Simon Gounder was born into a strict Hindu family in Fiji. His great-grandfather had been shipped from India as a contract labourer after the British took the islands in 1874, and the family settled in a small village in the north of Viti Levu. Simon grew up inside a system with clear rules. "As a Hindu, we believed in karma," he said. "If you do good karma, you get to heaven. If you do bad karma, you will be punished."
It was a ledger he could never quite balance. He knew his own wrongs too well.
The night the ledger closed At seventeen, a friend invited him to a Christian youth meeting in another town. There he heard something that did not fit anything he had been taught. That Jesus Christ could simply forgive sins. Not offset them, not average them out over lifetimes. Forgive them. Simon felt the weight of his own failures and, for the first time, an offer to be free of them. "I gave my life to Jesus that night," he said.
He hid it from his parents at first. When they found out, they were not happy. But the son who came home changed did not stop there. In time he led his whole family to Christ, and he went on to plant a ministry that carries the same forgiveness to others.
Karma keeps a running tab you can never clear. Jesus tears the tab up. Whatever you are carrying tonight, He is still in the business of forgiving it all at once.
