India (Trip 1) - Wrap Up
Thank You for your support of me and the Equip team on our venture to India.
Financial update: out of the total $3700 needed to cover the cost of the trip – Praise God – 88% came in via donations. Thank you so much for everyone’s generosity.
As most are aware I had an incredible time and God moved in incredible ways.
I feel that I was blessed in being able to do some Force10 work for a week prior to the missions part of the trip taking place. Making the trip to India and doing only the Force10 work or only the Missions portion would have been a very different trip and I definitely would not have gotten the well balanced perspective I did. I feel very fortunate to have seen the “big business, professional side”, along the “tourist, missionary, smaller business side”. I missed my family, but I truly value the experience and perspective gained by the journey.
Integrating back to the US was strange, but amazingly swift. At this point, I am working to make sure that the lessons learned remain fresh – but with each day the distance from here to India seems further away. I hope to return when the time is right. It would be a great experience for Renee and the kids as well (although they seem a little young for it now).
I left a lot of contemplations in my Blog entries, but a few closing thoughts are
1. God showed up in ways that I never expected him to - and often in areas that I never thought he’d need to!
2. I found out I’m not bullet proof – emotionally, mentally, or physically.
3. I really enjoyed the daily worship, team prayer, and constant expectation for God to ‘show up’ (and He did).
4. I knew I was really back in the US on my first day back at work. We were talking about a problem, and my first impulse was to ask the group “let’s pray about it”. I caught myself before asking my non-Christian coworkers – but maybe I should have asked anyway!
5. The trip renewed my understanding that what I allow God to do by way of expectation and faith – He will do. As I expect him to show up and do the miraculous – he does. When I don’t believe – I close that door for Him.
6. I continue to marvel at the level of communication that the Intercessor team had! I strive to have such a transparent relationship and daily discussion with God my father.
7. A biggie for me is the clear message I need to SLOW down and LISTEN. In India I was able to hear God speak as I took time to listen.
I am interested in what the future will hold in this area for me and my family.
God Bless. Thank you again for your wonderful and marvelous support.
India 19 - Hmmmm
This place is different!
- Starbucks – there is so much room in the stores!
- There are no flies buzzing around the pastry counter!
- No car beeping (horns) when the light turns green – how do the cars know it’s time to go (yet they do)?
- Cars are sooo big!!
- Cars go sooo fast!!
- Highways are sooo wide!!
- I Have not had the courage to go into the super-Safeway by our house yet! Not sure what I’ll do with all that food around. (I never saw a store larger than a 7-11 in India. Most are very small and it appears people just shop every day).
- I never saw anything in India that compares to a drug store here. All shops were very uni-functional. Medical shop has only medicines. Food shop has only food. Personal care shop has only hygiene care products. Most shops have a counter you walk up to that is street facing and they go retrieve what you ask for. You may recall the electronics store snap I posted. That store is twice as big as almost every other store with which I interacted.
- I keep hearing people say cell phones and I’m not sure what they are talking about – could they mean their ‘mobile’?
- Where are all the people? I have not seen anyone crossing the street in the middle of rush-hour traffic?
- Clean – glorious clean. I used to lament at the garbage I’d see on the side of the freeway on the way to work. Well, I still don’t like it, but what we have is sooo much cleaner than what I observed overseas.
- Coffee cups are so amazingly big here!!
- Cows – who kidnapped all the cows? I have not seen one since getting back.
- Stray dogs – what happened to the poor stray dogs!! Have they all been deported to India?
- Smells! Let’s just not go there! Nice to be home.
- The company at which I work has an Engineering Dept with a 75% Indian makeup. So In many ways I feel like I’m just in another part of India (the part with big cars, big roads, big stores, no cows, no stray dogs, no smells, no flies, no beeping cars, and actual grocery stores) – Hmmm, I guess that’s called Silicon Valley!
- Why am I yearning to see a Cricket match? Who won the World Cricket cup (India got eliminated, did Australia ‘the arch rival’ go all the way)? Did Dhoni get the most valuable Bowler award? Sheesh, I can’t find out anything on American news!
- Ahhhhh. Diet Pepsi. Say no more.
- It is interesting to me. In the US we really do have so much variety in everything. Take soda for instance. Walk into a grocery store and you have 20-30 different soda brands/flavors to pick from. In India, I never saw more than 5-7 in any one place. Usually it was 3 (pepsi, 7-up, Orange). How can the US market which has a quarter of the consumers (compared to India) support so much stuff!! We really are a nation of consumers!!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the landscape which makes up India or the US. Each has its own personality and that’s what makes each different. It’s just that they are VERY different!
I was a visitor in India so I did not have to deal with the day to day issues of running a household, etc. But it is surprising how quickly I have snapped back into consumer/producer mode back in the US.
When I was young, I’d hear older folk say ‘time goes so fast’. I never understood that saying until – well, I got older! Now, yes, time does go fast. Another saying that is living out in my mind now is ‘it seems so long ago even though it was just yesterday’. How does that happen?
Was I really on the other side of the globe?
