Final Thoughts
They tell you that once you go, you’re changed forever and I went to India expecting some earth shattering revelation. I am ever one for overblown expectations. The thing about India is that it does change you forever, but not often in some epiphany of divine communication. I’m sure some people get that, but I have yet to be that guy.
The changes it wrought were mostly small, yet deep seated, changes that are singularly more significant than any Mac truck force realization could have been. I find myself awake, alive and with a deeper understanding of what God intended for us to be. I feel more focused and more at peace than I have ever felt. I found my faith shaken to the core, not by disappointment, but by the clear demonstration of the absolute pettiness of the concerns or worries that held me back.
There is no way to truly put into words the things that you see on a trip like this. You cannot communicate the years of pain, betrayal and need behind a child’s smile; perfectly relay the stories of sacrifice, loss and faith in the face of amazing adversity; you cannot understand it on a visceral level until you’re looking that person in the eye and stand in their environment. Disconnecting from the fog of your own perceptions is a truly impossible task until you understand how truly distant you are from your own definitions of comfort and safety, pain and adversity.
We spoke to a child that lived in a train station and ate food from garbage cans; watched a man who had saddled himself with immense debt to care for 15 children weep as months of prayer came to fruition at the very last moment on a happenstance encounter with our team erased it all and gave him money to continue. We heard from a pastoral student that had no place to live, no email address, no phone number, nothing, yet he rejoiced that he could walk the streets and preach the gospel; sat with a pastor that had started his school, church and orphanage in a town that he chose because they had just burned thousands of bibles and witnessed his unshakable faith that God would provide.
In the face of incomprehensible conditions, real persecution, and a seemingly impossible task of changing the course and culture of a country of 1.4 billion people, men and women are stepping out to “suffer with Christ” not just for a couple of weeks or months, but for years or whole lifetimes. Children are being saved from the streets, people are coming to know Christ, and God is moving the impossible to the possible in increments.
I spent much of my life disenchanted with Christianity because of the hypocrisy and pettiness of many of the Christians I encountered as a Pastor’s Kid. At one point, I felt that God was a crutch used to hold up feeble hatreds, justified “us and them” mentalities, and make “train wreck” people feel good about themselves while changing nothing. I had already abandoned much of that thinking as youthful angst, but in India, all I could hear was God in the back of my head saying “Do you see now? Do you see what it’s all about? Do you see what it means to suffer and why it’s considered glory? Do you still think I’m a crutch?” I was crushed and humbled.
I still don’t know all the changes it wrought in me, but it’s coming together. I went to India looking for answers. I came back with those and more questions still. Yet I know this: I am wired for this. I am more alive today than I was a month ago, and I have had any idea that what God might ask of me being too difficult shattered into tiny pieces. I do not know if that will lead me back to India on a less temporary basis or if it will lead to something else. I just know that God answered my question of Purpose; it is the form in which that purpose will be realized that I have yet to see.
I’ll leave it on one last note. If none of that had happened, if it had been just a trip to another place to do some things, and life was not changed in any tangible way, this one moment alone would have accounted for every penny spent and every moment surrendered. If ever there is a moment where you know you’re seeing God in all of his glory doing exactly what he promised he would do, it is this:
