Thank you India. Thank you for being the hardest country of the race and the hardest two months of my life. I am honestly beyond thankful for all the hardships, both physical and spiritual from the two months with you. Without India I wouldn’t have experienced a fraction of the growth I needed. I wouldn’t have learned about finding contentment wherever you are, or how important it is to follow the light of the lord when nothing around you is making the slightest bit of sense. I wouldn’t have been pushed into wanting to know more about the Lords wisdom and all the characteristics that are so heavily influenced by it. Without India I wouldn’t have learned about the beauty that comes from our struggles here on earth and how much they have to offer later on.
When I signed up for this route of countries in late 2016, India was the one that stuck out the most to me. Asides from the jungle book I knew next to nothing about it. I just knew compared to anywhere else I was going to be during this trip, India was by far going to be the most unique. I still don’t know exactly why I was so drawn to India. I can say in confidence though that the Lord didn’t bring me there for pleasure. He had brought me there to struggle. Not because God finds it amusing to throw us curve balls, but to give us the option to build up our faith on a firm foundation for when a storm hits.
You see in life there are always going to be periods of hardships, for the sake of the analogy I’m trying to make let’s call the hardships storms. We know that a storm is eventually going to come and we know that the logical thing to do is to be prepared for when it finally lands. The best way to prepare for the storm of life is to start with a strong foundation. You wouldn’t want to take all your belongings of high value and store them in a house built on a foundation made of sand. That would just be foolish because once the waters start to rise and your neighborhood starts to flood, that foundation and all that you stored in that house are just going to end up floating away. Gone forever. Bummer.
I believe this is the main lesson the Lord was trying to teach me when he called me to India. If you refer to my past two blogs about Swaziland and Lesotho you’ll see that there was a lot of spiritual awareness and growth being instilled in me. It was now time to put all this new found knowledge into action as well as continue to prepare me for the next storm. At this point I knew that so long as I relied on the Lord in all situations of life it was going to pan out just fine in the end and more than likely with an awesome lesson learned. Easier said than done though.
India easily had the toughest of living conditions compared to anywhere else I’ve been so far on the race. We had no running water leaving us to rely on wells for cooking, showering, and flushing the squaty potty. Illness was a trend that my team and I quickly picked up on while we were there. I was by far the sickest I’ve ever been in India. There was on occasion where I had about a 36 hour confusing night terror/hallucinogenic tangent. I couldn’t tell when I was awake or sleeping and I had some crazy vivid dreams. Looking back it’s hilarious and we all laugh about it but it sucked in the moment. For those of you who are Facebook friends with my mom you probably remember her posting about it, often in motherly panic mode. I assure you I was doing just fine and it was all in good fun. Because we‘re missionaries and India is a closed country our presence was not something our host families wanted to make well known. That meant we were confined to the walls of our compounds and were only allowed out at night to attend and often lead house churches. This was really difficult for me considering I can’t sit at home for more than two hours without having to find something to do. It drove my team and I pretty crazy doing nothing all day in these little spaces we lived at. It was completely necessary though for the safety of the families hosting us, and it’s humbling to see what they’ll risk to share the word of God with others.
Since there was never much to do I was pushed into learning more about the Lord through scripture. India is where I developed a habit of reading my bible daily. Before India I figured if I just carried out the morals and shared the love of God with people that’d be enough to do big things. However my time in India taught me that the word is a powerful weapon and without it I was basically running into battle with nothing but a pair of flip flops on. So I spent my time in India skimming through the New Testament and writing surface level sermons for house churches. Which was good considering a lot of the people we were speaking to knew far less than I even knew about Christianity. I grew a lot in confidence of what I believed in by speaking three nights a week to house churches.
I spent pretty much the entire two months in India really diving deep into the book of Proverbs. I was really intrigued with the concept of carrying out the Lords wisdom in my own life. Looking back at my old journal from the first half of the race, my notes on Proverbs takes up about 50 or so pages. I took a ton out of it. From the idea of fearing the Lord is the first step to understanding his wisdom, to guarding your mouth to protect your life, to finding wisdom in silence. It’s just a really good book that carries out a copious amount of morals on how to live your life to the fullest and with the most potential to do incredible things. 10 out of 10 would recommend Proverbs as a reliable place to find angsty instagram captions.
A lot of India was spent trying to understand the logic of the locals and why shoving 10+ people into a five seater car was necessary. It was hard not to be frustrated at times but it’s no ones fault, it’s just the common issue with vastly different cultures, things aren’t always going to make sense and in most situations it’s odd if they do. I remember listening to a podcast sermon with my team one day and it talked about walking in the light of the Lord. Imagine you’re in a vast expanse of darkness and all you have is a lantern. The light coming off of it is only going to reach maybe six or seven feet ahead of you. Having that six or so feet is still tremendously more useful than dropping the lantern and running full speed into the darkness. What I mean by this is as long as you stride with the light of the Lord even though the end may not be in sight yet you’re still going to get there at the Lords intended time. The light is going to keep you on the correct path and safe from any immediate danger.
From this lesson I also took away the importance of contentment for whatever season of life you’re in. The hard part was differentiating Joy with contentment. Joy is often used to identify an emotion or feeling you have in a certain situation. It’s wonderful to be joyful but emotions quickly change as situations do. Contentment however is a mindset that has the ability to stimulate joy. You see by putting yourself into the mindset of finding the positive in any situation you’ll find it a lot easier to be filled with joy. Being able to recognize all the good still going on around you is a powerful tool to being happy and successful in life. It also gives you an atmosphere people are attracted to and gives them a desire to have the same characteristics in life. You basically become a catalyst for the Lord through contentment.
Without all the hardships that was India I wouldn’t have learned so many valuable lessons that I’m still to this day processing through. India taught me just how beautiful struggle can be and how having steadfast faith will carry you through the hard seasons. So thank you India for being the storm and the foundation to prepare me for the many ahead.
