India MIssion Trip
September, 2007

     While in India, I was thinking of all the hard work that had gone on over the summer, when we were given the privilege of going to an actual leper colony. Many on our team were surprised to discover these colonies still existed. While we were there I met a woman named Papama, who had been there 11 years. Her legs were mostly gone, her arms were stumps at her elbows, her face was disfigured and she had been alone for a long time. Because of her disease people believed she was cursed, so she was sent away from her family. She would never know the personal love of a husband, the sound of her own children’s laughter, or even know the freedom of being able to hug someone due to a disease she would never know how she contracted. While we were there she asked me to sing, something I notoriously can’t do. I told her I couldn’t but that I would bring someone over who could.

That’s when, through an interpreter, I received much needed rebuke. “How dare you…” she would tell me “…not use the abilities which have been freely given to bring glory to God.” Here she longed to do the things I took for granted and with the ease I could do them, and here was me selfishly protecting my fragile ego. After repenting to Jesus, I sang. I then asked her to sing for me, not thinking of her condition and her facial deformities. She gave me a smile and started singing. Tears came down my interpreters face as she told me that she was singing a song that talked about Jesus’ love, His very real joy, and His personal faithfulness to her. Tears streamed down our faces as we all freely hugged. She poured out all she had in that song, all of who she was and all she had to offer, she poured out in the name of Jesus while having hardly enough energy to get to her cement bed.

She taught me that I, and we as a team, barely know what it means to be poured out using all our gifts, energy, and resources that we have freely been given in order to glorify the Father, exalt the name of Jesus and not sear the Holy Spirit. Not that I have already obtained it… but I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Phil 3:12-16). Not that we or you have obtained this but together we can press on, desiring to and then doing so. That’s living life on the narrow road.