Outreach

Every Thursday everyone here (including the university students) divides into group of about 5 or 6 and goes on outreach to various local areas. My group goes to a slum area called Ram Nagar, where we play with the kids, another help at the clinic, and visit/encourage the house churches. Normally I play with the kids, colouring and playing soccer (or anything for that matter) with them. They are so much fun! We normally have about 30 - 40 kids gather at the playground (that a previous YWAM team built for them), all excited to play. It’s so funny for me to try and communicate with them since I have hardly any idea of what they say to me, and they have hardly any idea of what I’m saying to them. But I’m picking up a bit of Hindi here and there. One word that I will never forget is “didi” because they call me that ALL the time. It means ‘elder sister’. They’re always saying “Didi, this” and “Didi, that”. But I can’t understand anything else of what they’re saying! Lol. But it’s fun to try and talk to them through hand gestures, and calling on some of my other teammates to translate.

Normally before I go, I don’t feel like it will be very much fun because I’m just so tired, but then once I get there, I find it so joyous to play with the kids, and then when it comes to leaving, with like 20 kids all trying to shake my hand at once, I can’t help but feel light-hearted. =) 

A few weeks ago we visited a local house church where we played some worship songs, I shared my testimony and we prayed for the people gathered there. Before we went I had already prepared what I was going to say and I was quite nervous about sharing. When we got there it was too dark for me to read what I wrote, so I just shared what I remembered and just went with whatever I felt I should say. 

So I shared a little about my background and different things that have happened in my life and how God worked it all out. It turned out that after looking over my past, I realized that an overall theme in my life has been about seeking God and pursuing him (I also noticed this after writing my testimony song in music track) despite circumstances. My mistake has been that I would only seek God when I was going through a hard time, but then when things got better I would start thinking that I didn’t ‘need’ God so I stopped seeking Him, but then I would fall back into depression/darkness. All in all, I’ve learned that I need to seek God ALL the time. It’s silly to think that we don’t need to. That we already know lots about Him so we don’t need to know more. But God is SO BIG. He made heaven and Earth. He knows us better than we know ourselves. His love is SO VAST. We can never comprehend how much he loves us. From this, we see that we can never stop knowing more about Him. There is always something new to discover and something new to be reminded of. But it’s not the sort of knowledge that is solely for the mind. It’s the sort of ‘knowing’ that we use when we make a friend. When you meet someone and get to know them, you don’t just find out information and then stop getting to know them more. Rather, you continue to spend time with them and continue to discover more about them and deepen your relationship with them. I think this sort of reflects what our relationship with God should be like. 

So anyways, afterwards I shared Matthew 7:7. “Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.”

And there’s more…

Ashish, who played guitar and led some worship, was actually sharing about the same thing! (about seeking God etc). I had no idea that he was saying that, because he was speaking Hindi, and he had no idea what I was going to share either!

That whole time together was totally led by Jesus. We all sensed it. 

It’s been really great to go on outreach there, but unfortunately, I probably won’t be going back there again. Last week was our last time before we leave for mini outreach (10 days) and then Christmas break (3 weeks). When we come back, they’ll probably change things up. So please pray for blessings for that place. Pray that those house churches will be encouraged and strengthened and that the believers would really just seek more God and get way closer to Him and that they would be able to share Him with others.

Speaking of mini outreach… all four tracks of the DTS are going to different places. The music track is going to Goah this year. I’ve heard that it’s a really beautiful place lots of tourists go there. We’ll be staying at another YWAM base, but don’t totally know for sure what exactly we’ll be doing, but we will perform/play at various places and use that to share Jesus’ love. 

Please pray for mini outreach:

- That whatever finances we need, will come through.

- That we would hear God in how exactly He wants us to do things.

- For God’s blessing over this trip and that we would totally work WITH him and how he wants us to do things. 

May Jesus bless you more with His abundant love (he never runs out of it). :D