On India, Canada and the God who is sovereign over both

It’s a simple room in Kolkata, with nothing but a twin bed and a wooden table. Beside the bed hangs a crown of thorns on the wall. Over the wooden table hangs a map of the world. It is reminiscent of the bowed-over frame of a woman whose prayers and love have changed the world – and my life. Mother Teresa.

As a girl I dreamed at night of Mother Teresa landing in my backyard in an airplane and taking me with her to India. After all, Mum had named me after her.

And for the first time, this November, my dream was finally going to come true. I was going to go to Kolkata. I was going to step into Mother Teresa’s room and visit her Home for the Dying where every precious soul from the streets is loved into eternity.

I had purchased my round-trip ticket. But I didn’t have a visa. I was waiting for the funds.
The day the funds arrived, I went to book my visa. That’s when I received a WhatsApp message from a friend of mine. It said: “India bans visa services for Canadians.”

I was stunned. I thought it was a hoax. But scanning the internet, I quickly realized it was far too real. Our prime minister had accused the Indian government of killing a Sikh leader on Canadian soil. This was serious.

Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar was fatally shot outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, B.C. on June 18. Exactly three months later, in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Trudeau declared that “any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” thus setting off a diplomatic crisis.

I cried. It was a grieving, really. A grieving over life lost, the hurt amongst nations, and the postponing of my dream. And then I remembered all those for whom this was truly serious – those needing medical procedures in India, those with weddings to go to, those for whom family and hope and a future lay across the waters. And I wept for them.

Yet this brings me peace: the Lord is sovereign. How do I know this? On the very day I was going to book my visa, God made getting a visa impossible. From the start, this trip had been covered in prayer – by myself, my friends, and my family. Every detail had been committed to my Savior, the one whose thorns hung from the wall of Mother Teresa’s room. This, our greatest comfort, in an age when “nations conspire and people plot in vain” (Ps. 2).

And so, in light of the One who holds our days, may we reflect the posture of the very woman whose legacy has shaped my life: a bent-over one, bowed before a suffering Christ and a map of the world.