Trichy – Day 1, Oct. 23

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Overwhelming is all I can come up with for yesterday.

I have been involved with India for over 10 years now and nothing really surprises me and yet the nature of what I am trying to accomplish most often becomes overwhelming. I could again relay all the statistics about water and the lack thereof and how the consumption of water from unprotected sources contributes to sickness and disease, yet in all honesty it wouldn’t mean much. Reason being, you haven’t experienced it.
The reality though for millions in rural India is this daily experience of lack. Lack of meaningful income and here I am not talking about a $10/hr job but something much less like $1.00/hr but even this number in places is high, very high. There are many contributors to poverty and I confess I don’t know all of them but what I do know is that one’s survival on earth is really dependent upon a few simple things with clean water being a primary one.

The reality of the rural poor, with poor being defined as life being lived out on for less than $5/day, is that they don’t enjoy this basic natural resource. Their access point in many places to water is a canal that fills their fields, a pond or reservoir that has collected rain water or an open pit well, just to name a few and these access points vary in distance from close by to several miles. If there is any way to imagine this and feel free to do so and in through in the contributing factor of the outside temperature of 90 to 120 degrees on any given day and you begin to see that life in southern rural India is not all that grand.

If you travel with me here you recognize almost immediately the stark contrasts between rich and poor, between the middle and the lower class and caste, you witness the fact that there are literally poor places, poorer places and poorest places. When you think that it can’t get worse, it does. I would be amiss to say that these people’s struggle is just with one thing, but the reality is that it isn’t. They struggle on multiple fronts and yet they are a very resilient and industrious people and have done a wonderful job at adapting to what they have been dealt.

So here I stand, in a village, I’ve entered into their “reality” and it is overwhelming. I have no experience with this. I come from the West where we all are truly wealthy in comparison. This becomes so evident when you walk the dirt roads and see the places called “home” and you notice that their mode of transportation is an old bike with no gears, hand brakes or water bottles. If their lucky they might have a motorcycle and if so they are truly lucky because that indicates that someone in the household has a job which produces an income sufficient enough to support this mode of transportation.

I share all of this in the hopes that it helps you understand why it feels so overwhelming to be here and yet though I probably haven’t done an adequate job in painting the picture because really it’s something you just have to experience to believe.

To be effective I have to fight through this feeling and the only way I know how to process it is to share this, to not keep it locked up inside of me but to allow myself to be broken by it so that in and through my weakness, I can find God’s strength.

For me the reality of India and the hope for India and for that matter the hope for any country or people group is Jesus. It is as simple as that. You can do all the social programs you want, introduce whatever scheme to alleviate hunger, poverty, sickness and disease. You can try and conquer unjust structures of society or governments and yet if you were to really examine closely the root of all this “evil” and you were honest in your assessment you would conclude that it is the result of evil. Evil being all that is opposed to good. Sure there is good in the world and yet evil in its varied forms permeates this earth, it has to because the root of all evil is sin and sin is what happened in the Garden at the beginning of creation.
The hope therein for creation which includes you and me, India and America, the rich and the poor, the haves and the have not’s is Jesus.

Without the intervention of God we have no hope.

Thankfully God has intervened into human history and Jesus, God most literally in the flesh, has, is, and always will be that solution to the condition of this world. The final act of God in creation will be revealed at some future point in which creation is restored to its natural state and “evil” is dealt with once and for all, but until that time work has got to be done.

It is this work for which I labor and yet it is not my work but His; I just happen to be one who heard His call to get involved.

Feeling overwhelmed then is a natural consequence of laboring with God; it’s how you handle this that counts.

For me I am determined to go on with God in “mission” and my hope is that you will join me.

All of us have an opportunity to be involved with God in His activity, regardless of where you are in life the decision becomes do you want to?

Posted in News and Stories, Trip Updates | 3 Comments »