Month 1: India

      Seven months after being accepted to The World Race my journey finally began in Washington D.C. Thirty hours of traveling and two days later I arrived in a remote village in India.
     India is broken up into 27 districts much like the U.S. is states. The district we are in has 85 million people living in 22,000 different villages. Before I get into any of the details, our ministry contact has asked us not to mention their name or the names of the cities we are in on any public websites. So that is why these are left out.
     From what I understand the organization we are working with here in India is pretty much the only church in this district. They are the lead church of right now 1200 very small churches. This organization is having rapid growth, and soon as they can get enough pastors their goal is to have over 7,000 churches planted in strategic locations. Each pastor will focus his ministry on three different villages.
This way their 7,000 church’s will be reaching to all 22,000 villages and they will be ministering to the entire 85 million people in the district.
The Village my team is currently working in is located about two and a half hours away from the city where this ministry in located in. We are staying in the sanctuary of one of our churches, and packing everything up on Sunday mornings for church service.  
India is much hotter then I expected and I feel like I sweat about as much as I did while playing sports in high school. The heat is inescapable and has been very difficult to deal with. At night it is cool outside, but the church somehow heats up like a greenhouse. The crazy thing is it is the cool season for India.
  We have a lot of down time and things can get boring at times. I already miss home a lot and it is difficult to picture the next year of my life being like this. I feel it might be a very long year, and to be honest I have asked myself the question “What the heck did I sign up for” more then once. However, I know this is absolutely what God wants me to do and I am sure I will grow an incredible amount over the next year.