Wow. I can’t believe our first month of ministry is already over with! I was hoping that this adventure wouldn’t go by as fast as other racers have said it would but sadly I see that it’s indeed very true. India truly won my heart. I want to share something really cool that God allowed me to experience. As I said in my last blog about India, it’s very dark and oppressed there. The people are just so engulfed in their Hindu beliefs it was very hard to help them understand what a real relationship with Christ looks like. In most of the villages my team visited, there was usually a good amount of people who claimed to be Christians yet they still had other gods around their houses and also had the demon looking faces hanging on the outside of their houses to keep evil spirits away. At many houses we stopped to pray at, it was for an evil presence and darkness they felt there and each time, we tried explaining that all of those rituals and gods and things hanging up needed to come down because it wouldn’t stop until then. Of course with our translators, I’m not quite sure what was translated. It got very frustrating and very discouraging towards the end for my team and me. I just could not understand HOW we could help them understand what a relationship with Christ was. They believe in these religions that are based off of pure fear and it is so extremely sad to see. Needless to say, I just started feeling hopeless. I honestly started to think that there was just no hope for these people. When we arrived back in Hyderabad before heading to Nepal, my team got to go to a church that was all in English and had ACTUAL worship like we knew. I was in tears at the end of the worship time. It was auditorium style and was packed with Indians and Africans! At that moment, God reminded me that there is still hope in India and that there are people there who love Him and could continue sharing the gospel. I mean, this is a church, in the middle of a huge busy city in a country where Christians get persecuted and cut off from families, yet here were hundreds of people, my brothers and sisters in Christ, boldly proclaiming his name! What an incredibly beautiful thing to get to experience in my last few days in India! It’s been really interesting hearing the rest of the squad’s experiences from India. There’s a lot of people who loved it but wouldn’t go back, there’s people who were thankful for the experience but are glad to be out of there, and then there’s us who would move to India in a heartbeat haha It has been really great hearing all the amazing things that God has done in India. Although we were told India would be one of our hardest months, I am so thankful it was our first month going in. It was tough, and the culture was at times difficult to understand, but it allowed us to truly rely on Christ for his guidance and man, did he show up and do big things! There is still SO much I’m trying to process from India, and honestly I don’t know if I ever fully will, but I do know that God used us beyond anything we could do on our own to be a light in such a dark place!
