Recording artist Bethany Dillon recently visited India with the ministry Gospel for Asia. Here’s her account.
I’m a forgetful person. I know a lot of people say that about themselves; but in all truthfulness, I’m set apart. The “gift” has been growing since I was 8 and misplacing my favorite Barbie doll. Now, 10 years later, I’m misplacing my ID while standing at the security line at the airport, not to mention constantly leaving suitcases and wallets and cell phones behind at venues and then (here’s the good part) realizing it a day later when we’re three states away. Yeah, it’s quite a gift.
And yet, somehow, there are a few things that stick—experiences that left a big enough mark and made my heart ache deep enough to not be easily forgotten.
India isn’t easy to forget.
No Cake Walk
The first week of June 2006, my dad, brother and I packed our bags and left for a 10-day trip. We went with an organization called Gospel for Asia, whose deep desire (much like Christ’s) is to reach the most unreached area of the world with the gospel. They’ve planted churches and Bible colleges all over India; and young Indian men and women are going from village to village, risking their lives to share the love of Christ with a very wounded and hopeless people.
I thought since I’d grown up in the church and heard oodles of people share about mission trips that I was fully prepared to go. It’d be a cake walk for a churched American kid, right? An hour after we landed in Delhi, my mind was radically changed. The smell alone was overwhelming; but it came along with suffocating heat, flies buzzing everywhere and thousands of faces staring at me with an unfathomable emptiness. I can’t tell you how every fiber within me wanted to get back on that plane. And, to be honest, the feeling didn’t go away. I’d never been in a third-world country before; and for my first experience to be India was, well, a crash course in feeling like a spiritual ant, that’s for sure.
As I’m writing this, there are about a hundred stories flooding my memory. I wish I could sit down with a cup of coffee and share every one of them with you. I could tell you about watching my dad pray over a crippled, weeping woman in a slum or getting to meet the missionary I sponsor through GFA and listen to him, through a translator, share how Jesus captured his wayward heart.
But this is the one I’ll tell.
Three Hours in the Upper Room
Our first day in India, we took a train to a village called Ambala. We were going to church with the Bible-college students there. The small, stuffy building—which had a sign outside in bold letters that read “Believers Church”—was also filled with people from the slum who’d walked miles to be part of the gathering. After the four-hour service, we sat in a room next to the sanctuary and ate rice, beans and curry with the pastor and his family. When we had finished, one of the men in the church tapped me on the shoulder and said to me in broken English, “I think the girls are waiting for you.”
The girls are waiting for me? I thought. I asked him to repeat himself, and someone else chimed in that the girls from the Bible college (who apparently lived upstairs in the church) wanted me to come up and meet all of them.
I started up those noisy stairs, and there they were: all standing in a row, holding hands, smiling at me with such a fearless joy. After a few seconds of silence, I reached out my hand and said confidently (what else could I do?), “My name is Beth.” They all giggled and started chattering to each other; and then a girl stepped forward and said, “My name is Reena.”
In a matter of seconds, we were all sitting in a circle on the floor—holding hands, smiling and laughing and singing together. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t speak Hindi or that they didn’t know any English. It didn’t matter that we lived on different sides of the world. And it really didn’t matter that we looked nothing alike. We had one thing in common: Jesus. That’s all that was needed. I kept thinking over and over to myself, This is the Kingdom.
Three hours went by in that upstairs room. The sun started to set, and one of the brothers from the church came up to tell me it was time to leave. So I began to walk around the room and hug them goodbye. One of the girls, who had enough personality for five people, ran over to her small pile of belongings and grabbed a white shawl. They had used it to show me how to cover my head like the Indian women do. She then put it in my hands, and a smile started to spread across her face. She hugged me and said something I could barely hear: “Pray for me. … Do not forget me.”
Culture Shock
From there, I saw a lot of things that made my heart break. I daily had to walk over beggars who were covering the sidewalks; through a slum full of people who were desperate for some kind of hope; into a church, knowing everyone in the building was risking their lives to be there. But the hardest part? Walking off the plane into Chicago’s O’Hare airport, seeing a McDonald’s and Starbucks next to each other. Experiencing counter-culture shock was way more of a struggle than just being in India. You start to forget about all the distractions that fill up the normal day: TV, iPods, MySpace, movies. Believe it or not, those things are easy to forget … easy to let go of when eternal things are taking place all around you.
What’s impossible to forget is what it was like to stand in a church with a thousand Indian Bible-college students almost shouting, “Worthy is the Lamb!” and not having a thought of wanting to be anywhere else. It was the healthiest thing for my soul to stare at a world 24 hours a day that knew nothing of mine— that existed without having to speak English, be white or have the latest gadget. The experience ushered changes and got rid of so many things until, much like those three hours with the Bible-college girls, all that was left—all that was needed—was Jesus.
Impossible to Forget
My eyes were opened during that 10-day visit to India. But my heart had been moved by what Jesus was doing there years before that, through reading newsletters sent out by GFA and getting to pray for the missionaries my family sponsored through them.
Because I live in such a distracted, busy world, it was easy to brush off and forget things I would read from the mission field; but getting to stare into the eyes of my brothers and sisters and be compelled to love Jesus in a more radical way by being there in person has made it impossible to forget.
For more on Gospel for Asia, visit www.gfa.org. For more in Bethany Dillon, visit www.bethanydillon.com.
