Barak Gurung journeyed from from Buddha to Jesus. Faithful persistence by his daughter helped Gurung find the way.
“I’ve a Nepalese background. 90% of the population is Hindu, so they believe in Hindu, God and God. They have 33 million gods.
“But because they said that Buddha was born in Nepal, that’s why they believe in both Hinduism and Buddhism. So before I came into the Lord, I was a Buddhist. I used to believe Hindu and Buddhist, both.”
The story of how he came to faith in Jesus Christ begins with his daughter. Gurung was unsatifised with her Sience Maths and English results at a local catholic school so he sent her to the Presbyterian Ladies College, Croydon in Inner West Sydney. They accepted her on probation, a six month tryout, with extra tutoring from the college.
“It was a bit different for her in that college because they have everyday worshipping and the Bible study and also preaching. She received the Lord Jesus – her first year at Croydon – but she told us a couple of years later after it happened.
“So she was caught up with the Holy Spirit. She started to study the Bible and she brought the Bible home and then my wife told her that we do not believe in that. So we basically told her not we study the Bible, but she used to read the Bible putting the Bible inside the her, study books, so we didn’t know.”
“So after six months her performance, she subject was improving and after and then we went for interview after six months and the PLC principal told us that her study is getting better. So they were happy to take her as a full-time high school student.
“We asked out daughter how did you do so well. She told us that Holy Spirit helped her to get the improvement in these three subjects. We are quite surprised, but we still told her, ‘okay, don’t take Jesus Christ as your Lord because we have our own culture and tradition in Hinduism and Buddhism and we do believe in this them. And our ancestors worshiped Buddhist idols, so that’s what we should be. So a second year passed, then a third and fourth and she finished high school. She was admitted in University of Technology at Sydney studying for a Bachelor of Nursing
“So she was with her couple of other Christian students and they went to church, but we didn’t know. She she used to go church weekly, and some conferences and she also went to Hillsong.
Then in 2016 she and two of other friend got baptised and she didn’t tell us that she was baptised, but we came to know later on.”
“My wife said to her ‘Why you take Christianity as your religion?’ And we were bitter with her.
In 2019 Gurung’s daughter asked her parents to a special event.
“She told us, ‘Both of you have this 25th marriage anniversary and the pastor would like to give you the blessing. Would you please come to the church?’ So we went to the church just to get the blessing, not to receive the Lord. But so on that day we listened some of the worship songs and preaching and in the pastor gave us a blessing.
“After a month, she again invited both of us to a conference. That conference was actually held in Cairns in Queensland. So we decided not to go there. But she keep insisting ‘come for the conference.’ So we told her that, ‘okay, we’ll go to Cairns, just as tourists to look at the Great barrier reef and other tourist destinations but not to go to the conference.’
“But when we flew to Cairns, we were staying at one of the apartment that our apartment was really close to the conference centre. I was a bit curious how their church will look like. So I I did a morning walk and they went to the church. I came back and then had a breakfast and my daughter told us that, ‘Okay, you can go to your destination, look at the Great Barrier Reef – But come for the inauguration, the conference inauguration for one hour.’
“We sat down in the conference hall and they started worshipping. After one pastor preached, another pastor asked all the small children to come down the front.to be annointed with oil. We didn’t know at that time what is annointingand other things, but the small children went to the pulpit and pastor anointed their heads and about five or six children fell on the floor. So we were surprised how just by the anointing of the oil and just by praying, how the children can fall on the floor.
“We saw one of the small lady, I think she was about a year eight, she was still on the floor and she was not getting up. So we were quite surprised why she was still on the floor. So when she got up after almost like a half an hour, the pastor asks her ‘Why you are sleeping on the floor such a long time?’
“So she told everybody at the conference saying that when she fell on the floor, the Lord Jesus came and took her hands and take her to the heaven. And when she entered into the heaven, the heaven was very beautiful. So she and Lord Jesus was walking on the heaven beside there was a stream of water. The water has got a different varieties of fish like red, yellow, little blue, green fish.
