I’ve been blessed with a team that all have very similar interests. We like to exercise (well I pretend to), eat healthy, and we’re all very laid back and don’t get worked up about things very easily. So for our first morning in India we spent it doing the insanity workout playing on a computer on our flat rooftop. Needless to say, it drew a little attention from the surrounding neighbors. One lady and her child even came up to the roof and just starred at us and our computer trying to figure out what in the world was going on. Of course she didn’t speak English, so we’re really not sure what she thought.
That afternoon we left the church about 2:30pm and headed to a village, in a rickshaw I might add, about 30 minutes away to do ministry for the day. The village had about 300 people in it and consisted of people mainly from the untouchable caste which if any of my students are reading would know that they are the lowest and poorest of the caste system. There is a Christian church in this village, so there are Christians, but also Hindu’s as well.
We had the opportunity to go door to door in this village and pray for the people. We prayed for over a 100 individual people and families in the course of about 4 hours. People asked prayer for stomach pain, headaches, the ability to have children, to get rid of evil spirits, education, to have houses dedicated that were being built, etc. I’ve never done anything like that before and it was such a blessing. But I was completely and totally humbled, not just by having the opportunity to pray for them, but also by their hospitality. Literally almost every house we visited over that 4-hour period had us sit down while they stood and listened to us. They would have us wait while they brought out bed frames and covered them with blankets for us to sit on. Many of them even served us drinks and snacks. We were given coffee, tea, glass bottles of Sprite, doughnuts, peanut/caramel candy, and this Chex mix like snack. These people have very little money and here they were serving complete strangers some of the best that they had to offer while standing and making sure we were taken care of. I can’t even begin to describe how blown away I was by that. Not something I ever expected. It definitely challenged me to serve people better.
We invited everyone we met to a service we were going to lead at the church in their village that night. The other thing I’m discovering about India is that the electricity is very hit and miss. There hasn’t been a single day where the power has been on the entire time. On this night the power went out in the village about halfway through the service. The best part was that I was reading scripture for a skit right after this happened. So I found a flashlight, but never would have imagined what would happen next. I literally felt like I was swarmed by what had to be close to as many bugs that came with the plague of locusts in Egypt. It was unreal!! I had to actually take my hand and wipe off the page after every couple words I read while I was waiting for our translator. And the page would be almost completely filled again before I could finish the next line. They were everywhere!!! And dad if you’re reading this skip to the next paragraph now……………………………………………….Several bugs even flew up my man skirt. Yes, I said a man skirt. Not something I imagined I’d ever say, but I also never thought I’d be in India. And I have to say that I have more respect for Gandhi now than I already did because I really don’t know how in the world he kept his skirt up so well. It was a definite challenge.
But moving on. Allison preached and Mike gave his testimony. At the end of the service 6 young men accepted Christ as their Savior. Awesome, Awesome Awesome! And this was on night number 1 of ministry. The pastor’s wife in that village cooked us curried chicken and rice for dinner that night. It was really good! Trying to sit Indian style on the floor in a man skirt, however, was not so good. But before you get any really bad pictures in your head, I’ll tell you that I was wearing shorts underneath to be on the safe side. So it was ok.
It was an incredible first day of ministry and just one of hopefully many to come!
