Jesus thirsts
As some of you know, I’m leaving for India next Thursday, January 22nd.
I am not going as a tourist, but as a seeker of Christ with a strong desire to be changed by serving the poorest of the poor. This letter is to share with you how I made the decision to go, what I will be doing there, and also to ask you if you’d like to partner with me as I go, through prayer, finances, or both.
This trip has been mulling around in my mind since last year around this time, when I first read the book "No Greater Love" by Mother Teresa. Through her selfless life of love for the poor and dying in Kolcata (formerly Calcutta), she came to know Jesus in a most disturbing yet beautiful and deeply intimate way.
One of my favourite quotes is from her chapter on prayer. She writes,
“I shall keep the silence of my heart with greater care, so that in the silence of my heart I hear His words of comfort and
from the fullness of my heart I comfort Jesus in the distressing disguise of the poor.”
In Matthew 25:35 Jesus says,
“For I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me... for as you did to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
I would like to invite you to send me on your behalf, to go visit Jesus as he lays dying in the Missionaries of Charity homes, to offer him a drink, to comfort him and be with him as he returns to his Father in Heaven. Through this experience I hope to gain a deeper perspective on what it means to know Jesus by serving the "least of these," and return with the humility and insight to encourage others to press onwards towards the goal of knowing Christ and making Him known.
The practical details of the trip are as follows:
I’ll be in India month total, from Jan. 22nd – Feb. 22nd. The first two weeks will be spent
volunteering at Mother Teresa’s Homes for the Dying in Kolkata (Calcutta). My duties will include
bathing, feeding, and looking after the practical needs of patients who are dying of such diseases as tuberculosis and leprosy. While these seem like daunting and drudgerous tasks, I'm looking forward to a good dose of humility as I take care of the poorest of the poor in their final hours.
I'll be then flying to Bangalore, in the south of India, on February 7th to
teach English at the ACTS Institute. "ACTS" is an acronymn for Agriculture, Crafts, Trades, and Studies, and it is in these areas that the students are trained, alongside theology, and Biblical Studies. The students are preparing for a life of ministry in various Indian communities, but also are in need of "tent-making" skills to provide income for their families, as the communities are usually too poor to support them financially.
My father and my church from home, Harvest Bible Chapel in Barrie, Ontario, have been connected to ACTS for a few years now. My parents visited the school for the first time in 2005, and I visited them there for 10 days. We'll be returning together for the second time, and my father will teach theology and Bible and my mother and I will be teaching English. Although India is technically considered an English-speaking country, most of the
students at the ACTS Institute are from poor villages that speak a variety of dialects, and English is rarely even heard. It is crucial that the students develop their English skills, as all of the ministry-related instruction, such as Bible and Theology, is done in English. As well as teaching, I'll be spending my time getting to know the students, building relationships with them, and assisting them in their community projects (children's Bible camps, etc) in the surrounding villages.
As for the financial details of the trip, I'm budgeting as follows:
Airfare: Busan-Kolcata, return : approx. 1.5 million won ($1500 CDN)
Kokata-Bangalore, return : approx.100,000 won ($100 CDN)
Food and Lodgings, 4 weeks: approx. 400,000 won ($400 CDN)
TOTAL COST: Approximately 2 million won ($ 2000 CND)
The reason I'm asking for financial support is three-fold: I'm in the process of
saving money for seminary starting next year, and I'm trying putting all my savings now towards that. But more importantly, I think that when people give financially to a project such as this, there is a
deeper sense of connection between the go-er and the senders. 
I would love to have the support of my spiritual family, so they feel like they are going with me, and I feel like I'm going on behalf of them. Also,
using other people's money gives me a sense of responsibility, like I will be held accountable for how I use it. And I would like to be held accountable, for using my time and resources on this trip to serve Jesus and to serve others, and not simply to go to a cool new place for my winter vacation (not like there is anything wrong with that, of course, but that's just not the purpose of this trip).