They went a bit further up and they saw a lot of flowers like sunflowers. And the flower in front of them, smilled and greeted them. And then they saw a lot of other fruit like apple trees, like banana trees and all a lot of other fruit trees.
“The Lord took her a little bit up a hill, on the hill, to see how the heaven would look like. She looked at the whole heaven on the horizon and the earth was very, very beautiful. Even the floor was a shining kind of for gold and it was very, very beautiful. She enjoyed the beauty of the heaven. And then the Lord told all that, now you have to go back because you have to be in and then you have to still do a lot of your walk, and then the Lord grabbed her hand and ber back. And then she woke up.
“I didn’t know what my wife thought of it, but I thought that, ‘oh, so Lord Jesus is the king of heaven, so there is a real king in there is a real heaven and that’s how the heaven will look like.’ . So because of that testimony, I was some curious and had questions I wanted to ask the Pastor. And then we didn’t go to the tour destination on that day. We stayed in the conference the whole day.
“On the second day we are supposed to leave for the Great Barrier Reef. And our daughter again told us, ‘okay, you can go to the Great Barrier Reef tomorrow, why don’t you stay today? Today is another interesting day.’ So we agreed on our daughter’s request. And then on the second day the pastor started preaching about the King David.”
Gurung listened to the story of David being made King, selected although he was the seventh son and Jesse hauled in from shepherding sheep and being annointed by Samuel. “The pastor was giving that history of David in such a beautiful way that we can understand the heart of the Lord, we can understand how God will look at the heart of the people, not the physical appearance.
“I was really amazed how God loved the people and how God will listen our prayers. At that time, the Holy Spirit was inside me and actually though I didn’t feel that I was kind of nervous as well as I was basically kind of crying. And then I was a bit ashamed because then I looked at my right and left to see if any other people were also crying. When I glanced the people on the left hand, I found that there are other people crying.
“On that day, the Holy Spirit caught me and then I really started getting a feeling of the love of God. T he presence of the Holy Spirit in that conference hall was so strong and a lot of small children, a lot of other people was actually basically crying and on that day. So after that day, I feel that the love of God.
“When we finished the conference it was a hard day, we didn’t understand most of the things in Bible because we never had read the Bible. We came back to Sydney and then we gave some of our colleagues and our relatives the story of the conference, , give them the story of our experience of the Lord Jesus and Christianity.
“Most of our friend told us that its just because your small daughter took you guys for a conference and you are believing your daughter but she’s she’s still very young. They discouraged us. Telling us not to accept Christianity.
My wife thought of that we should come back to our Hinduism and Buddhism. There was a priest in Sydney. So she was about to call the priest and ask him to come to the home and to do some kind of ceremony or puja. She was like a kind of telling the Hindu God that we were in a Christian conference, but we want to come back through our religion.
“When she was able to call the priest, the Hindu priest, my daughter grabbed her hand and took her to another room and my daughter prayed for my wife. She was praying to the Lord and she was crying. And when she finished praying, my wife, had a heartfelt need for his voice, and a burden she had felt in her body was gone.
“My wife told my daughter that, okay, from this day to day I’ll not look at the Hindu and the Buddhist gods, but I’ll follow the Jesus Christ. But I was not there that day.
But we started slowly started going to the church, we started reading the Bible, we started worshipping and we started singing the songs of the Lord Jesus. We came to know that Hindu and Buddhist gods were not true gods. When we did some of the Bible stories, there weremany king of Israel, they also were worshipping the idols and they have been in many troubles because our God is a jealous God.
“So we came to know that the real God in the heaven and earth, and then we were invited fto be baptised . So basically within four to five months we believe in the Lord. We read the Bible, we basically went for a baptism. I used to drink a lot of alcohol before I used to smoke. But after the baptism, I relinquished everything. I didn’t drink any after that. I never drink any alcohol.
“Wonderful things happened in our life. So we left all our religions. We used to have a lot of ion like eating, drinking, playing cars, drinking overnight after the midnight, early, after the early morning the next day we used to sleep the whole day. So all those kind of things, all those burdens, all those things, everything, we have been been completely released from them.”
Image: PLC Croydon where the Gurung family’s journey began. Image Credit: PLC instagram