Some of you may have noticed that my blog has been pretty vacant this past month. That’s because I spent 11 days on a mission trip to India with a team of 24 other people. It was led by Tyler and Christine Johnson of OneGlance Ministries, and between being gone for two weeks and not posting anything the week after, it’s been pretty sparse around here. However, all that is at an end! We went there to minister to the Tiger Widows near the Sundarban region, to wash their feet, share the gospel, and hold medical clinics for them and other locals, and we did all that and more. I want to share with you all how the trip went and all the awesome things God did while we were there, as well as some of my personal struggles along the way. Thanks again to all of you who prayed for us and donated money and supplies prior to and during the trip. It made a huge difference in what we were able to accomplish!

The evening of November 5th, I flew out of Portland International Airport down to LAX where I met up with the team, and from there we flew to Shanghai, Kunming, and eventually into Kolkata. Just the flights and layovers took over a day and a half, and the trip there had its own series of mishaps and strangeness to it, but we all made it there okay, although not everyone’s luggage was quite so fortunate (two of the team received their bags the day before we flew back to the States. Whoops!). We arrived late in the evening and spent a night in Kolkata, woke up and had a leisurely breakfast, prayed and worshipped as a team, then drove a few hours south to the hotel we stayed at for the next five days. Although one of the buses tried really hard to break down on us, we got there in the late afternoon with not really enough time to do anything, so we settled in for the evening. The next day was our first day actually ministering to and reaching out to the locals, so I’m going to start counting “days” from there.

That night in the hotel we divided up into three groups: the medical team, foot washing, and prayer. The medical team consisted of four main people: Sheila, the doctor, Christine, a NICU RN and head of the medical team, Janelle, a Pediatric RN, and myself, an adult trauma RN, and then multiple other team members doing vital signs and other related tasks. You’ll probably hear me talking a lot about the medical stuff and not as much about everything else, but that has a lot to do with the fact that I spent much of each day seeing patients, and far less time doing whatever else it was that the rest of the team was doing, so please bear with me.

On the first day, we got on a bus and drove the 45 minutes to the tent we would be doing the clinics at. Around an hour into the drive, we asked how much further we had left, and were told by one of the local pastors that we were about halfway there. So much for the 45 minute drive time, lol. #IndiaTime
Once we arrived, we were greeted with flowered necklaces by some of the the local pastors and other community members. Having done some setup the night before at the hotel, we unloaded our gear and the two other nurses and I got to work. The tent was on land loaned to us by a local man, and it was probably 40 feet by 80 feet in size, with these inset booth-areas set up on the side walls of the tent.

We set up a triage station in booth 1, a station for an RN and Doctor in booths 2 and 3, a medication/pharmacy station in booth 4, had one booth that our residents sports medicine and exercise physiology team members used, and then the remaining booths were used for the prayer teams and foot washing. I spent all of the first day working with one of the local pastors identifying everyone’s physical problems and sending them on to see either the RN or doctor for further follow-up. If it was something simple, I would just write for medications and bypass the other team members, but in most cases I was identifying the chief complaints and sending them to an appropriate party.

I will be honest, this was one of the most emotionally painful days of my entire life. It might sound overly dramatic, but my heart’s cry is to heal the pain of this world. While I normally take care of patients, it is usually 2 or 4 in a day, and I can help meet a lot of their needs. That day I saw literally hundreds of people, most of whom I already knew we could not solve their problems, or at best could band-aid them with some over the counter medications. In other words, I knew we were solving nothing, and it killed me inside. With each patient I saw, it was like taking the knife and driving it just a tiny bit deeper.  I diagnosed one man with Parkinson’s Disease within 3 seconds of seeing him, long before the interpreter translated a single word to me.  Medical science in the United States can’t even fix that, much less me in some bamboo-and-tarp tent in a field in the Indian countryside.  I spent my entire day stuffing my emotions and trying not to break down sobbing over all of this because I knew if I started crying, I wouldn’t stop.  If I couldn’t stop, I wouldn’t be able to help any more patients, not that it seemed we were helping that much anyway.

Well, I learned a good deal about myself on this trip, including the fact that according the Enneagram (a kind of personality-profile/character-and-motivation test), I am a type 2.  Type 2’s are known as the Servant, which only further accentuated the fact that my desire is to want to help, heal, hold, and fix everything, everywhere. So seeing hundreds of patients I couldn’t help was extremely hard for me, and it was hard to keep myself together enough to keep working. By the end of the day I felt entirely hopeless, and after all the patients left I just sobbed in my friend Tyler’s arms.

