I miss India. A lot. Right now, as I type, there is another team from GCC most likely laying their heads down to sleep after a long, hard day of manual labor. They are helping to rebuild homes in the Tsunami zone, and it sounds like they are having an amazing time.

I have found that one of the highlights of my day is to log onto their blog site to read the stories and see the pictures of what they are accomplishing as well as who they are surrounded by. It only truly hit me 10 minutes ago how much my heart is aching for India. And it was brought on by one of the most random things – beef jerky.

When all of us were packing for India, we stocked our bags with all sorts of non-perishable food items in the case of there wasn’t much we could/want to eat, or if we were hungry while on the trip to or from, we would be all set. Ironically, the only time in India we busted out the food was on our last night – we all got back to the hotel after the restaurant had closed and we couldn’t order pizza again (the nice man wasn’t working the desk that night…) so we dined on tuna, beef jerky, peanut butter and crackers, nuts and assorted granola bars. And we thought it was great!

And I can tell the team currently in India now feels the same. They just blogged about a care package of food that was sent with them made by a woman from GCC…

Its kinda crazy how something like beef jerky could pull my heart strings and bring back all kinds memories of my time in India.

I have to go back….hopefully sooner rather than later…

Reflections

Well it has been almost two months since our return from India and here I am still trying to process everything I saw and experienced. I wonder if I will ever truly be "done" processing...

Last night Lindsey (one of my fellow India travelers) and I were talking about the pace of our lives. Somehow, without our knowledge, our lives have gone crazy. It seems like my life is over flowing with too many things to do and not enough time to do it in. Slowly, the pace of my life has increased back to warp speed. And it spawned a conversation about the pace of life in India...

India is a hard country and culture to put into words. As I have told many of you, even though we were actually only gone for 10 days, it felt like we were gone for at least a month. There was so many things packed into our days that it often felt like one day was really two or three. I believe most of this is simply because of we were "guests" from America and everyone wanted to see us, have a chance to talk with us and to have us pray for them. There is kind of a relaxed urgency in their way of life. The church planters we were with packed their days with visiting people and ministering in villages and homes, wanting nothing more than to love these people and help them to meet or know Christ better. Yet at the same time, there was always downtime to spend with their closest family and friends. Every day we were in the villages we "took rest" - some of us napped, some of us just laid down our heads, but there was always down time. How ironic is it that I had to travel across the world to see an example of relaxed urgency. And even after I experienced it and yearned to be like that upon my return home, somewhere along the line I returned to my old habits. Packing my minutes, hours, days and weeks with stuff, without "taking rest" every day.

How desperately do I want to remember how the Indians lived, and learn to emulate it into my daily life.