India Bound

This year I had the amazing opportunity to go to India. I had wanted to go about 2 years ago. Got scared and backed out. Kicking myself ever since then for being a wimp and not stepping out of the comfort zone. Well, I stepped out. Not so easily though. It took a lot of thought and urging from some close friends of mine.

Early on in 2005, I got this strange urge to email Ben (he was living in India for a few months then). At that point in time he was just an ex-boyfriend of mine, who I occasionally talked to when we hung out with our friends from church. But I just felt compelled to send him a little note from home, telling him that there are people thinking and praying for him. Little did I know where this one little email would lead us.

We emailed back and forth for the whole year that he lived there. He would tell me about everything he saw and experienced there. Share with me some stories of people he met. Then..here it comes...."You need to come to India".

At this point, my stomach is all in knots. A slight headache is creeping up. India? Mmmm. Not so sure. I had heard stories from my sister, my brother-in-law, and one of my ex-roommates..they had all been there before. They didn't have any bad stories at all, in fact they were all pleasant stories. It was just the thought of me traveling all the way across the world, into a country that I knew nothing about. The thought freaked me out a little bit. But the more I thought about the possibility of me going, the more I started to pray and ask God if this is something I could do.

Then Ben came back home to Oregon in February 2006. A couple months later...the view of my future changed quite a bit. Ben and I were pretty much inseparable from the time he got back in town. It was just a matter of time before we would become "official". I knew coming into this relationship that I would have to come to grips with India. This country is extremely important to Ben and I knew that if we wanted to head into the direction our relationship was going...I would have to make a decision about India. And the only way for me to really do that was to go. Village was sending a team January 2007. I had 9 months to think, pray, and prepare myself for all the reasons I was going on this trip.

Well, 9 months flew by but during that time I really got to know a lot about India and a lot about myself. The team went through months of training so I was really feeling prepared and amazingly, I had no nervousness about it. God gave me an incredible peace. I was SO ready to go. So excited to finally get to this country that I had heard so much about.

The whole experience leading up to the trip was enjoyable. Tiring. But nothing that I couldn't handle. I'm really looking forward to more traveling in the future.