Besides financial support, I would love for you to
support me in through your prayers. Please begin praying for me, that my heart will be right, that I will be
teachable, humble, and hard-working, and that I truly learn what it is like to serve Jesus through the poor. And please pray for those that I come in contact with, be it other volunteers, the patients, the students, or other travelers, that Christ may use me to shine His light into their lives.
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter, and for considering supporting me in this. My thoughts and prayers are with you all.
Your sister in Christ,
Jen
p.s. donations can be made through pay pal (login, go to the “send money” tab and enter my email address - jengal4@gmail.com), or by giving to me directly this Sunday (for those in Korea).
Beware of Community
I was 12 years old when I developed my first phobia. My brother had passed down his newspaper route to me, and being an eager 12 year old, desiring independence and a big-kid identity, I embraced the job with enthusiasm. Riding my bike through my partly-rural Canadian neighbourhood and delivering the local newspaper, The Barrie Examiner, made me feel older and more mature than my 12 years. I often felt like I was watching myself perform the task.
There goes that smart young woman, with wind blowing through her hair, tossing those newspapers so effortlessly. What a care-free girl, cool she must be!As you can imagine, I found myself making enemies with many of the neighbourhood's Labs, Golden Retrievers, Poodles, and German Shepherds. Territorial by nature, and protective of their master's turf, I was to them nothing but a persistent intruder. They couldn't understand that I was doing their master a service, and that they should welcome and appreciate my efforts. No, rather, they chased me. And barked. And bared their razor-sharp teeth. At first it was a game to me; being from a dog-owning family i thought nothing of the creatures - I considered myself a natural dog lover. So I just rode, ran, and jumped away faster than they could. Until the day I had a western-style stand off with the next door neighbour's German Shepherd named Bud (after the beer). He had me shaking in my boots, tears streaming down my face while i held my bike in between us, acting as a shield from his slobbering, snarling, angry growl. And then it happened: I took one step away from my bike, turning my back on him to make the run for home. He lunged forward and sank his teeth into my then-not-so-meaty butt, and didn't let go until my squeal alerted his master who then called him away from me. I limped home, shaking more than ever, tears soaking my quivering lips, and thus was born my fear of dogs.
It took me many years to get over that incident, and many stages of dog-phobia-rehabilitation by many sources to help me love dogs again.
They smell fear! Act brave, even if you don't feel brave, my dad would say.
Dogs need a leader, they need to know your intentions, who the boss is, I would read.
If you want to enjoy the benefits of their company, you must be willing to get close, to be confident, to pretend you love them, and eventually, you will, I would tell myself.
Eventually, it worked, and today I am able to walk by any sized barking dog and remain perfectly calm. I'm even proud to be the loving momma of a darling little Maltese puppy named Bailey. (He's no German Shepherd, I know, but it's a start!) His companionship, playfulness, loyalty, and adoration are worth all the pains it took me to challenge my fear and overcome it.
I also must confess another phobia that developed in my childhood: community. No really. I have been scared to death of deep, authentic relationships with multiple people at the same time. Once upon a time, I think around the age of 6, I remember thinking that people were really normal and fun to be around. And then it happened. For about the longest, most painfully lonely and fearful 11 years of my life, I was bullied, controlled, taunted, and manipulated by my peers. I was the class loner, the class clown, the class target, and the class loser. I was told I wasn't hip enough to be in the all-girls Cool Club, I wasn't fast enough to play first-basemen in baseball, I wasn't worthy enough to deserve the friendships anyone at school. I was told that I was ugly and nobody liked me, that my parents should have aborted me, that I ruined people's days by showing up at school. I could go on and on about how Steve Ellors*, the class hunk and eventually valedictorian, would pay first-graders to throw rocks at me, and how Anita Padon*, the coolest girl in the class, would turn everyone against me and manipulate them to not even look at me. And thus, I developed a dreadful fear of people. I thought they could just see how abnormal I was, how ugly and nerdy I was, how selfish I was, and I would just hide from them.
