To quote Carly Rae Jespen, “Hey, I just met you, And this is crazy!”
A teammate was singing this yesterday on our 9-hour bus ride after already having traveled for 34 hours and it pretty well describes how I feel right now about India. This journey started last December and it seems like I’ve been talking about it for so long. But this morning I woke up to this view….
So here we are. We are working this month in Andhra Pradesh. It’s one of 27 states in India and is made up of 85 million people living in 22,000 villages. One of the long-term goals of this organization is to have a church in every single one of those villages. They also have a children’s home that serves special needs kids. This month 2 of our teams will be working at the children’s home and my team, along with 4 others, will be going out to different villages in this state to evangelize. So tomorrow morning my team of 7 will head out to a village, where we are told there will be no electricity, no running water, and that we should bring a good shovel to dig our own bathrooms. Sounds exciting right?!
Once we get settled in we will do ministry 6 days a week. In the afternoon we’ll go out into the village prayer walk and meet people. We’ll invite them to a service that we’ll hold each night. My team will be completely in charge of the service each night. We’ll take turns preaching, giving our testimonies, leading skits, etc. Needless to say, a little out of my comfort zone! But I was reading Ephesians 6 yesterday in the Calcutta airport. In this chapter Paul talks about being equipped with the armor of God. He talks about how we need to be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power and then goes on to list the different pieces of armor. Then in verse 19 he says, “Pray also for me, that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel.” I can’t sum it up any better than that. I ask that you will pray this for me this month as we go to minister to people that may have never heard the gospel before. Pray for my team as we are stretched out of our comfort zone and for the softening of hearts for the people we will meet.
Once we leave in the morning I’m not sure when we’ll have internet again. So just keep us in your thoughts and prayers and I’m expecting to have some pretty incredible stories to share when we get back to the wifi connected world!!
Oh and for the record, there really are cows just wandering around everywhere. I was on my computer earlier on the porch, looked up and a cow had wandered up to a pile of trash about 15 yards from me. I’ll have more picture evidence of this soon!
