Safely in India

We landed in India this morning at approximately 4 am local time.  After deplaning and getting through customs, we retrieved our luggage and headed to our hotel in Kottayam.  We arrived at approximately 8 am and began a period of napping and recovering from the trip.  Some of us have ventured out for different shopping trips and to place phone calls to loved ones back home.  Our focus today is recovering and adjusting to India time.  We have just completed dinner and are heading for more rest.  (9:30 pm local time).  Tomorrow is church and a visit to the Children's home.

Our internet access is limited, so there may be only a few updates to this blog as we go forward.  We will do our best, but we are taking lots of pictures and have already begun to accumulate stories to share upon our return.

Good night.

Greetings from Dubai

We have safely landed in Dubai and are awaiting our last flight into Cochin. The flight over was very long but everyone seemed to have made it ok. Approximately four more hours flight time and we will be in India!

What it was was missions

I'm pretty sure it's required if you live in North Carolina that you have to hear Andy Griffiths' wonderful sketch on a country boy's impressions of his first football game. As I'm waiting on the second leg of our journey to India, I wonder what the outsider looking at missions thinks of missionaries.

As a kid, missionaries were the two families listed in my bulletin in church that I had never met or those poor unfortunate Mormon boys who seemed to descend during the hottest eastern NC summer days. I had no desire to go knocking on doors or deliver sermons to some faraway people. And in my mind that was all missionaries did so there was no way I was going to do that!

Then I was introduced to the wonderful concept of go, see, do. That we are not all called to go door to door. We are not all called to stand before a congregation. We are all called to be the hands and feet of Christ. To go where we see an need and do all we can to help. No matter what. No matter where.

That is what I want to have the strength to do. That is what I want to teach my girls. Whether it's in Kottayam or Marietta square. Go. See. Do. And that is what missions is to me.

Laura

A breather. And the power of prayer.

As I write this, we are sitting in JFK airport waiting to board the plane for our flight to Dubai. Except for the relatively short flight to New York, this is the first time today that I've had the chance to relax a bit and catch my breath. But even in the hectic rush of today God found a way to touch me.

I have the privilege and blessing of embarking on this trip with my whole family. Unfortunately, this morning it didn't really feel like a blessing. As we were scrambling around trying to get packed and make sure we had all we needed, I could feel the tension rising.

Just as I was about to overload, both girls came up and said that we needed to pray. The simple suggestion of the prayer was enough to begin to calm me down. After we finished the immediate task at hand, we gathered as a family to pray. The sense of calm and the blessing that I felt were amazing to me.

Even more amazing to me was that God was willing to bless me before I even left my own house. I was unbelievably proud of the girls for wanting to pray while we were running around trying to pack but the sense of peace was so unexpected that it had to be the hand of God.

I eagerly await the rest of the trip, not only for the opportunities that it affords but also for the unexpected blessings from God that I'm sure to experience.

Posted by Paul Smith.

Our journey begins...

We gathered together today to begin our journey. With prayer we loaded the mountain of luggage and were off. Please pray for us as we travel.

Off they go.

Today starts the journey. The first group leaves today and at this writing are probably on their way to the church to gather and head to Hartsfield-Jackson airport to start the journey to India.

Good Luck and May God be with you all.

1793 to 2012...A Look Back to Take a Journey Forward

 A week from now, I will be in the midst of traveling to India. (Okay, I almost flipped out when I re-read that sentence. I need to start packing asap!) I’ve started reflecting on the journey myself and several other church members will be taking. What new things will we see when we arrive in India? What new things will we taste? What will we experience?

These questions are similar questions anyone has asked when they began preparing to go to a place that is foreign to them. These same questions are probably the ones that William Carey and his family thought at they prepared to be the first Baptist Missionaries that traveled to India.

Two hundred and nineteen years ago William Carey, his wife, and four kids set sail for a new land. They weren’t going to try to settle a new territory like the British did to America. The Careys were setting out on a different type of journey. The Careys had one main goal while going to India: They wanted to share Christ’s love to a place that had never heard of Jesus.

I can’t help but to think about the differences in my journey to India and the Careys’ journey there. While I’ll be taking a little over a day and a half to travel to my final destination, in 1793 it took the Careys five months on a boat to get to India. A result of vaccines and other preventative medicines, I am pretty confident that I will be able to go the entire length of my trip without getting sick. That wasn’t the case for the Careys. William Carey’s 5 year old son, Peter, got sick with sever fevers and died soon after they arrived. Peter’s death from sickness wasn’t the only one. Several other people who joined the Careys on their mission in India also died from diseases.

While I’ll be taking ten days out of my life to travel to India to teach at the India Baptist Theological Seminary, the Careys changed their whole lives when they moved to India. They devoted themselves to showing the people of India that God loves them and has a place for them in God’s Kingdom. When the Careys went to India there were no Christians in the country. Now today, because of the work of William Carey and so many others, I am now able to travel to a Baptist Seminary in India and help train seminary students and pastors to continue spread Christ’s love to their people.

I am excited for the journey that I will embark on next week. My prayer is that as I have a passion for the people of India just like William Carey did, and that God will use me and open my heart to every person I meet along my journey.

Now on to packing….

Written by Rev. Lauren Waggoner. Rev. Waggoner is the Minister to Children at First Baptist Church of Marietta, GA.