The India Trip - Learning to Trust God - Part 1

If you've ever done short-term missions work, you'll likely have heard it said (or been told) that God does as much work in you as He does through you.

David, Joanne, and I at the gate about to leave DFW airport
for the first leg of our trip to Gatwick, England.

I certainly felt that way on my trip to India & Pakistan.

Throughout that time God was showing me that I could trust Him - that He'd take care of me as I travelled, that we'd get to places we needed to on time, and that we'd be safe and healthy.  Why was this important to me?  Well...

When I was about 6, my parents had arranged for us to go to see Mr. Dressup 'live'.  This was a big deal to me because he was the Canadian version of 'Mr. Rogers' and I had watched him on TV for most of my life - all 6 years of it.  Somehow it turned out that we got to the venue late.  There was a huge lineup, blocks long, and we weren't going to make it to the show.  I was terribly disappointed.  Following that incident, I always wanted to be early to any kind of show or important engagement we went to, and I would get nervous and uptight if it looked like we were going to be late.  

Myself, Joanne, & David after our first?
round of inoculations before leaving

India & Pakistan aren't great places to go for someone with this kind of 'hang-up'.  But God was on my side.  

I was travelling with two friends that I knew from the ministry I volunteered at in Texas.  Our plan was to travel for 9 weeks and visit 8 cities across India and Pakistan, helping YWAM bases and other missionaries while we were there.  We hadn't even left the States before challenges to my peace of mind started to arise....

We all required Indian visas in our passports before we left.  This meant we had to send our passports to the Indian Consulate in San Fransisco.  Our visa approvals got delayed and three days before we were due to fly out we still had not received our passports back from the consulate.  There wasn't really much we could do about the situation except pray, and so pray we did.  And the day before we were scheduled to leave, our passports arrived complete with visas.  You wanna talk about elation!  We were all so relieved.  It would have been terrible to lose the money on changing our flights and have to reschedule a bunch of things.  God had come through!

Click here for more true stories of God working in my life
The India Trip - Learning to Trust God - Part 2
The India Trip - Learning to Trust God - Part 3