He prayed for me, and it helped a lot, which was good, because I was expecting to spend the entire two hour trip to the hotel crying, which I was thankful I did not. I’ll be honest, I don’t know that I am quite doing justice to how hard this was for me, and it might sound to some like I am exaggerating, but I was handling this very poorly, and Janelle, the pediatric RN was having just as much trouble as I was. It didn’t end there though.  The next morning during worship, knowing we were about to head out to do this all over again, I literally felt like my heart was breaking.  I was sobbing yet again, although trying to do it quietly so as to not disturb everyone else’s worship. I told the Lord that I didn’t want to go back because if I went and saw more patients, then I would care about them, and I didn’t want to have to care about them because it was simply too painful for me. Knowing full well my heart was breaking and we hadn’t even started for the day yet, I went anyway, but it was very hard for me knowing exactly what I was walking back into. I’m not someone who begs God in prayer, simply because there is no reason to and it doesn’t make the prayer any more effective, but that morning I literally begged God to help me make it through the day.

Thankfully, God in His infinite kindness answered my prayers. You see, much of the rest of the team was praying for the people and seeing God heal them of all the chronic pain and problems they came to us with, but all I was encountering was hundreds of people’s pain and suffering. They only got prayer for healing after I saw them, and I never heard about it again, so to me it felt incredibly hopeless, while other team members were riding high on the miracles that God was doing in their midst. Tyler and Christine both changed some things up that helped me a lot that morning, and also helped shift my perspective to see and understand some of the other things God was doing.

First, Christine took over triage that morning, and I helped out in the medication tent for a while. That was a good break for me, and meant I was giving people medications to help, even if they were only temporary solutions to long-term problems, but it was less-hard. Second, someone from the prayer teams would come by every so often and let us know the different miracles and healings God was doing. Hearing things like “Hey, every person who has come for prayer for joint pain so far this morning has left totally healed and pain-free” did a lot for my wounded heart (thanks Sung!). As the day went on, I was able to recognize that while I was seeing a lot of people with pain and brokenness, fifteen minutes later, Jesus would reach out and heal them. In this process, a number of people would get saved right after they got healed as well! For me, the second day was much better than the first.

In retrospect, I want to share something my dad said to me after I returned to the US and told him about all of this. He said to me something to the effect of “I bet that gave you a glimpse into how God feels about those people each and every day.” What he said struck me. Sure, that first day of the clinic was one of the hardest days of my life. But the Bible says in Revelation 21:4 that, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” I remember once hearing minister Jesse Duplantis share an encounter he had with Jesus, where Jesus referred to that passage and told Jesse (roughly) “Those tears are mine. There will come a day when I won’t have to cry anymore.” My mercy-driven heart is touched by the fact that God cares for these people, and cares for hurting people everywhere. Sometimes when I hear stories about God healing people, I literally start crying because of His goodness and mercy. God is a kind God—the kindest, actually. No other god or idol or whatever heals people and solves their problems. Kali, an evil Indian goddess of death and destruction, is worshipped out of fear because she harms people if they don’t. Our Jesus is the exact opposite and brings only goodness, healing, and abundant life regardless of what we do or don’t do.

Healing wasn’t all that happened either. The morning we left Kolkata, my buddy Sung found a gemstone on the bus seat that supernaturally manifested from heaven. It was a small, cut stone that was clear in color. One or both of the days we did the medical clinics at that tent, some of the prayer team kept feeling water splattering on them from the direction of the tent wall. The problem is that we were in the middle of a field and there was no water being thrown or falling on them. No natural water, that is. Jesus, the Living Water, was showering on them while they were praying for people! God was showing up and showing off, not just in healings, but in spectacular manifestations of His glory and presence.

The third day we went to that same tent and had a church service where we worshipped with the locals, our team leader Tyler spoke, we prayed for people for healing and salvation, and God came and touched them all yet again. Later that evening, I had some fun with some of the other team members doing inner healing and deliverance in our hotel room, and God yet again showed up and brought freedom from emotional pain and demonic bondage.

There was much more that happened on this trip, but it’s fairly lengthy, so I am going to share more next week in Part 2. I will share more about the Tiger Widows, going out to someone’s hut and praying for a paralytic woman, tell you about their tailoring program and how you can get involved, and more. Check back next week for more stories of God’s goodness poured out in healing and miracles!