It's taken me many years to get over those incidences. At times I didn't think I would ever be able to interact normally with people, as I just didn't know how for the longest time. My community-phobia-rehabilitation has included therapy, anti-depressants, biblical counselors, prayer, the support of loving family members and friends, and lots and lots of tear-stained self-help books. And all these things have taught me plenty. I've learned that because God is in community with Himself in the Trinity, and we are created in the image of God, we are created for community. Being in authentic relationships with others is necessary, literally, for our survival. I've learned that true community is created when we are selfless and seek to meet the needs of others before our own needs, as modeled by the entire life of Christ. I've learned that community requires risk, the willingness to just get out there and try, even though you might get hurt. But most importantly, and most recently, I've learned that true community, true relationships, create
a mess worth making. Relationships are messy, difficult, hurtful things. They can be full of misunderstandings, judgements, betrayals, and conflict.
So why bother? Well, why did I bother to get over my fear of dogs? Because I saw that the benefits dogs could bring to my life far outweighed the safety of my fear. Likewise, relationships with others, though painful at times, are capable of enriching our lives in ways that nothing else can. They drive us closer to our Most Satisfying Relationship by forcing us to cry out to Him for wisdom, strength and the power to forgive. They act as mirrors that show us how we are not yet like Christ, so we can strive to grow in specific areas. They reveal to us our shortcomings so that we can grow and be the kind of person that we never imagined we could be: more loving, more forgiving, more gentle, more selfless, more Christ-like than we ever dreamed possible. And in the close, sweet times, they teach us much of love, joy, peace, laughter, trust, and the bliss that only pure intimacy with others can bring.
Community is a dangerous, scary thing, and it is not to be entered into lightly. Many of us have been burned at one time or another by allowing ourselves to be vulnerable with someone who ends up betraying our trust. But we cannot survive without it. In fact, we will never fully be alive unless we chase it, and when we fail or get hurt, to continue, in God's grace, to get up, dust ourselves off, and chase it again.
May the Creator and Imitator of Deep Relationships grant us strength, wisdom, and grace to beware of community, and then dive in head first.
Me, Nikki, Dan, and Clayton on our recent camping trip
*names have been changed to protect the people involved, who, by the way, i completely forgive and wish the best for
to hell with writer's block
so i haven't written anything in an ENTIRE year due to this mythological wall that has been blocking my creativity, so i've been telling myself, and i'm SICK of it telling me what i can't do!!! so i'm just going to write about whatever comes to my mind and we'll see where this goes...
so i'm currently re-adjusting to celebrity-ship, according to my facebook status, by returning to my position as, insert pretentious British accent, "Professor of English Language and Literature" (if you can call "Worldview 2 - Intro to English Coversation"
*literature* , here at Kosin University.) Yes, that's in Korea. And yes, I'm still here, it's been 2 1/2 years, but that's a whole other blog post.... The thing is, I've never felt so ridiculously and quite shallowly
*idolized* by so many people. I walk into a building, and i am welcomed by waist deep bows and screams and hyper-quick waving hands and many lines such as "Hi Professor!!!" and "I love you!!" and "Hello!! Hellooooo!!!!" It's just insane. Today I (and the other foreign English Professors) were called on to welcome the English students back for another semester at an opening Chapel service (it's a Christian university, btw), and the SCREAMS were so deafening, you would have thought Wentworth Miller walked in the room(or ok, Brad Pitt for you non-Prison Break people - and, side note - good for you, i just found out they KILLED SARA and i've never wanted 51 hours of my life back so badly). I've almost started to picture myself as some high-fashion skinny little Hollywood goddess, struttin' her stuff down the freezing cold cement hallways, and then I catch a glimpse of my reflection in some glass doors and I see nothing but a pasty-white, plumper-than-normal, older version of myself, wearing something i never EVER imagined myself in - a pinstripped chocolate brown suit that i got made in Thailand for a price i should have put towards my debt and darn-it! - i don't even like the cut of it anymore. But despite the delusion, in the end, it
*is* endearing. Because I ADORE my students. This week back at work has been so much better than I expected. After returning from a blissful 3 week holiday wandering around Thailand (which was SO divine), I was fearing that Depression would welcome me back with its cold, ugly familiar arms. He (depression has just
*got* to be masculine) opened them up for an embrace late last week, especially after i found out that my dear old high school friend had been killed while skiing, in an avalanche. I wanted to go home and say goodbye, to properly remember her, to be with her family. But there was this problem of a giant body of water called the Pacific in the way....blast.
