“So, I got our ministry schedule for this month…” our team leader said. We were all so excited!! We knew we would most likely be preaching and most of us wanted to get over that fear. She hands me the schedule and I look at it… and look at it.. hoping that what I’m seeing is not correct. “Gisele, the schedule says we preach every single day this month with no rest days.” “I know..” she says.
I’m sorry, what?? The scariest part was that the schedule was correct. Our first day was tomorrow, and then we had 18 more days after that. That night we started writing sermons together. This became a routine thing. We got in the habit of asking advice and feedback on our sermons and what we could do better.
We woke up that next morning to our host family praying and singing at 6AM with loud instruments and their best, loudest, and proudest voice. We finally got up for breakfast, and to our surprise, it was dinner.. Breakfast in India is basically just rice, chicken and curry. After, we put on our kurtas (traditional Indian clothing) and loaded up in the tuk-tuk for our first day of ministry. It took an hour to get to an extremely tiny village.. I wouldn’t even call it a village. The church was a single-room white building. There were tribal-looking men outside walking herds of goats past the church. They did not wear shoes, it looked like they made their own clothing and they wore baskets on their heads to escape from the sun. Church started around 12 and we were asked to sit on stage. About 30 people showed up, including our host family! That made us so happy that they came to support us. By the end of the month, we realized they were our biggest fans. We began worship and instantly a woman started manifesting. She either needed deliverance or was just causing a scene. I could not discern which one. I started to pray over her and mom (our host mom) anointed her with coconut oil. (Indian women have coconut oil on them at all times, for reason’s such as this).
The way we decided to go about our sermons this month was one person give a testimony that goes along with the sermon that another teammate would do. It worked out really well. On the first day, I told my testimony and Gisele preached. We always had a translator everywhere we went, and our “real host” who slowly started to become our best friend/body guard/manager came with us as well. On our first day, he took one of our cameras and took the BEST photos. After, we gave everyone an opportunity to come up and allow us to pray over them individually. I love that part, but sadly, by the end of the month I dreaded it. *this is fast forwarding, but I became so tired this month that I could barely speak, let alone preach and pray over people, but let’s not talk about that yet…*
Personally, I prayed over about 10 people on the first day of preaching. After the service we loaded back up in the Tuk-tuk and headed home. Once we got home, there were people there that needed prayer. So we all gathered around and prayed for what they needed. Knee pain, back pain, divorce, addiction.. you name it, we prayed for it.
Prayer became a really big focus this month, which is funny because in Zambia Gisele asked the Lord to help us grow in our prayer life. We prayed all the time. In the morning after waking up, before breakfast, before ministry, during ministry, after ministry, before dinner, after dinner, before bed, and this isn’t including all the prayers over people who came to our house just to be prayed for. We would be woken up in the middle of the night because someone needed prayer. Or our showers would be interrupted, our dinners interrupted, team time interrupted, quiet time interrupted, because of prayer. We prayed over and over again for so many people but never had prayer for us. We were spiritually drained. Our tanks became empty, we had nothing left to give. That became very obvious… I became so exhausted that I literally did not know who I was anymore. I felt like a zombie who just moved her legs to get her places. I have never experienced pure fatigue like that in my life.. mental fatigue, spiritual fatigue, physical fatigue.. all hit me in one instant. Some days we would drive an hour to our ministry hosts house, where another team from my squad was staying. They said we all looked dead.. and I believe it. I felt like a robot. I did not have the energy to even eat a meal. Yet, I had to go in front of people and preach every. single. day.
It was so difficult because we had a set time to leave our home. But Indian time is… a little slow. It’s actually considered rude to show up early to something. So every single day we would wake up early thinking we had to preach at 9AM, but we would not leave the house until 3 or 4.. we were on edge all day. At any given second someone could open our doors and say, “okay! Let’s go!”. So we would wait, and wait, and wait.. we normally got home around 9 and had dinner around 10PM, would attempt to write a sermon before bed and if we’re feeling it, try and have team time and would finally go to sleep around 12AM.. every day. And then we would wake up early the next day and do it all over again.
One time, we preached 3 different sermons in 3 different villages in 1 single day… but that’s a story for my next blog 🙂
