This is a picture from a night of ministry when a little boy walked in from a dark alley to listen to my teammate as she was sharing the Gospel. Praying his physical walk from darkness to light results in a spiritual one as well.
We’ve been here a little over a week and time is flying by. I love the people, the culture, the sights, sounds and even the smells. Well, some of the smells.
Our ministry assignment is church planting and village ministry. We drive out to remote villages and visit people in their homes and pray for them. At the end of the night we have a service where we worship with them, they sing and dance for us, and we share our stories of what God has done in our lives. Then we end the night praying for anyone who wants to come forward. That’s almost everyone. We pray for health, healing, salvation, ministry, jobs, school and studies, alcoholism, pregnant women, women who want to be pregnant, marriages, polio, paralysis, eye sight, knee pain….the list goes on. We pray and trust God is listening. After everyone has received prayer we start the long drive home. The days are long but we have some free time in the morning to rest and be together.
We’re staying in a town in Southern India that already feels like home. Here is what it felt like to get here…
We had a long hot bus ride that took twice as long as we were told it would. (They call this “India time” ) We were soaked in sweat. We are ALWAYS soaked in sweat. It’s over 100 every day with no Air Conditioning. But back to the bus ride…
I sat in the front and couldn’t sleep because I didn’t want to miss a thing. Traveling is bittersweet here; super uncomfortable but so entertaining. On our long trip I watched the driver and his friend switch places while we were on the highway. It was a seamless transition. There are always skinny white cows on the road, or water buffalo, goats…sometimes pigs, nothing surprises us anymore. Tuk Tuks, Motorcycles, cars, and trucks zoom by and everyone honks all the time. (The back of trucks say Please Honk. It’s like there is a whole language in honking. You get used to it.)
After our long bus travel day, we got to the town we are staying in and unloaded our packs. We walked down an alleyway with an open field/dump on our left and four story building on our right. We get to sleep in the building to the right, but a lot of people sleep on the left side of the alley. The left has a gravel pile, an open sewer ditch, patches of grass, lots of bushes, garbage everywhere and cement slabs with a few concrete buildings where people sleep inside. Some sleep outside on mats. There are usually chickens, cows, or dogs digging through the piles of trash. The first night we got here, a group of boys were playing in the gravel.
To get to our home, we turned to the right and climbed 3 flights of tile stairs. Three World Race teams from my squad are staying together this month so we have shared space. Nine other girls and I dropped our packs on the third floor and started settling in the big tile room with old leather couches lining the walls. I started throwing open all the windows because it was at least 100 degrees in the room. No air conditioning. Another girl promptly followed up and closed all the windows because there was a concern of malarial mosquitos. We slept with the windows closed for one night. It was like sleeping in a sauna that night.
But now we sleep better. The windows are open and we have done battle with the bugs, lizards and ants. They all won. Ants are amazing! We just let them stick to their ant marching line and try not to throw things off so they scatter all over the room again. We hope the lizards that live in our room eat them. They look like they eat pretty well. They’re fat and about 6 inches long. But now its cooler in the room with windows open, and so far no one has gotten malaria.
The bathroom has a toilet that flushes, praise the Lord! There’s one spigot of water three feet above the floor. We use that to wash our hands and we use a measuring cup for our “shower”. Showers feel amazing even if you’re just dumping a cup of water on yourself one cup at a time. Its never cold. Nothing is, well, except a coke I bought from the corner store, it was kind of cold. It tasted phenomenal!
We were invited to dinner when we first arrived and dug in. We eat with our hands, almost everything has rice and chapati (like lefsa for all my Norwegian friends) and a curry sauce. It comes in all sorts of colors and varieties. I think its spicy, but our hosts say they give us the food that is not spicy, which means the spicy food they eat would probably actually kill me. The food is good and we’re getting good at eating rice with our right hand. Never the left. I’ve been told people use the left hand instead of toilet paper.
That thought crossed our minds the first night when we were walking through a village and the kids were grabbing our right hands with their left. At first I tried to avoid it, but at one point my teammate Ashley smiled at me over her shoulder and said “I just kind of went for it”. So I followed her lead. After our village prayer time the pastors family made us dinner. We washed our hands, but they didn’t have soap. So we washed up with just a little village water and a lot of prayer, and we dug in-with our right hand. By Gods grace we didn’t get sick. My team is so awesome. We just shrug our shoulders and laugh about these things.
We’re getting used to the routines and I think before we know it we will have to leave India. I don’t even want to think about it. This was the place I’ve been dying to see, and now that I’m here I don’t want our time in India to end!
In our first week on the field, we have seen the hand of God moving in many ways. He has been working in our team through times of confession and prayer together. We’re learning how to live in true community and it’s been a huge blessing. I absolutely love my team.
We spend most of our ministry time praying for strangers we can’t communicate with. We totally rely on the Lord to teach us how to pray for each individual person. We are learning how to share the Gospel with these people and lead them into a relationship with the one true God. We preach every night and it’s amazing how God’s grace works through our feeble efforts to communicate His love.
We’re also struggling with this situation of being treated like a rock star in these small villages. We admire the people and are humbled by the way they sacrifice for us and serve us. We want to be equals with them, but it seems to be impossible. So we’re learning how to use the platform God’s given us to lead the people to Jesus. The other challenge is the religious culture they live in. It’s easy to add Jesus to the list of gods they worship when they worship a million other idols. But just like in American culture, the struggle is to teach people to worship the one and only true God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
We all struggle to leave behind all the other false gods that steal our affection that was meant for Him. Here in India, this contrast of God and idols is a little more visual. We are often invited into houses with pictures of Jesus on the wall next to several other pictures of Hindu gods. They welcome prayer, but their devotion to Jesus seems very temporary. The pastors have a very tough job. The statistics are staggering when you see how many villages and people each pastor is responsible for. Please pray for them. And continue to pray for us as we try to be a blessing to the pastors and the people, that our testimony would bring new believers into the family of God and more pastors and missionaries would be called out of this harvest.
It’s so crazy to think this is just the beginning! I can’t wait to see what God has in store for our next few weeks here and the months to come. Thank you for your prayers. We are in WAY over our heads and we really need them. All of us feel totally inadequate for the ministry we are doing, but we are learning again and again to trust God to work through us, even if we are rough around the edges. Please keep praying. I think this next week will be more challenging than the last, but I’m excited to see how God works here!
We love you and pray you’re all seeing a ripple effect at home of what God is doing as you share stories, pray for us, and continue to live for the one true God.
We love you and pray you’re all seeing a ripple effect at home of what God is doing as you share stories, pray for us, and continue to live for the one true God.
