Today (Sunday, March 23) has been the best day yet. As drew said, these are the times, this is the reason why I signed up for the race. But let’s start at the very beginning.
Today began like any other Sunday. We got up and went to breakfast and prayed with the kids, and then walked to church. I must say, up until this point today, I had just been going through the motions. Hugging the kids, hanging out, doing kids club, and just the whole shebang…but I can’t honestly tell you that my heart was in it. I really just think I never properly grieved from leaving Africa. Africa had so many beautiful memories and lessons, I just wasn’t ready to part with it all yet, and I was still hanging on to it that I forgot to be present here. Couple that with a lack of spiritual food and just the maturity to be seeking God and intimacy with him, as well as too much expectations about India, and comparing our experience to others experiences….well all of this was just eating away at me. I felt stagnant and knew something was off with me but at the time I just couldnt quite put my finger on it. The problem was that I couldn’t give what I didn’t have… You can’t pour out when your not filling yourself up. We just don’t always realize how much we really NEED Jesus. It was my own pride and brokenness keeping me from him. Thankfully it’s just another part of learning… taking risks and making mistakes but learning from them!! That’s the important part. I had also expected India to be hard, but when we got here it wasn’t. We are living in an apartment nicer than most places I’ve lived, and getting fed home cooked meals three times a day. Just shows you why they any to throw out all your expectations. But, i mean, we did have our own share of difficulties.
So after church, my teammates and I have been asking difficult and interesting theological questions together and walking through them in scripture. It has been really enlightening and these kinds of deep, meaningful conversations about God are my absolute favorite. So that was fun, and then we had to plan for kids club this evening. Since I have been the one taking charge of this, I was skipping through my notebook with past notes from devos, sermons and studies and saw one about the power of our words and speaking life. I thought that is a good idea, very true and applicable and we even came up with an exercise for the kids to do. We had them stand in a circle and we demonstrated what to do. You were supposed to come up with something nice to say to encourage the person to your left. I was kinda nervous at first as to how well it would work because past games and things have sometimes gotten lost in translation, and other times getting them to talk is like pulling teeth. But this time was different. They got it and it went really well. Some of the things they said about each other and about us were just precious. After that we took turns reading scripture and talking about the weight and value of your words, how life and death are in the power of the tongue, and how wet should speak life over others and ourselves. For some reason I just knew that they got it.
Afterward we had more worship. Ali pulled up three songs on her computer so they could have the lyrics and we all sang along. First was Speak Life by Tobymac, Our God, and Break Every Chain. We played Speak Life at least three or four times. It’s just a really fun upbeat song with a lot of truth to it, so imagine us all dancing and singing at the top of our lungs! Also, I started doing this thing back at debrief that I call ‘interpretive dancing’. Now this kind of started as a joke but I enjoy it, so I started doing it and then I look around and some of the girls are doing what I’m doing. Presh. But the best moment was during the song Break Every Chain. All the kids were sitting on the ground at the beginning, and I went to the corner so I could stand and worship freely. As the song progressed the spirit in the room was growing more powerful, then at the verse that says “there’s an army rising up” I yelled “RISE UP, ARMY!” And they all stood and it was one of the top worship moments of my life. I wish you could have been there.
