Chitwan National Park. Home of elephants, tigers, cobras, and very large spiders. Also home to witch doctors, single mothers, and nomads. And a temporary home for fifteen World Racers to spend eight hot and lovely days.
This beautiful Nepali jungle is nestled between mountains bordering Nepal and India. You can stand atop a mountain and be in two countries at once!
A glimpse of what this week looked like:
– Having no electricity or running water was nothing the community water pump and some headlamps couldn’t fix! Bucket showers became the highlight of our days because…
– Temperatures were around 103 F degrees each day (heat index well over 110), the only exception being from 2:30-5:00 AM. Some of us slept on bamboo mats rather than sleeping pads because they didn’t trap sweat or heat as much.
– Our prayer lives skyrocketed pleading with the Lord each night to send a rainstorm or even a small breeze.
– We ate like Nepali kings and queens because a spitfire man named Mr. Commando came to cook traditional food for us every day.
– We recycled the same 2-3 outfits the whole time, dousing ourselves equally in perfume and prayer.
– We walked a few miles each morning and evening into jungle villages to share the gospel, making everything worth it to get to love people we’d never have met otherwise.
This week was absolutely incredible. I learned about the gospel, about myself, and about people. I learned that the simple gospel message is love. I want to love and love well, and people want to be loved and loved well. It’s all so blissfully simple yet humbly difficult.
Because I couldn’t possibly try to fit everything I learned this week into one blog, I wanted to write a blog series on love. This will include things like what I’ve learned about marriage, how I learned to love a bully, and encouraging a witch doctor.
Please join me in this journey of love, and may we as Christians grow into participants of the simple gospel message we profess!
