As Karen and I sit in the airport in Newark, waiting to get home after more than 24 hours of travel, we look back at our indelible memories of India:
Highlights:
Egrets flying low over acres of rice paddies with waterfalls and mountain mists in the background; a flash of iridescent blue and black as a Monarch butterfly as big as your hand flits past; the angelic sound of 'How Great Thou Art' sung by 540 orphan girls before sunrise for five straight days; Naan bread; Naan bread (worthy of repeating, especially when it is beginning to blacken right off of a hot stone); a woman in an Indian sunset-colored sari, emerging from a dark hovel, the quintessence of incongruity, her lovely, dark skin contrasts her orange robe, her thick hair serving as a rude platform for the water jug balanced precariously on her head; the street scenes in Delhi: heat, dust, people, animals, bicycles, auto-rickshaws, cars, motorcycles, beggars, merchants, simultaneously clogging and moving, alive with life, yet seemingly trapped; the seashore at Kerala, unchanged from the days when the apostle Thomas purportedly landed here, the black, wooden ships and their nets drying in the sun, a dozen men gathered around a boat with seven wicker baskets teeming with shrimp, cawing birds flying and diving overhead as they barter below.
The need here is so great that one could easily be overwhelmed, but we have a chance to bless many in India, and look forward to God's leading in the days ahead, as we fulfill our mission to be a "Center for Christian Thought and Action." Ten days in India have served to deepen our appreciation for her people and history, though we feel a bit as though we know her less now than when we left; we have learned more about ourselves than her, her mysteries shrouded from us, waiting to be unlocked through further study, further adventures in the "land of the tiger."
 |
| Street scene |
 |
| An elephant delights in an afternoon hosing down. |
 |
| No rewards points, but reasonable! |
No comments:
Post a Comment