A Nepali Recap

This is a tad late, but it's a recap of what Nepal ministry was like for our team:

I didn’t want to leave. As the van pulled away tears filled my eyes, I was determined not to cry. The van pulled away from the church and children started chasing it yelling their final goodbyes. I couldn’t stop them anymore and the tears started rolling down my cheeks.

When we arrived in Haripur, Sarlahi I never once imagined that leaving would be so difficult. Instead I imagined the day we left being a day of celebration. For me the first few days in Haripur were spent counting down the days until we returned to Kathmandu (the promised land).  I had the completely wrong attitude about being where we were, yea I knew that this was where God wanted me and that I needed to set my own desires aside, but nobody said I needed to be happy about it, so I wasn’t.

God used those three weeks in the jungle to teach me a lesson, several lessons actually. I was stretched and broken during that month, my entire team was and in the end we were so grateful for our experience in the jungle. We learned about love and sacrifice from not only our Pastor and his wife but from our neighbors. We were able to pour into the community but we were poured into just as much.

Preaching in villages required hour long walks in the blistering sun to reach the villages. It wasn’t ideal but God showed up when we needed him the most. There was one brutally hot day when we walked 1 ½ hours to a village, by the time we arrived I wasn’t sure how I’d make it back. Our entire team was drenched in sweat and exhausted. As we sat with the villagers and preached, the sky darkened and a cool breeze started up. By the time we started our walk back there was a constant cool breeze, the sun was hidden by the clouds and we had all stopped sweating, it was perfect! We spent the entire walk back thanking God for the cooler weather.

One of the biggest things that stuck out to me about our time in Sarlahi was how we were received in the villages as compared to India. In India people didn’t ask why we were there, they just wanted to touch us and receive prayer from us. Here they just wanted to know what we were doing there, they didn’t expect anything from us, instead they just wanted to know why we would come see them. We were able to explain to them that it was God’s love that brought us to the jungle, to their village, to them.

We were also blessed to be able to spend several mornings at a local school. It was a school that had few teachers, supplies and students. These students came from incredibly poor families and we were informed that this school was the only educational opportunity these children would have. I was struck by how little they had and how poor the school was but how seriously these children were about school and how much they cared about being there.
We really loved the time we were able to spend with them (although language barrier was a bit rough sometimes).

God gave us so many opportunities during the month to love on others He also gave us something else – The opportunity to be BE LOVED ON and it was wonderful.

-Jess