You ever want to love something so much that when it doesn’t live up to your expectation you feel SUPER disappointed?
Like when you have a bunch of things planned up in your mind for a vacation but everything you planned falls through and you have to make the best of it?
I had high expectations for India.
You might be thinking,”It’s India Mary, why would you have high expectations for such an impoverished country?”
That’s a valid question, but the reason I chose this route for world race was so that I could go to India.
I originally applied for a different route but after watching the movie Lion I was having dreams about India for a month.
I knew that I had to go.
What’s crazy is not just a few months before that, I was listening to someone who had done there DTS for YWAM in India and I said out loud,”I have no plans to go there! That sounds rough!”
It is crazy how God can change your heart for a nation in a matter of a few days.
I went in to India last month thinking that this month was going to be a life changer. I was super excited and the first two weeks were some of my favorite memories in India.
It started to get hectic in week 3.
It was getting harder and harder to get out of Hyderabad by train because all of the sleeper seats were booked and a lot of us teams were just suck in the city longer than we planned to be.
It was frustrating logistically but once we got it figured out, we moved fast to New Delhi after a week in Hyderabad.
The train ride was great, when we got there the car ride to the hostel was scenic, the hostel was clean enough, and I was happy to just be standing on ground that was standing still after being on a train for 25 hours.
After some rest, the next day was our sabbath so a few of us went out and had a super great day just checking out some things in the city. I got to sit in Starbucks for 4 hours and enjoy some great coffee, and had a great conversation with two people before heading out to a dance show that was happening in the park.
The day was perfect, until I got home.
Disaster struck and I was sick…I mean really sick. And I haven’t been REALLY sick in 2 years.
I didn’t get any sleep and the next morning I was exhausted. When you are sick though, the hardest part is that you have to sit out of ministry that day. You are stuck in bed, resting, and trying to get better so you don’t miss any more days.
Well, 4 out of 7 girls on my team ended up being sick at the same time and we spent two days sleeping and trying to stay hydrated.
It took 2 days and 3 nights for me to go into a low place I like to call:
The Black Hole of India
I was not only dealing with stomach sickness, my allergies were miserable, I was having consistent nightmares, and a feeling like I had something sitting on my chest some nights that made it really hard to breathe.
Everybody knows that to get better from sickness you need lots of sleep and I wasn’t getting that necessary sleep.
I was really getting to a point where I wanted to say,”I can’t do this anymore.” And booking a flight home.
Yea, I sunk that low. And I had never had that thought while on the race!
I felt isolated, exhausted, and the enemy was telling me that these bad things were happening because I was not doing enough. I was having nightmares and long nights because I wasn’t praying enough, reading my Bible enough, or I wasn’t spiritual enough.
I really started to believe all of those lies and dug myself deeper into the black hole.
Our fourth day in New Delhi, I was pretty quiet around my team and I was not very engaged in what we did that day. It wasn’t until our Bible study in a Dunkin Donuts that I was started to feel a weight lift.
As we were all doing our check ins, I realized that a lot of us were dealing with these thoughts of leaving.
When we all laid it all out on the table, said everything that we were going though or thinking and calling it spiritual warfare, a weight was definitely lifted off of all of us.
When we recognized these were not our thoughts and these thoughts do not define us, we were able to identify those negative thoughts and tell them to shut up.
Our fifth day in New Delhi, I started to climb myself out of that black hole and back onto a solid foundation. And it honestly took a few days to finally start feeling like myself when we moved to Agra.
It amazed me that it only took a little less than a week for me to fall from being head over heals in love with this country to a place where nothing about India made me happy.
That is exactly what the enemy wanted. He wanted me to believe it was a helpless country and there was nothing I could do to change that.
When you start thinking thoughts that you know are not from you, you gotta call them out and kick Satan back to hell.
I was so mad that I had let the enemy make me think so badly of this country.
It wasn’t until we were leaving India that I started to see even more of the beauty that I missed in the past.
The children playing on a huge toppled tree but having the best time, the grandma selling fruit on the side of the street with a huge smile, the loan green tree amongst vast tan fields, and women in beautiful saris herding the goats in the open field while the sun sets.
That is the beauty that I missed because all I started to see was the negative before.
Now that I have seen it, the crazy part is that I want to go back.
I want to capture the beauty that I missed this first time around.
My love for India was so high and filled to the brim with expectancy. When it wasn’t what I planned, it fell pretty fast. But, I know that India taught me a valuable lesson and helped me to take captive of my thoughts to notice when a foreign one enters.
I am thankful that God was able to show me the beauty of India as I sat in trains and long car rides. I was able to see the India that I saw in my dreams and that makes me even more excited for the future of this country.
No one could have prepared me for India and the lessons I would learn in keeping an open mind and an open heart.
I think of the opportunities and conversations that were lost because I had a negative outlook on the country as a whole.
I know that I now do love India in a new way and I hope maybe one day I will make it back and see more of what this country has to offer.
