Finish Strong.

India.

 

Our last country. The final stretch.

 

India was challenging to our team in many ways. Besides the fact that the people worship cows, meaning cow pies were everywhere, and don't appreciate hygiene at all, there were worse things happening.

 

You see India is like a battlefield. Like a war zone. You either suit up, or you get hurt. The places we visited during our time there were all places where you couldn't let your relationship with God slip.

 

We started off in Delhi, wow, what a city. People and cattle walk side by side. Hindu God's sit on their thrones and receive worship from everyone in the country, shipowners, hotel managers, restaurant staff and many more. This wasn't unusual to us by now, but it was crazy that the truth of "the god you worship, you will reflect" came to life.

 

Multiple times we would enter a shop hoping to do some bargaining but at the sight of the Hindu goddess Ganesha we would just turn and leave. She is the goddess of success, which means you would have no success in bargaining with the shop owner. The people reflect the god they worship.

 

From Delhi we moved on to Varanasi which is the spiritual capital of the country. This city is known as the place where people come to die. They believe that if a person was to die in the "holy" city, was burned on the riverbank and the remains were put in the river, that person would skip the process of reincarnation and go directly to "heaven."

 

Can you imagine that much death in one city? Bodies were carried with chanting through the narrow streets, sometimes we would pass more than 5 daily, and walking down the riverbank meant you would see a few body burning heaps.

 

In Varanasi our team was quite limited in ministry, because almost the whole team became severely sick all at once, it may have been due to the spiritual heaviness of the city, or just the lack of hygiene.

 

We managed to go to the temple of Shiva as well as do some prayer walking and we met some people who really needed some Jesus love. We also had a worship night just before leaving and we met up with some South Africans at a stage who clarified some myths. Let's just say it was an interesting week.

 

India was also the first and only country where our team missed a train. After returning to Delhi from Varanasi we missed our train which would have taken us to the orphanage where we would serve.

 

A few days later after meeting some cool people and being encouraged, we were off to Alwar where we met up with some friends from Emanuel Ministries. Wow, this was the highlight of our time in India by far.

 

The boys there were so special. We made some pretty hectic connections with them and actually became very emotional when we needed to leave. Jesus had established deep brotherly bonds between the boys and our team and they honored us for the time we spent with them.

 

Besides just spending time sharing stories or playing soccer we ran a tight program with them that started at 05:00am and ended at 21:30pm. They honored us with a going away party including a well planned and thought out skit along with all the memory verses we had taught them. They ran our program back to us.

 

Then it was time to start traveling home. 32hours (on a train) later we arrived in Mumbai and we were surprised with a hotel room to freshen up for our long flight home.

 

God is good, and we are pleased to say that we finished our year strong.

 

Next stop, debrief.