we are leaving india tonight and i've been thinking a lot about
what we've learned here and how we've changed. a couple posts ago i wrote
how we were feeling overwhelmed at the challenge to serve in a way that costs
us. as i was feeling pretty down about the
seeming insurmountability of my own selfishness, a small slice of
hope cut in: all major change that has happened in my life has started in the
moments of deep brokenness. i thought about the time when i first
realized the depth of poverty in the world when i was in Honduras and with
tears in my eyes made a commitment to give away a lot of my things. i
thought about this last year when my cabin at camp all came together in a way
i'd never seen and how it started when i was brutally honest about my own
struggle of caring too much about what others think of me. i thought
about the moment when i knew i would marry dave and could only love him if i
battled my pride. so in the same moment that i was feeling overwhelmed
and discouraged, i prayed that God would use this brokenness to bring about
change in dave and i while we were here in kolkata.
pause. so i actually did start writing this weeks ago on the
night we were leaving kolkata and we haven't had internet time since then.
i am sorry to any of you who were trying to follow our adventures and
were left assuming that we were trapped in an indian jail or something. a
combination of sickness and the fact that we were living out of a car in
iceland meant that we had no internet connection. we are home now and i
hope to be able to catch up with anyone reading this in person, but until then
i will try to finish the blog about our experiences as authentically as i can.
the last day dave and i spent at daya dan was good and strange at the same time. i mean, we had spent about three weeks helping out at this center for children with disabilities, so you might expect us to cry as the kids sang a goodbye song to us or at least to feel like we had been changed through our time there. the kids sang to us and the emotions that i expected to come at the end of this crazy time in india were just not there. even though i wouldnt have said it, i guess i expected that because india is so different, that my heart would be so different coming out. overall, as dave and i reflected on it, we realized that our time in india was full of 'mundane' experiences and every day challenges to love God and love people that were not any more glamorous or romantic than they are back home. what i mean by this is: while we were at a center for kids with disabilities, we spent most of our time every day seperate from the children, doing their laundry. dave and i were both sick to some degree or another most of the days in india. because of the business of begging, the sisters and other NGOs ask you to not give anything to beggars, so we were prevented from doing random acts of heroism. because we didn't have such extreme things happen to us or an overly emotional experience, we were forced to really deal with the condition of our heart and seek God in the same way we would back home. this was super challenging because I guess we assumed that the change would just happen to us, rather than us actually having to seek God.
right before we left daya dan for the last time, i sat beside mashi
(one of the local women employed to be house moms) as she fed one of the most
challenging children. i really connected
with her mostly because I thought she was hilarious and she liked my rosy
cheeks. i asked her about her life and
as she described to me what her daily life looks like, it was clear that God
was showing me what it really looks like to follow him. i asked her if she had kids and in very
broken english she told me how she had four young kids and how her husband left
her just after the fourth was born. she told
me how she was so greatful to have the job at daya dan so that she can provide
for her family. i thought it was crazy
enough that she was a single mom working in a culture where women do not work,
but she went on to tell me how she wakes up every morning at 4 to start cooking
rice for her children, then she wakes them up, walks them to school and takes 3
buses to get to daya dan. she gets to
daya dan in time to wake up and change her second group of children. She spends the whole day there playing,
feeding and loving the children, goes home, takes a 5-minute break, makes
dinner for her children, puts them to bed, does the laundry and dishes and is
finally in bed by 11. she asked me where
I was the last couple of days and I told her how dave and I had been in
darjeerling. i asked her if she had ever
been there and she replied, ‘no. i will never go. no money.’
everything she told me, she said in a very matter-of-fact kind of
way. she was not trying to get pity or
complain and in fact, when we weren’t talking she was singing and patiently
feeding one of the children his mashed-up rice. there was not even a hint of envy or of dissatisfaction as she told me
of her life, which from my perspective a bit of griping would be more than
justified. as I thought about it, it occurred to me that the kind of faith the
mashi lived out was the very day-to-day kind of faith that God was trying to
teach me. mother teresa’s words, ‘we can
do no
great things, only
small things with great
love’, were so clear in mashi’s
life. as i walked home i replayed in my mind the times i had seen mashi
tenderly tuck in so many of the children, or sing as she did the dishes, or
laugh so loud when she was tickling little santos. for her it is simple: serve and love in each
moment of every day. i was so challenged
and still am. the kind of mundane and
unglamorous tasks that we had before us in each moment we were in india were
moments we could choose to love and see the kingdom come. this is the good news of the kingdom: Jesus
came to make the poor rich in him, to tell those who the world shoves aside
that they are loved and to give the most value to day-to-day, ‘mundane’, unnoticed
acts of love. after all, isn't all of life the sum of 'ordinary' moments?
the kind of drastic and dramatic change that i had expected and
hoped for did not happen. india did not
end with a nice culminating point or lesson. we do not feel like people who have been changed into saints. what we did come away with, however, was the
call to be people who are not always seeking these spectacular things, but
rather are seeking to love God, however insignificant it may seem at times. we hope and pray that our minds and hearts
will begin to shift in such a way that the upside-downness of the kingdom of
heaven will start to seem right-side-up and we will begin to see mundane acts
of service as holy opportunities.
