Team Selah Vie has spent this holiday season in a Village 2 hours outside Hyderabad. This month our team has partnered with Indian Christian Ministries, going out into different villages each day to preach the word of God. Although we will never go to the same Village twice and it’s sometimes hard to build a bond in that short amount of time, we have seen God work in big ways. Christians here in India love to celebrate the Birth of Jesus, and In fact they even have one more celebration than we do back home. Semi-Christmas for our host family was on December 21st, there were songs, skits and a whole lot of preaching that had a 27 point program that lasted 4 hours complete with cake before dinner.
The week before Christmas we were asked to come into a Village and Share the Gospel, at the time we didn’t know it was their celebration of Semi-Christmas until we were put on stage. It was my night to speak and all day long I couldn’t figure out what to say, I kept praying, but still didn’t know. I planned then to just speak again on a topic that I used a few weeks previous. While we were on stage, about 10 minutes before I was supposed to stand up, I was flipping through my bible. It dawned on me that I was supposed to speak on the call of Jeremiah. A few thoughts are as follows.
– “Come on God, you couldn’t have told me this 6 hours ago when I was praying?!”
– “Well I could still just use the sermon I had ready, wait, but then I will feel like crap if I don’t just do what He is asking.”
– “Ugh..Fine”
I quickly scribbled down 3 points I wanted to make sure I covered, but the rest was the Holy Sprit and I’ll be honest…I have no clue what I said. But as I turned around after I was done speaking, my team leader (Emily) was doing some sort of rock move at me, so it must have went somewhat well. Those are the best kinds of Sermons, because you just fully surrendered and allowed God to use you in the moment as a vessel. And it’s hard to sometimes make the decision to step out of that comfort zone and go up unprepared in a prepared way.
All this month Christmas has been on our minds, missing family, traditions that we do, food we eat, music we play, weather that we have. Thankfully we were able to do most of these things. We all had traditions that we wanted to include into our team celebration. Personally, I made it my mission to make at least one Christmas cookie, and succeeded for the most part in a foreign country in making my Aunt Barbs recipe of Chocolate Delights which ended up being only cornflakes and Cadbury chocolate. There were no complaints! On Christmas Eve our team made hot chocolate, read a Christmas story and watched “National Lampoon Christmas Vacation” while eating my cookies. On Christmas Day we woke up early to make cinnamon rolls in a rice cooker (they turned out well, and were even better with a scoop of frosting) while singing carols and opening our Secret Santa present. Although it was completely different from home, its was a good reminder of what we were truly celebrating, the Birth of Christ. And when I’m back home next year, I will think back to that time in India I celebrated Christmas with my team.
