Thursday, June 28, 2007

Reflections: Jay Aquila

1) What amazed you most about India?
How God can do so much with so little. The people God put in place within most of the church plants were not people of stature. Nor were they highly trained scholars – But they were people seeking God’s kingdom and wanting to bring God’s love to the people of India. There really is no money to be passed around. There’s just enough for what is needed. Even when we visited our selected churches, we did not bring much more than ourselves, and our stories. And look how God used us!

2) What stressed you out the most while in India?
Just the feeling of not being able to do more. When you touch down in India, you’ll see that this new world around you has a lot of problems. Things that in America seem so elementary, like garbage collection. There’s trash everywhere! All you want to do, thinking in “Mission Trip” mode, is that you have to clean it up. Or - Why isn’t anyone cleaning it up? Or – Why did our hosts just tell me to toss my water bottle on the ground? It doesn’t make sense, and I wanted it to … badly. I wanted it to make sense to the people I was visiting. But trash collection, cast system shake up’s, and distribution of wealth wasn’t what we were here for. We could only hope that by showing people Jesus, that these separate issues would be worked out by the people we meet and show the love of Christ.

1 comment:

Nancy said...

I love Jay's statement that you need to keep on task for why God sent him to India. We want to help out with everything but there is only 24 hours in a day and 2 hands on our body. It can distract us from God's true mission for us.