By Riley Gonzalez —
Rose Renuu loved her religious traditions in Nepal, but she never looked the idols in the eye.
“When I was a little kid, I never used to make eye contact with these gods because they were scary, Rose says.
When her mother died, nobody talked about it to her, so she never was able to process the grief. Her dad remarried to an American-Nepali, so off they went (with her sister) to Arizona. She knew plenty of English from Hanna Montana and American shows, but still there was culture shock.
After a few years, her dad divorced and the family moved into a small apartment. Rose was studying in the university and working full time, and the burden became too much, so she quit school.
Over the internet she met the boy who became her boyfriend. They had a long-distance relationship. He was Christian, and his family gushed lover for the sweet Hindu girl from Nepal.
After 10 years, she decided with her sister to go back to Nepal for a month and see Grandmother. She was having a blast, but she noticed that Hinduism was no longer a cherished religion. It was creepy.
Then her sister crashed on a motorcycle. At the hospital, the doctor’s diagnosis was grim. She had multiple skull fractures and was at risk for bleeding in her brain.
While she had admired her boyfriend’s faith (along with his family), she had never prayed to Jesus. But when her sister teetered on the brink of death, Rose broke down. She prayed to God, not the gods of Hinduism.
“I was desperately praying for her life,” she says. “I desperately asked him not to take her away from me and to just heal her.”
Miraculously, she was moved out of ICU the next day. After a week, she was released from the hospital.
“She was in a coma and unconscious and unresponsive,” Rose says. “The next day she was healing so fast and just the speed of her recovery felt like a miracle to me. I knew that whoever I had prayed to answered it.”
She didn’t immediately receive Jesus.
Her trip was supposed to be a month. But because she had to take care of her sister until her sister was well enough to make the plane ride to America, she stayed six months in Nepal.
After which time, she was uncertain what to do with her life and asked God. She went to Los Angeles, to the family of her boyfriend.
It became the lowest point of her life. She was career-less and direction-less. Suddenly all the weight of the accumulated traumas — her mother’s death, the PTSD of her sister’s accident — bore down on her. All the squelched emotions bubbled up, seeking expression.
She went with her boyfriend’s family to church.
For Christmas, her boyfriend’s mom gave her a Bible.
It was actually a bit scary. She didn’t know what to think.
For three months, she was too afraid to even open the Bible.
Finally, she built up some courage and cracked it open. What she discovered was that it contained “love letters” from God, she says.
“I was just in awe. I felt so much love and so much comfort just reading that letter. And it was very shocking to me because I didn’t know that God could speak. I had never heard anything in the voice of God. So I really felt like I was being loved in a way for the first time that I never knew was possible. It literally felt like the warmest hug ever.”
After reading, she “knew” that it was Jesus.
“God was trying to gain my trust through the other love notes that I was reading,” Rose says. “And he was like slowly creeping on me. And then bam, he just revealed himself to me and gave me this big hug and said, “I am your father. You are safe now. Don’t you worry. I understand everything.” And I just felt this sense of belonging that I had never felt before. My eyes just opened that day.”
She launched “Love Notes from God” on social media.
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