With the transition from India to Nepal came a transition from Team Wildflowers, who I had been a part of for the first four months, to a new team. While the thought of leaving my teammates, who had walked with me through the most wonderful, difficult an transformative months of my life, was sad, I was eager to experience it all again with a new team and see the Lord show up again.
I spent our last month as Team Wildflowers praying into our new teams, asking the Lord for His provision and guidance as leadership decided our new teams, for peace and immediate bonding and vulnerability in the new teams.
I had so much peace going into team changes, trusting that God had it locked down. And He answered prayer after prayer. The first time my new team, Women of Wonder, sat down together it was immediately comfortable and we launched into a vulnerable conversation, sharing where we were emotionally and spiritually.
As a fresh team, we embraced ATL (Ask the Lord, where we don’t have set ministry in the country, instead we pray, go and do as the Lord leads) and we hopped on a bus from Kathmandu, a sprawling city in a high, cool valley, to Chitwan National Forest, the hottest, flattest part of Nepal.
We stayed at a homestay on the bank of a lazy, little river where elephants bathed every morning. The homestay was designed in the traditional style of the Tharu tribe. We built friendships with the staff, fished with them in the river, joked around and on our last night, we celebrated with the most bizarre and hilarious dance party I have ever been a part of.
Here’s a high quality video of us dancing to Gangam Style:
Chitwan was a really sweet season of rest and building relationships with other travelers, the staff, and people in town. We got to ride elephants, fish in the river, ride bikes through the forest and cook with local women.
After Chitwan we loaded up on a another bus and traveled to the resort town of Pokhara. Pokhara was beautiful, but in all reality, it was really hard for me. With the backdrop of mountains and lakes, the Lord walked me through a season of melancholy, apathy, and numbness. These mini-depressions fall on me occasionally since my first year of college, but usually only last a day or two, but I was in this state for about two weeks. And throughout it, the enemy reigned in my head space, attacking my self-confidence and will to do any single thing. I asked the Lord over and over to take it away, but He didn’t.
Instead, He showed me His qualities as a comforter and the intentionality and purpose in His love through the seasons His children go through. On those days, it was hard to get out of bed and harder still to love and serve my teammates and the people around me. It felt like there was a veil of depression separating me from the rest of the world, but I remember being so sure that the Lord had not abandoned me. He was still showing me things and I felt His love even when I was numb to everything else.
I needed Jesus then. In the midst of it with no revelations in sight, I had to depend on the Lord moment by moment to function and love my teammates. He taught me so much about myself and His nature through it, and even though it was crazy hard, it was undeniably worth every second.
During these seasons, I always default to my favorite things as a comfort. I watched Secret Life of Bees, read A Wrinkle in Time, and studied in Micah. Micah 7:7-8 became my anthem:
As for me, I look to the Lord for help. I wait confidently for God to save me, and my God will certainly hear me. Do not gloat over me my enemies. For though I fall, I will rise again. Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light.
The Lord illuminated the root cause through a conversation with my squad’s mentor, who met us in Nepal to debrief the past few months before heading to Malaysia. And it sounds crazy, I’m pretty new to the spiritual side of God, but He revealed to us through our conversation that the seasons of melancholy I have been experiencing for years was because of a spiritual burden I had been carrying since my freshman year of university. I prayed later that day and asked God to break any ties that held this depression to me and free me from it completely.
I didn’t feel any different in the moment, but the next morning I caught myself whistling while getting ready. Then later, I caught myself narrating what I was doing with silly songs. I found myself laughing at stray dogs with big bodies and little legs. I didn’t think much of it at first, then it hit me. I hadn’t done any of those things in weeks, I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t unmotivated, I wasn’t doubting everything about myself. It was gone, my depression, melancholy, apathy, all of it gone. And it’s been a month since then and I haven’t had a glimpse of depression!
He healed a deep hurt in my soul last month.
Nepal was beautiful, but even more than being enamored by the scenery or the warmth of the people, it’ll be cemented in my heart as the place where the Lord brought me through a deep valley to one of the most beautiful mountaintops.