And THEN there was this whole deal at the Professors retreat, an hour away at a fancy-smancy hotel in Gwanju. Three things that REALLY irked me happened: 1) They announced that they were cancelling the fine art program (stab in the heart! I think the arts are SO incredibly worthwhile and desperately needed, but this culture simply does not value them - "no job for art students! can not become rich!"). 2) A woman working for a broadcasting company, while addressing us Professors, encouraged us to "teach the students to have an obedient heart while new in the workplace, not to express their ideas and opinions." Awesome.
*Please, no independent thinkers! No creative ingenuity! No democratic mindsets! Obedient, subserviant little clones, only, for us!* And 3) A woman who was supposed to give a speech on the school's sexual harrassment policy (a gov't requirment) skirted around the issue by giving a 5 minute schpeel entitled, "How to do Mathematics" that mentioned SQUAT about sexual harrassment and too much about men and women being "different" because they have different centers of gravity which can be figured out by some ridiculously complex math equation. 5 minutes of this, and i'm waiting for her to address the seriousness of sexual harrasment, but she doesn't - she just wraps up her neat little speech about gender differences and sits down, with a hearty
*applause* even, by the entire Korean faculty, all straight-faced and nodding with approval! The foreign staff all just looked at each other, with jaw-dropping stares and fits of laughter - like we just could not
*believe* that just happened. So there's this culture for ya: hatred of the arts, love of obedient little workaholic slaves, and suppression of anything slightly related to sexuality. SO, needless to say after that, Depression was running straight for me, as I was thinking, "WHY do I work in this country again??" But i rejected the embrace and decided that, after all, I have a LOT to keep me content in this country. Since working at Kosin, I've made a LOT more Korean friends than I've had in the previous 2 years in Korea (I had been doing the typical English Teacher thing, hanging out with other English Teachers who were, just, way too comfortable). And they are
*delightful* . So fun, and giving, and loving, and so it's easier to love Korea when there are Koreans that you just
*adore* . Along those lines, I'm learning more about living in the present and enjoying the people who are in my life RIGHT NOW instead of longing for past relationships or dreaming of future ones. I have a job that allows me to befriend people from totally different cultures - Kenyan, Cambodian, Fiji-an (i don't know what that culture is called), and Korean, of course. Yep - there's many international students here - its cool! SO i guess what i'm trying to say is that despite the cultural, er,
*differences* , and the overtly enthusiastic response to my blonde hair and blue eyes, I'm deeply, deeply BLESSED to be in the position I am and I refuse, from now on, to accept any other ideas about it. Freaking blocks and walls and ugly embraces, you can control me no more.
