Well hey there friends, it’s been a while! I apologize for the lack of blogs the past month, wifi seems to be one of the scarcest resources here in India! In case you were wondering, I am most definitely alive and well! It’s been a crazy first month here, and I’ve seen the Lord do so much in me and the community that I had the opportunity to live in! I’m currently at my month 4 debrief, and the rest has been greatly appreciated/needed. With all that said, this is going to be a longer post because I don’t have the time for multiple posts, so strap in and get ready for information overload.
To kick off our adventure to India, we had almost three days of straight travel that involved 18 hours of flight time and a 10 hour bus ride. In this process of traveling, the airport seemed to misplace my big pack. This has left me with only two shirts, a flannel, some wool socks, my day pack, and one pair of underwear. Over this past month though, I’ve picked up two more shirts (well technically four, but I had to ditch two because they turned my skin blue), a sleeping bag from one of my squad leaders, and some new underwear that my coaches brought me at debrief! It’s been an adventure to figure out how to live with practically the bear minimum, as well as to see the support that my squad has showed me over this season.
Enough about the bag, let’s get back to the good stuff. Upon arriving at our main base in India, we spent two or three days (time a concept that is slowly leaving my mind, so the days may not be correct) at orientation to better understand our host organization, Bibles for the World, and all that we would be doing. We found out that my team, as well as the team The Front Line, would be heading to Damcharra (pronounced Dam Charra), and we would be working/living at a school doing VBS and teaching when school actually started. With all that in mind, we hopped on a 4 hour train ride and headed off to our first month of India ministry!
Our ministry for the past month was working a ministry called King of Kings, which was an English school. The headmaster, Daniel, was also the pastor of a local church, so we also helped out there as well. The first two weeks we did VBS, with the first week having the VBS at the school and the second having it at a village a hour or so away. Doing the VBS, I really realized how much I really enjoy and missed working with younger children. I loved just getting to be a giant goofball and just having so much fun showing the love of Christ to young kids. Most of the time I helped out with teaching the songs to the kids, and it was such a fun time doing silly dances to get all the kids involved with what we were trying to teach them.
After the two weeks of VBS, we had a day of social work, which is what our host called manual labor. We drove out to a nearby village, and we helped with the construction of a church. My job on this particular day was to wade out into a river behind the church and pull up sand from the riverbed onto a burlap sack. After it was on the sack, we would put the sack on a bamboo pole, and two people would wade back to the shore and drop of the sand and redo the whole process. This was probably one of the most fun days that I have had on the race, because it was just 13 racers just letting lose and having fun playing in an Indian river after we were done. It was just such a beautiful time, and it is something that I will never forget.
After about two weeks of us being at King of Kings, the students finally came and started school. It was so cool because there were students that lived on the school grounds with us, and we just had the opportunity to grow with them before and after school. The first two days of school was just a huge sports tournament that we had the opportunity to participate in as well! We had the chance to play the students in soccer, and this really started a rivalry between us and the locals that led to countless soccer matches throughout our time there. After the sports tournament was over, classes resumed and we had the chance to be teachers for a week. It was definitely one of my favorite weeks on the race because I realized that I really enjoy teaching, even if it was not always the subject that I was supposed to be teaching. The students were hesitant to talk to us at first, but over that week they really warmed up to us and it was really enjoyable!
So now I am going to switch the focus of the blog from our ministry to what the Lord did in me over this past month. It started out as an awkward month for the Lord and I, I just wasn’t really feeling that much of a connection with the Lord whenever I spent time with him. About two or three days into ministry, I realized that my time with God has slowly became a thing that I just had to check off of a list, it had lost all the relational aspect of what it should have been. So I decided to take a leap and change up how I went about spending time with the Lord, and it was honestly so good for me. Instead of just sitting with the Lord in the morning, I started to spread that time throughout my day, and it just brought about such a change in the way that I operated. I started writing letters to Jesus in the mornings, and it just released me to pour out all my real emotions to him. I had a place where I could be honest and say that I was frustrated, angry, hurt, thriving, full of joy and excitement or just any other emotion or thing that I was going through. Putting my emotions to paper just freed me, it was so much easier to pour it all out than in my head. I would later spend some time in the Word in the afternoon, specifically Matthew, after our tea time (which is honestly the best part about India. America get your act together and put in tea time in our daily schedule). It gave me time to just sit and work through the Word; I wasn’t rushed by breakfast or having to go to ministry, I had all the time I needed to just sit and sink my teeth into Scripture. In the evenings, I would for the most part end up journaling my day. This proved to be quite needed in my life; mostly because a lot happens in a day on the race, and you forget a lot of times what actually happens on what day. It helped me pull in all my memories from the day, and to just find gratitude for what the Lord did that day.
The biggest thing that happened to me this past month though was learning about some areas where I lack trust in the Lord. This all came about one day after I listened to a podcast about finding your way in life, and it just sent me into a panic. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I wanted to do or that I was on the wrong path in life, it just made me question what the Lord has already spoken over my life. It made me question what the Lord had told me, it threw my trust for the Lord out the window. For two days I was just in an uncomfortable place, so I decided to take a day off of ministry to sit with the Lord. That day I sat down and read through the entirety of Brennen Manning’s “Ruthless Trust.” It’s a book all about seeking absolute trust in the Lord, and to be honest it wrecked me in the best way possible. I didn’t know why so many things in my life were the way they were until I read through it. The book showed me that a lot of my remaining insecurities and doubts about myself all stem from a lack of trust in what Abba says about me. That my desire for control and clarity in my life all come from not releasing my future to the Lord, and not having the trust that he will take me to where he wants me.
Having your trust in the Lord tested is a scary thing, but it honestly has taken me to such a good place. I’ve learned that gratitude leads to joy, and that because we are grateful we can have joy. I learned that trust is made up of having faith and hope, and that this can be seen countless times throughout the Gospels (specifically in the miracles that Jesus performed for people like healing and such). I’m finally starting to understand that human love is incomparable to God’s love; that we can compare human love to God’s, but in no way can we compare God’s love to ours.
Y’all, the Lord has taken me to such a place of residing in him and what he has for me, and for the first time in a while I have no fear of what is to come. I’ve been liberated from the fear that plagues my generation, the ever present worry about what is coming next. God is so good when it comes to it all, and I’m finally starting to see the fullness of that in my own life.
So I’ll start wrapping up this blog here. I’m sorry for the hodgepodge of information here, so much has happened this month and I really only have time for one blog while I’m here at debrief. If I somehow can find more time to write and post blogs, I may get more than this one blog up. I tried my best to hit all the highlights of the month, but I still feel like this blog misses a lot. Before I end this blog though, I have some really cool news! Later today I have an interview for a discipleship program called Center for Global Action, CGA, that AIM runs for people after they get off the race. If my interview goes well, I’ll be moving off to Georgia for 4 months in October to be discipled and really learn how to apply what I learned on the race to my whole life! I’m sorry that this blog was so long, but I needed to get a lot out there and this was the best I can do. I’ll see if I can update you all more this month, but I cannot make any real promises. Thank you all for your prayers and interest about what I’m doing here, it means a lot to me!
Love and blessings,
Tucker Stevens
