Dearest supporters,
This blog will be lengthy as a lot has happened since I last posted or updated you. So, if length turns your eyes away, scan no further. Reader beware!
Well, India has encroached upon me before I could even process that I’ve already been on the road for four months. Though it seems to be a current theme amongst my time abroad, the mere idea of trying to sit down and process what He has led me through is daunting as it is joyous.
We touched down in Hyderabad, India somewhere around the 10th of April (our time), and immediately drove an hour away to a hotel for some additional training on what to expect during our stay in India. We all shoved the windows aside, throwing them wide open to get some semblance of airflow through the bus (something we do on all our public transportation). The wind flittered upon my cheeks, my chest, and through my fingertips and has consoled me from the touch of this places’ arid and smashing heat.
After a day of questions, answers, and instruction, my entire squad (re-united for the time being) took an overnight bus ride from our hotel in Hyderabad to Ongole, “eight” hours southeast. We departed around 2000/2100 and arrived at 0400 the following morning to a beautiful compound. The people here welcomed us in with smiles and good cheer; a refreshing presence.
The week went on as we traveled from remote village to remote village, sharing the Good News of what He has done, not just in our lives, but in the book we hold dear to us as the immutable Word that supersedes conditions, reservations, and any of our own power to overcome the troubles we face. And…the troubles we face in the West are incomparable, however deeply we still might feel them encroaching around us. The antique cliche which we casually toss around like our parents keys to their car does not quite suffice with what I say: “someone has got it worse than you.” I held the expectation that India would be what I’ve imagined it to be, but how faulty my grand idea of it was. As we were welcomed into a village, we were asked to pray over people with medical problems, normally something I shy away from.
I took off my shoes as I walked into one particular home – a rare home with white painted walls, cracks in the ceiling, and one fan in the middle giving them the only respite from the heat of the day. The sun had set, and a single light from the kitchen illuminated the whole place. This family was wealthier than others in the fact that they had an actual house made of mortar.
Other homes we walked into weren’t as fortunate. They’d share their thatched living space with a bed (if they could have one) with their livestock, and several stones for a stove (and most likely also cooking their livestock that they live with). Most would ask for prayer over their health, like back problems and stomach aches (though my assumption is that these were mere symptoms of a larger and more destructive health pattern. Most had bloated bellies (a sign of malnutrition) that were not from a healthy life). But, this particular family that we were asked to come in a pray for had told us that the father (a crucial element of the family) just had heart surgery. So, we removed our shoes and walked in to the grey-haired father lying supine on the bed. He ripped his button-up shirt open and showed us his dark brown scar tissue that raised at least three inches above his chest. Glancing around the place, we observed the wife favoring one of her legs more than the other, almost as if one leg was much shorter. We asked her what was wrong, and she replied that she too had surgery on her knees, but the doctors had to remove half of her knee (?) for the operation.
Both the husband and wife clasped their hands together and asked us to pray. A teammate of mine prayed over the wife’s knees while I grabbed the husbands’ hand and prayed over the effects of the surgery. I don’t know if anything happened to the husband in any physical sense, but at the end of the prayer he was weeping and kept shaking my hand. My teammate, Jake, prayed over the wife’s knee, and after a minute or two, we asked her how her knee felt. I didn’t see any growth, but she walked around the place and lifted her knee back behind her, something she told us she was not able to do for the past several months…
That evening, we take an hour bus ride back to our compound. My teammate, Tristian, and I walk into our room to all of our things an inch under water! A water tank above our room had to have leaked through our bathroom and then flooded the area where we slept. I picked up my air pad, clothes, backpack, and many other soggy things and put them outside to dry. Thankfully, none of my extremely valuable items were touched by the water (because I put a lot of things in plastic for just this reason). So, lesson to future world travelers. Put everything valuable in plastic gallon bags.
I was pissed off beyond belief, ready to cave the wall in, not caring if the walls broke my knuckles. Then, almost immediately my entire day swirled in my head, pushing back these reckless emotions. How could I be so blind? I just came from a village where brown mud huts, thatched roofs, and sandy floors were all that people had, and here I was in a white painted wall, with a fan above my head and a bathroom with a bucket shower, and I was concerned about temporary matters that can be fixed relatively easily. Someone probably does have it worse than me, but is that the only measure I use to find myself in being content? Am I only content when matters proceed with how I imagine they should or ought to? When something goes against me, what then do I have? What did I just pray over the family in the village if I did not even for a moment believe it for myself? How hypocritical.
So I prayed with a couple other guys and reoriented my thinking and emotions on Him. Afterwards, I opened a book a friend lent me (and thankfully was left untouched by water), and turned to a passage I recently read but now had the opportunity to practice in full.
“Heavenly Father,
If I should suffer need, and go unclothed, and be in poverty, make my heart prize your love, know it, be constrained by it, though I be denied all blessings. It is your mercy to afflict and try me with wants, for by these trials I see my sins, and desire severance from them…When your Son, came into my soul instead of sin, he became more dear to me than sin had formerly been; his kindly rule replaced sin’s tyranny. Teach me to believe that if ever I would have any sin subdued I must only only labor to overcome it, but must invite Him to abide in the place of it, and he must become to me more than vile lust had been; that his sweetness, power, life may be there…that in myself I find insufficiency and no rest, but in Him there is satisfaction and peace.”
So, I say all of that to say that through a flood in my room, my own blindness was exposed to the radiance of Christ, testing if what I believe is my own or an adopted sentiment. I had become colorblind, thinking that my white cracked walls should somehow be more, or less, exposed to hardships, yet I am no different than those in muddy village huts with hurts that cut through the skin. We all need the power of Chr.ist to come in and abide in the place of where sin is, or formerly has been. “And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Chr.ist J.esus.” (Philippians 4:7). Without Him, there is no peace, no healing (inner or outer), and there is no justice. We will only ever be in a darkened world where blindness guides us to our moral, ideological, emotional, and physical graves. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.” (John 1:5). Remember, old photographs used to be developed in a darkroom, and the world would have no memory of the old without acid touching the paper making the negative bleed away to show the image that lies beneath.