the least of these
Last week I taught Jesus how to knit. We sat on the dirty cement floor of his small, plain, concrete-block house, the sun streaking through the torn flowered material that was his door. I had bought him some brightly-coloured yarn, needles, and a knitting book filled with trendy patterns, and had meekly presented them to him as his five half-clothed children gathered around, curiously rumaging through my bag and playing with its contents - an iPod, a Latin American Spanish phrase book, a camera, a pair of sunglasses, some lip gloss, and lots and lots of yarn. Fumbling through directions in Spanish and Creole, I slowly taught him (with lots of hand gestures to copy me) how to cast on, purl, change colors (he had trouble with this one), cast off, and sew up the finished product - a lime green, teal blue, and chocolate brown-coloured camera case that he could sell at the local fair-trade art co-op. Every hour or so we'd stand up to take a break, and I'd go outside to play with the kids and their friends on the dirt roads of the Haitian community they were apart of on the north shore of the Dominican Republic. Having gone there to visit my friend who works in the community and to do what I could to help, it was my desire to provide him with a skill that would help him put some food into his children's bloated stomachs. Throughout the four days, after I hiked up to his shack on a hill, as he was stitching away, the Spanish phrase book came in handy as I sought to discover a little about his life. As we talked, joked, and listened to music, we became friends. I grew to love the kids, too, as we jumped rope, drew pictures with sidewalk chalk, and played Cats and the Cradle. On the last day, I gave them some clothes, soap, crayons, paper, and other gifts, and as I decended slowly down the hill towards the rest of the village, I realized that I had come to know the Friend of the Poor in a way I never had before.
Now replace Jesus with Romona, a Haitian woman who works at
La Tienda, Rachel's fair trade art co-op, and you have what Jesus talked about in Matthew 25:44-46:
Then they also will answer, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?' Then he will answer them, saying, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.' And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Through the reading of two very profound books (see below) and my experience with Ramona, I realized what Jesus was really saying here. On the Last Day, the very authenticity of our salvation will be measured not by the soundness of our theology or by what we claim to believe, but by how we treat "the least of these" in our society. By responding in love to the deperate needs of the poor, the lonely, and the rejected, we are literally responding to the God-Incarnate himself. Jesus becomes alive in the eyes of the lowly, and by reaching out to them we are opening ourselves up to a deeper undestanding of the gospel and intimacey with God that we could never know otherwise. Read the Gospels, and you can't miss that Jesus was all about befriending the forgotten, the lonely, the most-gossiped about, and the rejected. Translate that into modern culture and you will get the homeless, the poor (anyone trying to live on a non-living wage), the abused (emotionally, sexually, physically, or economically), the "socially awkard," the "loners," the "sexually loose," the "unfashionable," the "annoying," and the "fill-in-this-blank-with-whomever-you-seek-to-avoid." He sought them out not to patronize them with charity or write them a cheque to ease his conscience, but to befriend them, live among them, and share with them the love and grace of their Creator. This is the radically compassionate character of the God of the Bible. This is the very nature of the Upside-Down Kingdom of Jesus, of which we are all gently beckoned to be a part of.
There are two books that have shone the light so brightly on this urgent message that I was greatly disturbed with my own self-absorption and complacency. They helped me to see that I have been so focussed on my own existence and "issues" that I have not been fully denying myself and radically following this Way of God, that is to look so counter-cultural that it brings hope, love, and justice to a world full of cyclical injustice, cut-throat competiveness for money, power, and popularity, and abandonement of the desperate. They are:
1)
The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne
Highly readable, intensely inspiring, and disturbingly challenging, the author of this book is the Founder of
The Simple Way, an intential Christian community that lives in the poorest ghettos of Philadephia. Believing firmly that Jesus meant what he said in the Beatitudes (blessed are the poor, meek, lowly, hungry and thirsty for righteousness, etc.) and how he lived his life (seeking out the forgotten, abandoned, and rejected to love and meet their needs), the Simple Way seeks to befriend the poor and homeless, fight against the social injustice against them, and actually meet their needs by sharing with them their food, clothes, and other resources. Having gone from the jail cells in the inner city to the slums of Calcutta to the war-torn neighbourhoods in Iraq (on a peace mission), Shane's semi-autobiographical work will seriously cause you to question why the heck you've been sitting on your butt. If you're comfortable with where your life is now, don't read this book. It may cause you to want to actually follow Jesus, which could, as Shane says, wreck everything.
