Nepal is beautiful, and for the month of June, I’m living in the midst of this incredible beauty with the men and women of Team Willow.
We are living in a church built into a rock on the side of a mountain above a rushing river. True story. The days are warm, but with the evening comes the cooling rains. The river offers a great place to just sit in the presence of God. The Psalm, “Be still and know that I am God” has come alive to me in new ways this month. There is nothing more amazing than sitting in the midst of this unreal part of creation and just being in awe of the creator God who breathed all this into being. That same God is alive in me, He delights in me and whispers sweetly to me that there is beauty in all of His creation, including me. Wow.
Our days are filled with good old-fashioned door-to-door evangelism…tracks and all! But this isn’t just any neighborhood visitation, these villages are on the tops of the surrounding mountains, requiring hours and hours of hiking up ridiculously steep mountains. But as we gather each night for our dinner of rice, dahl, potatoes, and cucumbers the comments are always “Today was awesome” and “Did we really just do that?” Easily forgotten are the hours of sweating as we climbed the mountain with tiny narrow trails, sometimes no trail, sore muscles and exhaustion are overlooked as we remember the times of worship in a clay hut churches, the prayers with men and women who had never heard the name of Jesus, and the eagerness and excitement that we were greeted with from school children. See, what I’ve learned this month is that despite the heat, discomfort, and hard, hard work of climbing mountains, the love of Jesus makes it worth it all. And I would hike 8 hours one way up the steepest mountain to see just one person encounter the love of Christ for the first time. It’s worth it. They are worth it.
