Wow, the men of G squad have been in Kolkata for less than a week and God is moving so mightily here. The guys have been so awesome about stepping out and having bold conversations and praying for healing of people’s hearts and their bodies and the Lord has been answering those prayers. People are feeling loved and experiencing the presence of God in a way that they haven’t before. That being said I wanted to share some really cool stuff that we just fell into in the last couple days.
To start I have to give you guys some background story.
I love good tattoos. I love when someone is able to take a rough idea or a memory that you have and turn it into something beautiful and meaningful that will stay with you forever….
The whole time I’ve been out with G squad, I have had a little money stowed away in the back of my phone to have some tattoo work done in Nepal because the work is supposed to be great there and the prices are cheap.
As we have approached transitioning to Nepal several of us guys have been talking about ideas for our tattoos. The idea that I had really settled on was to have something with a hummingbird done.
Why a hummingbird? Because some of my fondest memories of my Gramma and my Papa together were of us sitting in the sunroom at their house and all of a sudden my Papa saying, “Look Mo, there’s a hummingbird on the feeder.” We would sit there a bit longer and inevitably some little brightly colored male hummingbird would come crashing in like a kamikaze and run all of the females off of the feeder. Papa always got the biggest laugh out of watching those birds zipping around the feeder like fighter planes….. I can still hear his big bellowing laugh as I’m writing this.
So, the other day a few of the G squad guys and I were walking around praying for people and Jesus was doing some cool stuff. Joey and Eric prayed for one man who was fully deaf and Jesus opened the man’s ears enough for him to actually hear some sounds. Not full healing, but marked improvement is also an open door to use Jesus name and tell people they are loved. After that encounter, the next guys Joey talked to started talking to him about this awesome tattoo shop here in Kolkata. When I heard there were good artists here in Kolkata I was super skeptical. Even if there were some good guys here this is India….. no offense, I love India, but it’s not the cleanest place and not a place I would have ever thought of having thousands of little holes put in my skin…..
But we ended up going to check out the shop. As we walked in, it was like we stepped out of India and into one of the nicest shops in the States. It was clean, it smelled good, Post Malone was playing on the radio, and everyone spoke pretty good English.
I had a consult with an artist named Satish and man, I loved what he came up with. The price was just a tad more than my budget but not by much so I went ahead with having the piece done.
As, he was working on my tattoo, Satish and I talked about the trip I’ve been on for the last 15 months, we talked about our interests… he told me that even his ancestors did tattoos here in India. Very different tattoos than Satish does, but it’s in his blood….. and then I got to share with him some testimonies of people being healed by Jesus here in India and he seemed super surprised. I shared the Gospel with him and as I got done…. He looked at me with this grin and said, “I have never heard this before, I like this very much. Can I see Jesus heal someone?” Holy cow! That hit me like a ton of bricks….. I was looking into the eyes of an intelligent Indian man, who had never heard that Jesus was the way, that Jesus loved him, and that Jesus would transform his heart and mind, and bring healing to his heart and the hearts of those around him….. It was incredibly humbling to get to share the love of Christ with this brother for the first time.
When he was done with the tattoo, I was totally blown away by the art. I’ve never been so pumped about anything I’ve put on my body.
That was yesterday….. today I went in for Satish to clean the tattoo for me and to put a treatment on it to keep it clean and allow for better healing. So we hung out and he did the work and before I left to grab a bite to eat, I got to pray over him. As I prayed he just looked at me and smiled… he felt so loved.
While a few of us were at dinner, a couple of the other guys were there at the tattoo shop…one of them having a tattoo done and the others hanging out having good convos and then Eric was in there playing his guitar… playing secular music and slipping worship songs in as well.
When I got back over there after dinner, I picked up Eric’s guitar, he was using mine and we played a few songs and jammed a while…. There were so many phones out taking videos for their Instagram feeds and other social media.
Then the idea hit me…. What if we were to set up a live music day with these guys that they could advertise, in order to maybe get some people into the shop for consults or tattoos during a time that was normally slow??…….. What a way to bless all these guys and have time to worship over the shop, and have great convos with people.
The Lord is pursuing these guys and they don’t even realize it yet. Our live music afternoon will be going on about the time most of you are waking up for work in the eastern time zone. Send up a prayer for us and for these awesome guys at the shop.
