I’m not going to lie, India has not been anything like I initially expected. Anyone who talked to me extensively about the Race before I left knows that I was most apprehensive for this first country. I was expecting to be hot and sweaty all the time. I was half expecting to hate the food & end up getting sick from it. I also didn’t even like Chai before coming here. Everything that I had heard about India was terrifying to me. To make matters worse, a lot of people looked at me like I was crazy when I said that India was the first country on the list.
I’m so happy to report that the Lord has been incredibly faithful with my horrible expectations. The city we are in has incredible weather, the home cooked meals have tasted amazing, no one has gotten sick, & I LOVE THE CHAI HERE!!!
Literally everything that I was worried about has been shown to be false.
On the flip side, the way we have been doing ministry hasn’t really fit into my preconceived constraints. See, I’ve been on a few international mission trips before & they have all followed a similar format: get off the plane, rest for the day, hit the ground running the next day & get as much work done as possible for the duration of the trip, & go home exhausted.
That is the exact opposite of what I’ve been experiencing here in India. Contrary to the American-way-of-things, nothing here starts before 11:00am, cooking meals takes the majority of the day, and there isn’t one particular thing that is our major focus for this month. In fact, a couple days after we arrived, our ministry host told us that two of our five ministry days would be spent back at the house on cooking or cleaning duty.
Initially, my team was taken around to different ministries & given ‘orientations’. This most often looked like sitting at a ministry site and listening to what each one was about & then taking a tour around the facility. I don’t think I did a single thing to ‘help’ these places in the first week.
These ‘orientations’ combined with the realization that two ministry days would be spent not doing ministry made for some unhappy World Racers.
As I thought and prayed more about this, I really feel like the Lord was very intentional with placing us in this situation. The whole point of the World Race is not to go on a year-long mission trip & come back with some cool stories, but to journey through this year realizing that life itself is a mission field.
Ministry isn’t somewhere we go but a way we live.
Before these past two weeks, ministry had never looked like standing in a kitchen all day cooking meals for my team. It had never looking like staying back from an outing to clean other peoples’ rooms. It had never looked like seeing other believers as an opportunity for ministry too.
But now it does.
And isn’t that so the heart of Christ? He doesn’t relentlessly chase down the unbeliever & then leave them hanging once they accept him. He doesn’t, by any means, exclude the cooks and the cleaners from the ability to touch lives.
No, my God is even present (maybe especially present) in the seemingly small, insignificant details.
He’s in the multitudes of peeled garlic cloves, or in the tears from chopping onions. He’s in the 100th broom stroke of the day or folding freshly cleaned laundry.
Oh yes. He’s in it all.
