Everything has looked different for us during our month in India. New continent, new culture, new context. But it was more than that – deeper than just surface level. The first three months of our Race were BUSY. A lot of times, especially in month two, I felt like I didn’t have any time in my schedule to catch a breath, let alone have some time to myself to process what was going on. We haven’t gotten a lot of downtime, and on our off days, I’ve done my best to pack in as many fun adventures as I could. When ministry didn’t make me busy, I made myself busy. The first three months of my Race have been a testament to a lesson that I’ve been learning ever since I left: The Race will not change me if I don’t make an effort.
Our month in India was the exact opposite of busy. We lived for three weeks in a church that we weren’t allowed to leave unless we were traveling to another village for ministry. We didn’t start any work until six or seven in the evening, so every day was empty except for meals. There was no public transportation, so our off days were quite uneventful. There was no internet access to allow me to waste time when I got bored. And on top of all of that, the daily temperature highs were one hundred and ten, and we had no air conditioning. If you know anything about me at all, you know that this should have been a month that I hated. At the beginning, I thought it would be too.
During the first three months of the Race, I never made an effort to make my relationship with God a priority. I rarely made time for sitting alone with Him, whether in scripture or in prayer, and it was evident in what I brought to the table for ministry or when spending time with my team. In India, I ran out of excuses. There was nothing left to distract me, so I dug in. I read scripture every day for the first time since leaving, and I began praying more regularly. I listened and contributed to spiritual conversations with my teammates, instead of leaving the room to focus on whatever else I was doing. I really chose into the whole experience better that month than I had since the beginning, and I loved every minute of it. The annoyance I thought I would feel with never being able to leave was instead a weight lifted off my shoulders that I didn’t always have to find something to fill every minute of every day, and what I was filled with instead was so much more important.
All of this had a huge impact on how I treated our ministry compared to other months. It was common for me to look at the work I was doing as my own efforts, and not as God wanting to work through me. This attitude often kept Him from being able to work through me how I know He wanted to, and this month I learned more of how to let go of my own role in this work. When I had struggles or questions with our ministry, I didn’t ignore them or get frustrated with them as I had before. I took them to God and to my team, and it made all the difference. The lack of business in my life made room for that decision.
Our ministry was fairly laid back as well, which contributed to my month of rest that I didn’t know I needed until I was thrown into it against my will. We would travel to different villages in the area, sometimes to attend a church service and preach, and sometimes to do home visits and pray over people that needed it. Even if we weren’t doing home visits, prayer was a huge part of what we did. Church services always ended with most of the congregation coming up to our group and asking for prayers – anything from physical pain to family problems to evil spirits. They would line up in front of each one of us as we prayed over them one at a time, and we went until everyone had been covered.
There’s a couple things from this that I needed to unpack and ask God about, and the answers that I got both came back to what I said earlier about learning to let go of my own role in the work and let God work through me.
The first goes back to my blog post from a couple weeks ago, about how I don’t want to be the hero of the work being done. Church services were a bit awkward for me at the beginning, and I had to get used to being the center of attention in ways that I hadn’t been in other countries. Traditional Indian church services saw the entire congregation sitting on the floor while the pastor stood up front and delivered the message. While we were there, though, in addition to the pastor, a row of chairs was placed in front of the church, facing the congregation, for us to sit it. I hated it, but that’s where they wanted us to be. It was another one of those situations where, even though it was uncomfortable, we had to choose to use it for God’s glory and not our own.
The second of these was another experience that I had had a small taste of in previous months, but in India it took center stage. Prayer ministry in other countries had been very relational – we would visit homes, often for over an hour, and get to know community members before we prayed over them. We would hear their stories, get to know their families, and really get to the heart of what they needed prayer for the most. Often, it was something that they didn’t say right away, but came out at various points during our conversations.
In India, however, this could not have been a more different experience. If we were doing home visits, they were quick. We would go in, they would tell us exactly what was wrong, we would pray, and we would move to the next house. These visits were five to ten minutes tops, and it was exhausting. I felt like nothing was getting accomplished, and I felt like we were being used by these people just because we were visiting Americans. We had similar experiences after each church service. The entire congregation would line up in front of us as soon as the sermon concluded, and everyone would expect us to pray over them. Each one of us had a line of people to pray over, and not a lot of time to do it. It felt like an assembly line, and my prayers got more and more tired and repetitive the further down the line I got. To make it even more chaotic, we only had one translator, and there was far too much going on for him to translate for each person that needed prayer. Most of the time, we didn’t even know what we were praying for. Even when he was there to translate the need, he never had time to stay and translate the prayer for any one of us. I hated it.
After a few of these services, and a lot of frustration, I took all of this to God and just asked Him what in the world I was supposed to do with all of it. What I heard was this: “English prayers are still effective.” It was one of those moments that I mentioned earlier, in that I realized that my own efforts were not important. I needed the reminder that God could work through me, even in the chaos, even with no translator, and even though neither I nor the person I was praying over could understand one another. He reminded me that the words I was saying were not important, and even that I was probably saying too many of them to begin with. Often, I would try to fill up time with so many words to make sure that all my bases were covered – the less I knew about the person in front of me, the more words I used. God reminded me in that moment that even if I were to pray the same two sentences over every person that came up to me, and even if I knew literally nothing about any of them or their needs, that He could still work through that. All I needed to do was make sure that my heart was in the right place. All I needed to do was make sure that my focus was not on what I could offer these people – what I could do for them – but what God could do for them through me and my teammates.
I got another lesson when I shared these revelations with the rest of my team, and that was that I should not struggle with any of this on my own. I learned that my whole team was struggling with this on some level, and what God had been speaking to me was something that all of them needed to hear. Going forward, it had a huge impact on the way we viewed our ministry, and on our confidence going into each evening.
Had this month been busier, and had I not been in the mindset that I was, a lot of this probably would have gotten swept under the rug. I wouldn’t have given it the processing time that I needed, and ministry as a whole would have suffered from it. In the coming months, I want to be better about giving God time to speak into the work we are doing, and speak into the struggles that I am having with it. I want to learn to better monitor the distractions that I know are a problem for me, and to focus much more of my attention on growing closer to God than I have in the past. I know I’m not going to look back on this experience and regret the times that I was not busy.
