India...up close & personal
- Pastor David Hillis
- Apr 7, 2008
With only a couple of months to go before our trip departs, there is a lot to praise God about! And a lot to ask for your prayers about.
Garage Sale recap
This last weekend, we had a "Grand and Glorious Garage Sale", with tons of stuff donated toward the cause! And tons of help...not just from those on our team, who all took part in helping...but many of you. So many people were involved that I could never name them all...but I do want to thank the Young Marrieds GROW Group for their involvement sorting and labeling items Thursday night (it was their first SERVE event together as a group!).
A great big thank you also goes out to our youth, who took part in the 30-Hour Famine this weekend. In addition to fasting for 30 hours and working to create awareness for world hunger, they also serve mercilessly to help wrap up the garage sale Saturday. They helped get the unpurchased items onto trucks for donation, clean, and even setup the building for the following Sunday. You all are amazing.
I also want to thank my wife Teresa for all the work she did promoting the sale on numerous websites, and also by handing out flyers in grocery stores and in other areas. I actually went into Food City on Friday morning of the event to pick up some items for the salsa that Teresa was making and selling (and several other women here were helping her make), and as I was checking out I heard the bagging lady say to the cashier in Spanish, "I wonder if they have any stuff for kids?" I looked in her hand, and it was a flyer for our garage sale! I wasn't gutsy enough to answer her in Spanish, for fear that she would riddle me with a long line of Spanish stuff (or laugh at my Spanish response with a Southern accent!). But I did tell them in English that there was and they should come check it out! Some from Food City did...and from tons of other places.
All told, we raised over $2,500 toward our India visit...which is huge, considering that we have 9 going who are trying to raise $27,000, and as of last week we only had about $3,000 dollars in. Please pray for us in the coming weeks, as we trust God to help us raise the remaining amount needed. As the great missionary Hudson Taylor once said, "God's will, done God's way, never lacks God's supply." Amen!
Team set ... and preparing to serve
It looks like we have nine of us going, six women and three men. Two of six women are from out-of-state, the others are from Hope! Yesterday we had our fourth team training meeting as well. If any of you would like to come and join us for one of our other five meetings, for support and for prayer, you are most welcome...contact one of us on the team to get details.
Please pray for provision, for our team to be prepared for what we will encounter. It will be quite a shock for many of our people going. As it was described in our training on Sunday, imagine all of the people in all of North America, Central America, South America, and Africa, packed into one country 1/3 of the size of the United States, and you have India.
When our missions chair at Hope visited the region several months ago where we are going, and he too was shaken...when he came back he said, "I just couldn't get over what I was seeing. The word that kept coming to mind was that everything was so 'broken'!" Speaking of "broken," take a look at this video done by a British reporter, called "India: The Broken People," to see just how broken it is, which I just stumbled across this morning (part 1 of 3). Let me caution you, as some of the scenes are a little disturbing:
There is no telling what all God has in store for our team, and our church in the future as we reach out to those without the hope of the Gospel. Please pray with us!!
Your humble servants,
Pastor David & the India 2008 team
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Alex Junk on Apr 7, 2008 6:49pm
Thank you for the update David. The videos are powerful and it's awesome what the Lord has called us as individuals, and as a church body to do for him - including going overseas for him!
Keep the updates and communication coming!
In Christ,
Alex