Guess what everyone?????
It's month #4 already!!!!! What the heck!
So that means, if you look at the list of countries I am in…hmmm…what's the name again, oh right
INDIA
>The second most populous country with 1.2 billion people
>900,000 Indians die a year from drinking contaminated water and breathing polluted air
>2.3% Christians
>800 million (80.5%) Hindu
Life here in India is quite interesting, we have a very different month than any of the other teams on our squad and to be honest, I'm so glad. As much a I would love a "cush" month with A/C, internet, fruits and a fixed schedule, my month is exactly what I wanted when I signed up for the World Race!
For starters, when we got to India and I saw what the cities looked like, I immediately began praying for green! The cities, even the small ones are busy, polluted, and dirty. So God blessed me in this request. We live in a very small village in the middle of no where…I actually don't even know the name of the place. We live in a church sanctuary, the only room in the church, minus a small storage room that our married couple stays in.
We walk down the road to use the community squatty and basin for showering. It's atleast inside so I can get fully clean…well as fully clean as the water will allow. We buy food from street vendors or have meals made for us by a different families. We are the only white people the village has ever seen, so if we don't lock the door on our church, we have children at our door starring at us all day.
We start ministry anywhere from 2-4 and we end anywhere from 10-12. But in the mornings I wake up to do my devos and we have team time. For our ministry we will be visiting around 20 villages over the course of the next 3 weeks. We go to a different village each day and we make house visits. We tell people who we are, about the program that we will have that night, we tell them about Jesus and we pray for people.
Children hold our hands and follow us from house to house, continuously speaking the only English they know – "What is your name?" "How are you doing?" "I'm fine thank you." Once we finish visiting people, we go begin our program, usually around 8. We begin with singing a few songs, give a testimony, a message, and then have an altar call. Then we pray for people, we pray for pain, broken bones, headaches, school, blessings, all kinds of stuff.
We've seen people come to know Christ, we've seen a ladies knee healed to the point that she was able to jump up and down, we've seen a woman's neck healed so she could actually look to her left and her right. We've seen many "headache" healings, but mostly I've been able to touch hundreds of people in a short amount of days and place the hands of the Holy Spirit and pray on them simply because of the color of my skin. I'll take that.
At the end of the night, we come home, drained and worn out and I love it. I couldn't ask for a better month. To be able to pray for people who have never been prayed over before, to bring them before the Holy Spirit, to trust that God has a reason for each new person I encounter. Even when I'm exhausting knowing that God has compassion when He was weary and that I get to find my strength in Him and Him alone. Getting to sit outside and worship with my team as we prayed for people and watched a lunar eclipse. Getting to speak words that God puts into my mouth minutes before it's time for me to speak. Getting to use a new talent of playing guitar to lead worship for a building full of 50-100 people. Catching people's attention to tell them that God sent me all the way from America simply to tell them that the God of the universe loves them. Being able to walk into a house, tell a woman who God and Jesus are starting from creation and ending with today and then seeing her come to know Christ.
Who needs cush when I have Jesus?
"Whom do I have in heaven but You? And I desire NOTHING on earth but You. My heart and my flesh may fail, but God is the strength of my heart, my portion forever!"
-Psalm 73:25-26
