Meet Grishma Parajuli – International Speaker for Summer School Conferences
Grishma Parajuli has a remarkable story of God’s grace in his life. Here, CMS missionaries G & R share some of the highlights.
“You can pray for me, but I challenge you: I will never become a Christian!”
This was the reply Grishma gave to a senior Nepali nurse who had offered to pray for him.
Grishma, the grandson of a Hindu priest, was very proud of his Brahmin caste. He knew Christians followed the cow-eating religion, touched low-caste people, and didn’t keep Hindu purity rules.
Grishma met the nurse because he was attending Christian meetings as a spy. He was looking for evidence to report to the authorities, and so pretended to be interested in the Christian faith. He had been to church. He had visited patients at the Green Pastures mission hospital. Now he was visiting a mid-week Christian home group.
One of the members of this group was this senior Nepali nurse, who worked at Green Pastures. She too had been a Hindu, but after contracting leprosy years earlier, she had gone to Green Pastures Hospital for treatment. In contrast to the rejection she had experienced from her Hindu community, she was deeply impacted by the genuine love of the staff at the Christian hospital. These people treated everyone with dignity and respected them as equals. Something in her confirmed that the faith of these Christians was true.
In time, she put her trust in God and became a passionate follower of Jesus. She explained to Grishma that unless the Lord opened his heart to know the truth, he would not be able to become a Christian. So she offered to pray for him.
Grishma started reading the New Testament looking for arguments to discredit Christians. However, while reading the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), his heart was touched. He couldn’t help but be impressed with Jesus. Jesus’ teaching was insightful and authoritative, and his lifestyle was consistent with his teaching. Jesus’ miracles pointed to his identity as none other than God Himself.
As Grishma continued to research Christianity, he couldn’t find any evidence for the accusations that Christians were forcing and bribing Hindus to convert. Instead, he became more and more impressed by this community and the way they sacrificially served—especially the poor and despised. In the end, Grishma lost his challenge as God wonderfully answered the nurse’s prayer. Grishma committed his life to Jesus.
Being a high caste Hindu, this decision precipitated intense persecution from his family who threatened him that he would have to choose between his family or Jesus. He couldn’t have both. Like many Nepali converts to Christianity, Grishma experienced what Jesus meant when he taught about the ‘narrow gate’ and the ‘narrow path’ (Matthew 7:13-14). He had to leave home and turn his back on the support of his family.
This all happened over 30 years ago. Today, Grishma is the senior pastor of a thriving church with over 1,000 members and 11 church plants it continues to support. A number of CMS workers in Nepal are members of this church, and the now-retired senior nurse is co-leader of the home group to which G and R belong.
You too can meet Grishma and his lovely wife Laxmi and hear more about his story and ministries. Grishma will be the International Speaker for CMS Summer Conferences in January 2020.
