his complicated version of one of the henna patterns covers all of the woman's hand in a delicate design that tells a story of faithfulness and God's love.

By Vanna Larcombe*

DELHI, India — Henna crosses all boundaries. Rich, poor, forward caste, low caste, students, young, old, shopkeepers, and jobless, all women like getting henna. It’s like getting your nails done in the States.

Henna isn’t just for women in the slums or girls in university – you can use henna to reach all women in South Asia.

Henna gives us a cool way to get involved in a community. A bunch of white girls doing henna gives you a reason to be there and something to do. Sometimes groups keep meeting to do storying in connection with henna. Other times henna serves only to get people to come on the first day and then the group becomes a storying session and worship time. It just depends.

When we plan a henna group meeting, our main desire is to tell the story in a way so that all of the women understand the Bible story. We want to be able to get each of the women to retell the story.

Asking questions helps us to find out if they all understand the story and what they liked in or learned from the story. Understanding the story helps them to feel comfortable using the henna to retell the story to others. I love to see when a new person comes to the group because someone shared the story with her.

After a couple of meetings, the women know that we’ll ask who they plan to tell the story to and if they told those people at the following meeting. There’s accountability for all of us; we learn a new story in Hindi every two weeks to tell the group and they go out to tell others.

Many of the women are very excited to share the stories with one another once they learn them. All of the women get excited about the henna but the believers also want to understand the story. They want to learn the story by heart.

My favorite stories are the ones that show God relating directly to women because the women get excited when they hear those stories. It’s great to get to talk about God’s Word with each other even though I don’t speak their language very well.

One of the greatest things that I’ve learned through working with henna is that God’s Word is powerful on its own. You don’t have to add anything to it. People who aren’t believers will ask good questions just from hearing the story that goes with the henna on someone’s hand. It’s cool for people to have something that represents God’s Word on themselves – it makes it easy to share.

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*Name changed. Vanna Larcombe is an IMB representative from El Paso, Texas. For tools on how to use henna storying, go to http://www.southasianpeoples.imb/henna