The Church in India- North and South

We went to a local church on Sunday called Pilgrim Highlands church. It was the one that we attended the last time that we were here, and to our surprise the pastor and a few others remembered us (granted it is a small church, and they probably don’t get many white people attending). They meet at a new location, and we found out that much like The Pursuit in the early days, they have to travel from location to location at this point as they don’t yet have a permanent building. They still seemed to struggle with the same issues that they had a few years back, like getting the laptop connected to the overhead projector to work. Adam commented on his new appreciation of The Pursuit’s commitment to doing things ‘excellently’. We can empathize with these folks though, because we’ve had nothing but issues with nearly everything electronic since we’ve been here. On a sad note, it was our visit to this church that caused Hailey to have a major meltdown that evening. She has missed many things, but she really missed her Swerve class at The Pursuit! This is a real testimony to our youth leaders! Thank you Andrew and Amanda and everyone else who helps with the junior high program. Its such a hard age.

The service was a bit different this time because they had a guest speaker. This man and his wife are doctors who volunteered to go to northern India to work for a Christian organization as doctors for one of their hospitals. They had a choice about where to go, and one of the choices was in a town in Uttar Pradesh (home of much Christian persecution). They really didn’t want to go, but they prayed and eventually asked the organization to make the decision for them so that they wouldn’t be able to look back and question the decision of which place to go. Of course, they ended up going where they dreaded but felt the peace of God. To make a long story short, he was forced to become the hospital administrator (with no prior experience), deal with an overwhelming number of patients that only he and his wife attended, and eventually defeated the extortion tactics of the corrupt local politicians. They experienced many, many miracles, one of which was a local governor getting kicked out of office the morning that they were going to levy a huge fine on the hospital.

A main point that he highlighted that we found quite interesting is that throughout history, it has been the north of India that has controlled the direction of the entire country. Every empire that made successful, lasting invasions came in through the north, mostly along the border of what is now Pakistan. The Dutch, French, and others who arrived through ports to the east and west further south were short lived and did not make any lasting impressions outside of the immediate areas, and even those were eventually lost. The next amazing statistic was that the south of India contains 80% of the Christians in India, and the center of the north (containing over ¾ of the Indian population) has barely 5% of the Christian population. This doctor and his wife confirmed exactly what we felt when we visited the north, which is that there is a palpable darkness there. Satan has a major stronghold there, and it is affecting the direction of the entire country. Many Indian Christians are now trying to organize prayer trips to the north to walk the country and pray for God’s power to be unleashed. They have great faith that prayer can turn the tide in this country.

In listening to this man’s testimony, it struck me that we often think that we know where God is leading us, only to have Him lead us somewhere completely unexpected. Adam and I felt that we were coming here to somehow affect our immediate neighbors, but perhaps God has something completely different planned. Or perhaps its nothing that we’ll ever seen in this life at all; perhaps we’ll go home thinking that we didn’t have any discernable impact. Perhaps it is just something that our kids need to experience. Only God knows.

On the subject of kids, we would greatly appreciate your prayers for our girls. Hailey is having a particularly hard last few days. She is very tired, which isn’t helping, but I think its more than that. Prayers for them both would be great.

Boy, it sure was hard knowing that our life group met last night and we weren't there! We miss you all.

Lastly, apologies for the grammar mistakes in the last post- ‘profit’ for ‘prophet’ etc. I’ll chalk it up to jet lag…. :)