2)
God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It by Jim Wallis
For those who are frustrated with the self-righteousness ignorance of the Religious Right and doubtful still of the cynical Left, this book will help you see that God is not a Republican...or a Democrat, but cares about how we deal with poverty, the environment, war, injustice, and many other issues. He talks about the danger of claiming that the evildoers are "out there" and not within our own actions and policies, and claims that our faith should motivate us to stand in the way of injustice, needless violence, disregard of the environment, tax cuts for the rich, abandonement of the poor, and make our voices heard on every individual issue instead of being loyally partisan, and if God is on one side or the other. A must-read for people like me who love to talk about the two biggest taboo topics out there: religion and politics! Or for those who are simply seeking clarification as to how Christians should be involved in politics in a way that shows the world the love, grace, and justice of God.
If anyone in Korea is interested in starting a book club with either of these books, let me know, I'd LOVE to hear all your prospectives on them and discuss all this more, and then actually go and do something about what we learn. We can have it at my new apartment! Go
here to order from within Korea and receive it in 10 days.
To those who are still reading, you deserve a medal. Thanks for reading about what I've been learning. May the God who loves the least of these surround you in all you do this week.
Peace,
Jen
p.s. Click on the flickr badge on the right to see the rest of my pics from the trip, plus some old pics of nepal i took years ago that i just recently came across, which actually just emailed to Shane to have published in his new book,
Jesus for President. Check out his
website for more details.
Koranglish
Well, its been four days since i landed in the Dominican Republic, and I'm just starting to train my tongue to stop speaking Korean when I know I need to communicate something in Spanish. I´ve been automatically responding with "Ney" (Korean for "yes") instead of "Si" and "Kumsumnida" (Korean for "thankyou") instead of "gracious." People here must think I´m from some crazy little European country whose language they´ve never heard before. haha. Although, I have decided that I am enrolling in Spanish classes as soon as I get back to Korea (how´s that for ironic), because I LOVE the language and have an eerie feeling that I will be needing it one day. I love it here. The people, music, food, and buildings are so full of life. Being with Rachel has been so comforting, rejuvanating, relaxing and inspiring - like simultaneously coming home, going to church, sleeping in, and enrolling in school. Even though much time has passed since we last saw each other, we are still the same together. We really love each other, and its been nice just to rest in that. She has felt blessed by all the gifts, cards, and presnts that have been sent with me, which has been a blessing to me as well to see her feel so loved. And seeing
La Tienda has been wonderful. Everything inside of it - the women included - is soooo enchantingly beautiful. We´ve only been into the village once so far, the rest of the time I´ve been helping Rachel get some much needed away/relaxation time, with no complaints from me! So we´ve gone to the beach 3 times, and have just read, knitted, painted, sat in charming little beach-front restaurants, and talked. It´s been wonderful. I´ve been knitting some examples of iPod/camera bags to use to teach our sole knitter tomorrow at la tienda, I´m excited (the bikini idea is out, since Rachel didn´t think it was simple enough, plus it might not sell seeing as alot of the packages to sell are sent to churches/mission organizations...boo!). So, tomorrow will be great to spend real time in the co-op with the women...
Until next time....ciao!
not enough headspace for this mind traffic
so among the normal i'm-only-home-for-6-weeks activities, like going to aqua-fit with mom and grandma every morning, eating lots and lots of homemade maple syrup chili and timbits, scheduling in friends' visits like they are doctor's appointments, driving all over ontario to see friends and their newest baby or boyfriend or marriage vows (not always in that order), flying to montreal to a) feel like i'm in Europe, seriously, b) kiss random people i meet twice, and freak out if it ends up on the lips cuz i didn't know which cheek to go for first, and c) see my ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, who also happens to be my good friend from korea (don't ask), planning a trip to the dominican republic to visit my best friend's
art co-op, yes, people, among all this (see pics
here, btw), i'm making three major life decisions that require countless hours of tumultuous thinking.
