4,000 bricks (give or take a few)
100 something people
1 steep mountain
This was what awaited me on our first Saturday morning in India.
We split the squad in two and piled into pickup trucks to get to the mountain. After a wild ride during which most of us probably thought we were going to die, we arrived at the site where we were going to help build a church. Actually that’s a lie, we arrived at a giant pile of bricks. The building site was at the top of the mountain.
Now I don’t remember how many bricks there were, but I would guess maybe 4,000. 54 racers plus a few dozen locals totaled up to about 100 people. So that’s 40 bricks per person – if we were to split it up that way, we would still be hauling bricks as I write this. That mountain was not easy terrain.
Our host for the month, John, set up the strategy: we would form a human chain up the mountain. We distributed ourselves about an arms length apart to get as close as we could to our building site. Then we would pass the bricks up to the end of the line. Our squad plus the group of men, women and even children made the chain go about halfway to our final destination. After we had moved all of the bricks to the halfway point, we would start the chain again.
I was stationed near the bottom of the mountain, moving bricks and watching the giant pile become smaller. As hours passed under the hot Indian sun, every single one of those 4000 bricks passed through my hands.
I began to realize the gravity of the situation as time went on. John had informed us that we were the first foreign missionaries, and for that matter, the first white people, to come to this village. Much of this region of India is still considered “unreached” from a missions standpoint, and here we were building a church. Not for a bunch of white people to come in and leave a week later, but for local pastors to use to share the gospel. We weren’t coming in with fancy western ideas and good intentions that might not fit the culture, but we were there to help.
This was also not a situation where we were doing something “for” the locals – these locals were present and participating. It was the rare situation that needed all the assistance and bodies it could get. To be part of it was an honor.
