Will You Go? – OpEd
Sunita aunty still remembers the afternoon that changed everything. She was visiting her neighbors in the government hospital when she noticed an elderly patient lying alone in the corner bed, staring at the ceiling. No family members sat beside him. No one had adjusted his pillow or offered him water. When she approached and asked if she could pray for him, tears rolled down his weathered cheeks. “Beti,” he whispered, “I thought God had forgotten me here.”
This is where Christ’s healing ministry truly comes alive, in the overcrowded hospital wards, the silent homes where the elderly wait for someone to remember them, and even behind the iron bars where hope seems impossible.
Jesus never ministered from a position of comfort or safety. He went to the margins, to the places respectable society avoided. He touched lepers when touching meant becoming an outcast. He spoke with the Samaritan woman whom everyone else ignored. He welcomed children when they were considered interruptions. And throughout His earthly ministry, He demonstrated a profound truth: the Kingdom of God has no boundaries, no locked doors, no visiting hours.
When we bring Christ’s presence to hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons across India, we are not doing something extra or optional. We are continuing the very work Jesus began when He stood in the synagogue and declared, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18).
Those words were not meant only for the comfortable or the free. They were spoken over every human soul trapped behind bars of steel or illness or isolation.
Think about the bedridden grandmother in the small flat whose children have moved to Bangalore or Mumbai for work, whose world has shrunk to one room and the sounds from the street below. When you visit with prayer and Scripture, you are not just being kind. You are proclaiming that she still matters to God, that her life still has meaning, that the Church has not forgotten her. You become Christ’s hands offering comfort. You become His voice reminding her that even now, especially now, she is beloved.
Consider the patient in the crowded ward of the district hospital, surrounded by strangers, facing surgery tomorrow morning, frightened and alone. When you appear at the bedside offering prayer, you are answering Jesus’ call in Matthew 25:36: “I was sick and you visited me.” You are bringing light into a place where fear and uncertainty have been the only companions. Your presence says what words sometimes cannot, that God has not abandoned them in their suffering.
And in the prisons, behind thick walls and locked gates, where society has decided these people are defined only by their worst moments—there, perhaps most powerfully, we witness the radical nature of Christ’s love. When you minister to the incarcerated, you are fulfilling the rest of that verse: “I was in prison and you came to me” (Matthew 25:36). You are demonstrating that no sin is beyond the reach of grace, no person is beyond the hope of redemption.
The beautiful mystery of this ministry is that it transforms us as much as those we serve. When we enter these places of suffering and confinement, we discover Christ already there, waiting. He is in the eyes of the cancer patient in the government hospital. He is in the trembling hands of the elderly uncle who has not prayed aloud in years. He is in the tears of the prisoner who finally believes he might be forgiven.
This work requires no special qualifications, only a willing heart. It demands no eloquent speeches, only genuine presence. Ministry is often simply about showing up and saying through our presence, “You are not alone.”
The homebound, the hospitalized, the imprisoned—they are not interruptions to ministry. They are not projects or duties. They are beloved children of God who need what we all need: to know we are seen, remembered, and loved beyond measure.
That elderly patient Sunita aunty prayed for? His name was Ramesh, and he gave his life to Christ that day in the hospital. But Sunita will tell you she received the greater gift—the privilege of witnessing resurrection happen right before her eyes, in a place the world had written off as forgotten.
This is where Christ’s healing ministry still breaks through in India today. Will you go?
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