While in Malaysia, my team and I served at an Indian church called Bethel Assembly. We were located in an industrial town called Sungai Petani, surrounded by auto shops and junk yards. After spending a month in a village in Thailand with limited access to everything, I had high expectations for Malaysia. When I thought of Malaysia, I pictured tall sparkly towers, developed cities, beaches and access. My expectations were not met. Instead of cities like Georgetown or Kuala Lumpur, we were in Sungai Petani.
My first picture of Sungai Petani was painted by our taxi driver before we even arrived. His first response to us when we told him where we were going was “why are you going to Sungai Petani, there’s nothing there.” Thank you sir very reassuring.
One thing I’ve learned over these months is that expectations are dangerous, but I couldn’t help myself. This is when I realized, I needed to alter my expectations. Instead of expecting comforts, I needed to expect God to show up. I needed to expect my relationship with God to grow, I needed to expect God’s love to overflow, I needed to expect an impact, I needed to expect God.
Although I was not where I had expected to be God helped me see the little blessings like AC, western toilets, running water, electricity, and an empty sanctuary/ sound system to worship, pray and work out. While in SP, we attended prayer and house meetings, led an English service, participated in a worship conference (where we danced and sang back up in front of 2,000 people), experienced traditional Tamil church services, laughed and joked a lot with our host and his brothers and danced a lot. I had moments of boredom and exhaustion, times of feeling trapped inside, late nights and early mornings but I also had time with God.
I was blessed to experience one week helping out at a special needs school. Now one thing I have determined is that teaching is not my thing and at first I was not thrilled. I soon realized these students are different in more ways than one. They are not judgmental, they smile so much, they are easily impressed and they have no expectations. We made crafts, we sang, I made them laugh, they made me laugh and there was no pressure. They reminded me not to let the pressure of expectations take away the joy that God has for me.
I’m not going to say this was an easy month or that I didn’t have moments (many moments) of frustration, but I will say God made it a lot easier.
