What a week!
We were informed on Monday that the team was going to a prayer meeting to a village that doesn’t know the gospel. A pastor has been recently planted there, who is a local Bengali. Our team prayed and asked God who to go, who to stay and seven out of ten of us hopped in the van with Pastor Sam and Pabithro. After forty minutes and thirty kilometers away we arrived. Village life in India is far different than what I’m used to. The houses were made out of smoothed mud and bamboo surrounded by miles and miles of rice farms.
I’m getting used to never really knowing what’s going on until it happens, Pastor Sam said he needed two people to preach, so the seven of us prayed and asked God who He thought should preach and it ended up being me and one of my teammates Sarah. What an overwhelming and humbling experience to be used by God, the maker of the world to preach His good news to people who have never heard about Jesus Christ. I still can’t get over it. What an awesome God paving the way!
Afterwards, we had a lot of people come up to be healed from various illnesses, demon possession, and depression. I’ve never felt the Spirit move so much inside of me, I’ve never prayed that hard, nor heard my team pray that hard. We were crying and screaming and I now realize a little bit more just how powerful God is. He loves us and he is going to fight on our behalf. We had some late night tea, hung out with the sweetest village kiddos and headed back.
On Tuesday, some of the girls went to our very first house visit at Gitaroi’s house. She is a precious woman. After feeding us way too many sweets, I saw on the table a Bengali to English translation book with a lot of questions she wanted to ask us. We met the whole family, sang songs and made a second date! I’m learning that being a missionary, being a disciple is far more than just going around and preaching the gospel. It’s about making relationships. Our neighbors are just now warming up to us and it’s been over a month. We need to focus on seed planting, and then God will come and do the watering. I’ve said about 3,000 times that it’s not about religion it’s about relationship. Look at Jesus and what he spent most of His earthly ministry on- raising up the twelve, that’s where salvation happens.
Also Tuesday, was Valentine’s Day. To be honest, I was missing my Valentine at home, but God really blessed this day and lifted me up with the servant boys on my team. They bought us girls a cake for after lunch. Then, when we got home at night they decorated our pillows with chocolate, a rose and a stuffed animal. Oh, they got us rugs to go outside of our bathrooms too.
