India on the whole is a land of intensity. You wake up in the morning, and before your eyes even open, you’re bombarded with the sounds of cars honking and dogs barking. The colors blaze and the smells are overwhelming: spices and smoke and dusty street life.
It’s been about a week since I left my comfortable home of breakfast with my parents and sleepovers with my sister, days filled with best friends and little kids.
The transition has been hard- harder than I thought it would be. Sure, I knew that I’d have a breakdown (as they say all Racers do) sometime between months 4 and 6, but I really wasn’t expecting the beginning to drag by, each day longer than the last, as the jet lag wore off and the reality of the year dawning on my conscience with more clarity than it ever had before:
This is real life. And this real life is intense.
The first few days were launch in Hyerbadad, India- a time of acclimating to the country (and the timezone), to our team and to ourselves. It was a time of tears and laughter, of taking our eyes off of where we were coming from and focusing on the future and the work God has in store for us.
Once launch was over, my team packed up, spent the night in the airport before flying to Bangalore, and hopped on a bus to the YWAM base here, where we’ll be spending our next month.
Again, the transition was hard. Now I was going from a squad of 40 to a team of 6, the people who are supposed to be my family but still don’t appreciate my bad jokes or youtube quotes. I still haven’t actually spoken to anyone from back home or really heard anything from my parents.
This is real life, World Race style.
But finally we started ministry. Yesterday we went to an apartment where slum kids go on the weekends. This Vision School is a safe place where they get some cookies (called biscuits) and get to hear how much God loves them.
Hanging out with these kids was a breath of fresh air (figuratively, of course- all the same smells are everywhere). They reminded me why I was here and what at the end of the day is important to me.
Yes, I love my family. Yes, I love my friends. Yes, I love teaching dance, babysitting the Husted girls, hanging out with my Rock kids, sometimes even helping business run at optimum capacity. But my heart is, and has been for quite some time, with “the least of these,” with the kids whose families are torn and broken, who live on that slated less than $1 a day, who play in the mud and don’t know what sharks are, let alone what the ocean looks like.
We get to go back to this ministry every weekend while we’re here in Bangalore, and I’m psyched, partially because these kids have stolen my heart, but mostly because they breathed fresh air back into it and reminded me that this year isn’t about me.
It’s about them.
