled through India and other parts of Asia. He went toward Tibet, more than once, into country that was not waiting for him. He wrote, too — books including At the Master's Feet, in which he set down what he believed and what he had known of God. Those writings, and that wandering, made him a prominent Indian Christian evangelist in the early twentieth century. Notice what he did not do. He did not become a foreigner in order to become a Christian. He took the new life he had been given and carried it in his own clothes, on his own roads, in his own voice. The song was new. The voice was his.