A) where the heck do i work when i get back to korea in march?
B) where the heck do i work in September?
C) how the heck do i deal with all the political, spiritual, social (mis)information that keeps attacking me constantly over here?
possible answers:
A) this depends on a lot of factors. what's more important to me- working hours? money? job satisfication? vacation time? location? what would be most important to you? well, my dad, being the statistical engineer that he is, drew up this table with all the possible factors and i rated them all and they he did some fancy smancy formula thing and it turns out the job that won is the job with the best hours and job satisfaction and vacation time. but what about money? that is why i'm sacrificing time away from home to go to korea anyways : my end goal has always been to pay off debt and then save money for my masters. but i feel like being debt-free has become an idol, to which i sacrifice job satisfication and
fun . Is being debt-free and saving money worth working at a slave labour school where i completely disagree with their philosophy of education? even if it's short term? what about trading $400 a month more for 2 months vacation? or good hours in dognae (far away from everything) vs. bad hours in haeundae (close to friends and beach)? what's worth more?
B) An International School in India or Busan? Adventure or Comfort? Starting over or building deeper relationships?
C) I don't know. Too many opinions, books, news channels, commentaries, people telling me what to believe or who to believe or how to live. Information overload, thanks in part to this media-crazed culture, whose ban-wagon i have recently jumped on. like by getting my new google homepage, where i've linked over 5 different media sources, all saying different things about the same person or event or ideology. somebody, please just shoot me. or at least just tell me what to believe. i just want to live in peace and do what is right! but who know's what that is anymore....Even within the boundaries of "Christianity" I'm annoyed at the "evangelical conservatives" and the "agnostic/liberal/emergent" types. It's hard to trust anyone these days, and i find myself sceptical of everyone's opinion for some reason or another. if only i could fast all forms of media for a few days....no tv, books, internet....how would my mindset change? does one need all this information? hmmm....the dominican republic is fast approaching.....saweet.
J.
I would like to invite you to send me on your behalf, to go visit Jesus as he lays dying in the Missionaries of Charity homes, to offer him a drink, to comfort him and be with him as he returns to his Father in Heaven. Through this experience I hope to gain a deeper perspective on what it means to know Jesus by serving the "least of these," and return with the humility and insight to encourage others to press onwards towards the goal of knowing Christ and making Him known. 
I'll be then flying to Bangalore, in the south of India, on February 7th to teach English at the ACTS Institute. "ACTS" is an acronymn for Agriculture, Crafts, Trades, and Studies, and it is in these areas that the students are trained, alongside theology, and Biblical Studies. The students are preparing for a life of ministry in various Indian communities, but also are in need of "tent-making" skills to provide income for their families, as the communities are usually too poor to support them financially. 
My father and my church from home, Harvest Bible Chapel in Barrie, Ontario, have been connected to ACTS for a few years now. My parents visited the school for the first time in 2005, and I visited them there for 10 days. We'll be returning together for the second time, and my father will teach theology and Bible and my mother and I will be teaching English. Although India is technically considered an English-speaking country, most of the students at the ACTS Institute are from poor villages that speak a variety of dialects, and English is rarely even heard. It is crucial that the students develop their English skills, as all of the ministry-related instruction, such as Bible and Theology, is done in English. As well as teaching, I'll be spending my time getting to know the students, building relationships with them, and assisting them in their community projects (children's Bible camps, etc) in the surrounding villages.
I would love to have the support of my spiritual family, so they feel like they are going with me, and I feel like I'm going on behalf of them. Also, using other people's money gives me a sense of responsibility, like I will be held accountable for how I use it. And I would like to be held accountable, for using my time and resources on this trip to serve Jesus and to serve others, and not simply to go to a cool new place for my winter vacation (not like there is anything wrong with that, of course, but that's just not the purpose of this trip).
