The holiday season can be difficult for missionaries who are separated from their loved ones and family traditions. Yet this family with roots in Mid-America is sharing with their chosen people groups the most valuable of all gifts—the love of Jesus Christ.
Discovering India
By Sukhi and Anandini Singh, AFM missionaries to the Kullu Pahari people of India
We are finally in India! For the past couple of years we have anticipated this moment. Training, team building, paperwork, vaccinations, packing and leaving. Now we are like newborn babies. The warm, familiar world we knew is nowhere to be found. New sights, tastes and smells. Oh, the smells! Our noses are overwhelmed. Are we breathing air, or something else?
And yet, isn’t this what everyone told us to expect? Why is it still such a shock? We didn’t think it would be, and yet it is.
As we look around, all we know is what we observe. As adults, we recognize the meaning behind most things in our home country, but here we have no answers. Why is that man sitting there? Where is everyone going? What is she eating? Why do people live like this?
We are beginning to look for answers to those questions in the larger context of how to share the Gospel here. This first part of our journey will be a time of childlike learning as our senses are bombarded by what we do not understand. It is both exciting and intimidating. We ask God to help us embrace a vulnerable curiosity as we twist our tongues to form unfamiliar sounds, make mistakes and then recover from them. We can’t wait to grow to understand our people, becoming friends and then brothers and sisters with them in the family of our heavenly Father.
