The first week in India was really hard. The most difficult week of the Race so far. The transition from Africa to India was more of a jolt than I expected. More than that, though, I just felt really down and discouraged. My experience these past three months has been really uplifting and freeing. And then when we got to India, I felt like I hit some sort of brick wall.
The culture here is very overpowering. Someone described it as swallowing up all other cultures. And in this land of many gods, I felt the warfare in a different way than I expected. I came to India prepared to fight. But I think I was ready to face the blatant attacks from the enemy, not these subtle, sneaky attacks. These attacks were in my mind and emotions, beating me down with old lies. I was not prepared for this.
One night, at the height of this discouragement over nothing in particular, I went up on the roof. I laid on a cot and stared at the sky. As I was lying there, I was overwhelmed with a heaviness out of nowhere. I started to cry over nothing and listen to all sorts of old lies. Struggles that have not been on me in months were crushing my chest.
As I looked up, I saw the clouds passing through my tears. It looked like every cloud in the sky was forming elephants. Big elephants, small elephants, they were everywhere. This was really strange to me until it hit me. In India the most prevalent god that you will see everywhere is their elephant god.
In the States, I would have thought nothing about what this may have represented, seeing elephants formed in the clouds. I love clouds! And I love elephants! But here, I felt like it was such a picture of an attack that I was feeling, almost physically.
I began to pray. I prayed for a long time. And slowly, the clouds started to part and the stars popped out. The more I prayed, the more the clouds blew away until the whole sky was clear.
In a land of many gods, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the spiritual oppression, whether it is blatant or very subtle. But just like clouds are vapor to a mighty wind, so are these gods nothing to a mighty God.
In a land of many gods, we serve the one true God.
