India - final blog entry

Why is it that plane rides home feel so much longer than plane rides en route to mission and adventure?

I can't wait to be home. Carmel is picking me up at DTW and we'll have he whole day together before picking up the kids around 3...assuming i can remain conscious.

My last day-and-a-half in India was fun - Taj Mahal, sightseeing in Delhi, shopping - but a little too long. There were no earlier flights for me to have caught, so they were necessarily long, but (with the exception of the Taj) i would have felt just fine about skipping it all and heading stateside a little sooner.

Still, it was a very pleasant way to end the trip.

I've caught some stomach bug, though. Perhaps it was inevitable. Daniel would tell me it's a devil tummy spirit, but i think it's just all the stuff i ate and drank while waaaaay out in the villages doing ministry. It's worth it. Besides, the immunization lady gave me a great stomach-illness-kit that already seems to be taking good effect.

Such a good trip...i think i can see how to plan it so we could take a team, now that i've been. I think i've got a few good ideas about how we might reduce costs so more people could afford to go.

One idea i've been tossing around would involve a little mission, a little justice, and a little adventure. Since most of the Indian guys have no transportation of their own i've been thinking about how we might help in that regard. We can't buy cars and vans for them - it would be far too much money - but we could buy motorcycles. Brand new, a decent motorcycle costs about $2000 USD. I figure we could raise about $10K, take a small team over and buy bikes. We could use the bikes to get around while in India - going from village to village, preaching and training and praying...very "Apostle Paul"...and then gift the bikes to Suresh and his gang on our way out. The roads are a little dodgy, and we'd undoubtedly keep long days, but the vision of riding into some god-forsaken village on iron horseback to bring the gospel is a pretty compelling picture.


Plus, if we brought someone who could film and edit in the fly, we could easily document our mission reality-TV style and then create a YouTube channel and a show for iTunes.

On another note, i'm thinking and praying a lot about evangelism. Our staff at the winds have been going back and forth about the topic, about our twin dissatisfactions with (1)our lack of intentionality concerning evangelism, and (2)our frustration with any existing modalities of evangelism. Simply put, we want and need to evangelize more faithfully, but we all recognize that the methods of evangelism we once relied upon are no longer effective. The world has changed, and we just haven't caught up yet.

While with Suresh, especially, i was enraptured with the front-line nature of his ministry. It was like the best of my charismatic upbringing and my days working with Athletes in Action and Campus Crusade all rolled into one.

Here, that crusade-style juju is no longer effective, but i would love to find some other way to do those apostolic kinds of things.

There has to be a better way...

I feel very close to God, attuned, and take great confidence home with me. It was such a wonderful experience, but all good things must come to an end.

And this officially ends my time as an Apostle to India.