This month my team and team Pleres are in a city called Ongole in southern India, about an hour from the Bay of Bengal. Yesterday we went to CV Pollum Covenant Home. Forty-five minutes outside of Ongole there is a two-level home where 10 orphan boys live with a pastor, his wife, and their 3 little boys. Our task for the day: to paint the walls blue…At least, that was the original plan – just blue, a lovely blue, sky blue in fact. But by the time we left there was more than just blue on those walls.
At the outset of this month we thought our ministry would be church planting in a village. While the thought of being able to go home and tell people that I helped plant a church in India seemed so impressive to me, something within my spirit new that I needed something more tangible to do this month – I needed to do ministry where I could feel and see the difference I was making. As terrible and bratty as it might sound, I knew I needed to do more than preach and pray and fund raise.
God has this way of answering prayers I can’t even put into words, or haven’t yet put into words.
One of my passions is art. At home I love to paint, it’s something that calms my nerves and helps me clear my head; the process of it enthralls me and somewhere amidst the colors, brushes, the smell of paint, the mess of it, and the feeling of gliding paint over a surface makes me feel calm and closer to those deep parts of me that are left untouched by so many other things that life entails. Something about it makes me feel God more, at least feel Him in a different way.
Before we left debrief in Hyderabad for Ongole, I knew that I needed to do something with my hands. I needed to use my hands to do something, plain and simple. I knew I had to do something that involved my gifts, anything. Well, God set us up working with a children’s home called Sarah’s Covenant Home where over 80 children with special needs live. He also gave us the opportunity to paint four homes for orphaned children in various parts of this area. I didn’t really think to ever ask God to give me an opportunity to paint, I’ve had the opportunity to paint in both the Philippines and Malaysia, and it was just something I didn’t think to pray for. But He knew. He always knows exactly what we need.
I want to change the face of this world. I want to make it beautiful and colorfully infused with the love of God. I want to make it look more like the creation God originally intended it to be. And for some reason, a lot of the time I think I can do it on my own. But just like those walls I can’t. I could start but never be able to finish on my own. It is necessary that I have help, people around me with the same vision and the same heart.
