Communion

 

It’s Sunday here in India and a mixed day for us here.  In the morning our team will split up to go to area church services.  This afternoon is a bit of personal time until around 4:00pm when we’ll all get together for some additional training before heading to the field tomorrow to set up our first medical clinic.

Rickshaw cabbies await the morning's business over sweet tea.

Larry and I were up early and after depleting the instant coffee available to us, decided to go out for a stroll.  Mark joined us and we had a nice visit about the state of our team and the struggles some members are having.  It was very early and the street was just coming alive.  Merchants at the various small huts along the roadside were sweeping their dirt sidewalks with bundles of grass.  Cabbies squatted near trash fires lit near the stalls for their rickshaws, warming their hands in the 50-degree chill.  The street never really gets quiet here.  There is always a horn honking somewhere and the voice of a bus worker notifying the neighborhood that the bus will be leaving soon.

At dawn and dusk street people burn trash to ward off the cold.

We returned back to the hotel and had a good breakfast.  Stir-fried vegetables, potato and pea curry, an odd but very good dough-like substance that reminds me a lot of Cream Of Wheat with all the moisture squeezed out and some sugar added.  The only thing they don’t seem to understand here is coffee in the American/European sense.  Everywhere seems to have one of those fake cappuccino machines that we see at convenience stores in the states.  It produces a substance that is exactly unlike coffee with hot milk.

Tezpur's Baptist Hospital complex.

Our group split up into two in order to attend local church services.  My group went to the local Baptist church.  This church is located about three blocks from our hotel in the middle of a Baptist hospital complex.  Once on the complex we took a wrong turn and ended up wandering the halls a bit.  Yes, it is a hospital, but no, it is nothing like the states.  This is field medicine.  A lot of beds in a shared ward, open air windows to let the flies in and out, and families visiting and bringing the food for their loved ones.  I'm sure that it is the best of care that can be had in this area of India, but it is still very primitive by our standards.

As is almost always the case when out of country visitors are present, one of the visitors is asked to give the message.  Being the Pastor in our group, Mark was tapped early.  With decades of experience, Mark always has a message or two he can prepare in a moments notice so he gladly accepted.  He was asked while we were having breakfast so he spent a little bit of time reviewing a scripture or two and putting the message together in his head.

When we arrived at the church we were warmly welcomed and ushered to our seats.  It’s a very familiar looking and plainly adorned chapel that would be at home in most small towns in the states.  Seating is segregated by sex: women on the left and men on the right.  We had two young ladies in our group and the hosts were very accommodating, allowing our ladies to stay with us.  We were taken to the front pew.

The Pastor of this church, a distinguished looking Indian man with graying hair and beard, came and introduced his self before the service.  At first he keyed in on me, commenting on and appreciating the fine layer of gray that adorns my goatee.   He assumed I was the Pastor but I immediately directed him to Mark.  Again, he had an appreciation for grey facial hair, this time the ones on Marks chin.  He asked Mark what he planned to speak on.  Mark replied that he was going to give a message on unity and told the Pastor what verses he was using. 

The Pastor nodded and smiled as Mark explained his plan.  Then he said, “You will preach on the last supper, yes?”  With only minutes to go until the service started, Mark could only agree.  No doubt Mark was remembering the many times he told us to be very flexible during the trip.  He now had about five minutes in between songs and offerings in order to plan a 40-minute sermon that would translate well into the Hindi culture.

There was plenty of music, most of it accapela and most of it old Baptist hymns.  The richness of the voices raised in simple song was incredible.  There was a special music group of young ladies that sang a more traditional Indian worship song.  I was sneaky enough to bring my pocket stereo recorder and I wish I knew how to post an MP3 here.  It is beautiful and so filled with spirit and such a contrast the complete cacophony of noise that is Indian traffic.

The simple chapel at Baptist Hospital in Tezpur.

Mark took the stage and even though a few of his Western humor jokes didn’t come evidently come across well, he pulled off a nice message for communion Sunday.  It was a very special experience to share communion with brothers and sisters from halfway around the world.  Our cultures are completely different, our language barrier is extreme to say the least, and I am sure we are just as much of an oddity to them as they are to us.  But we share one common bond through Christ.  To me it is simply incredible that complete strangers with such vast differences can both look at a cup of wine and a piece of bread and communicate the greatest truth in the world.  Not only is it communion with God, but a communion that is universal among believers, no matter the divide that is between us in an earthly sense.

Tonight is more training and a rundown on the schedule for our first day in the actual mission field.  It seems like it has been a long time coming and we are all anxious to let the work begin.