Sinha refused. According to the account documented by International Christian Concern, mob leaders Bisahu Dhruv, Mansa Gawde, and Phoolsingh Gawde then led the crowd onto the roof of Sinha's house and tore it apart, exposing the seven members of his household to the pounding monsoon rains that were already soaking the region.
The family's harvested crops sat drenched in the rainwater that poured through the open roof. In the weeks after, the family's small grocery shop was shut down, and their water and electricity connections were severed, cutting off their remaining means of livelihood along with the basic utilities of daily life.
Dhruv told Sinha plainly why the mob had come: "By becoming Christians, you have polluted the village and defiled our gods and goddesses." Chhattisgarh is one of thirteen Indian states that now enforce anti-conversion laws, statutes that in practice have emboldened crowds like this one to treat a family's choice of worship as a public offense to be punished.
Think on that for a moment, friend. Seven people. A roof torn away with human hands, on purpose, so that the rain would come in on them. Not because they had stolen, not because they had cheated a neighbor, not because they had lifted a finger against anybody. Because they would not bow to gods carved by other men's hands.
A Roof Torn Away, A Foundation That Holds
Now here is where the story turns, because a torn roof is not the whole of it. A house can be opened to the sky and still stand on its foundation. The Lord Jesus told a story once about two men who built houses, one on sand and one on rock, and He said the rains descended, the floods came, the winds blew and beat upon both houses. The difference was never whether the storm would come. The difference was what was underneath.
That family in Chhattisgarh is finding out, the hard way, what is underneath their lives. A mob can strip the shingles off a house. It cannot strip the peace of God out of a believing heart. It can cut the wires and shut off the water main, but it cannot cut a man off from the well of living water that never runs dry. Sinha and his family have lost a roof and a shop. They have not lost Christ, and no crowd of a hundred men, however loud, can take Him from them.
The Book does not promise the Christian a life free of storms. It promises something better and harder: that the storms will come, and that they will not have the last word.
"Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake." (Matthew 5:11)
Blessed. Not cursed, not forsaken, not forgotten by heaven while the rain runs down through a broken roof. Blessed. That is a hard word to receive standing in a house with no ceiling, and it is exactly the word the Lord meant for that moment.
Paul told young Timothy the same plain truth without softening it one bit: "Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution" (2 Timothy 3:12). Notice he did not say "some." He said "all." If you have never felt the wind of it, be glad, but do not be surprised when it comes, because it comes to every soul that means to walk with Jesus all the way home.
What happened to that family in India is not a strange thing, and it is not a defeated thing. It is the oldest story in the world, the story of men who would rather break a roof than let a neighbor worship the true and living God in peace. And it is also the newer story, the one that started at an empty tomb, where the last word was not spoken by a mob but by a risen Savior who said He would never leave nor forsake His own. The rain gets in. The roof comes down. The foundation, my friend, does not move.