The Best Love

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Where there is love there is life.”

Have you ever been in love?  Like, real love.  Not a crush.  The kind of love that makes people starry-eyed and kooky.  The best-possible-future-you-can-see-yourself-living, forget-what-you’re-doing-and-just-sit-and-daydream, lay-down-your-life-if-you-had-to kind of love.  Love made up of selfless sacrifice and soaked in the incomprehensibly huge love of God.  Real love.

If you have, you have experienced something that transcends the paltry shadows of this world.  And you have been blessed beyond measure.

Allow me to shift focus for a moment.  I have had a weekend of re-defining my life, my goals, my expectations, my desires.  It made me realize the areas I was spending time and energy that should have been focused on growing my relationship with God and doing well in school.  After coming to these realizations, I simply lifted it up before the Lord, asking that He would make this weekend one that would shape my future – that He would give me a vision for life.  Re-defining His way.

I’ve got to start being more careful about what I ask for.

India keeps coming up and won’t go away.

It seems to be God’s main way of communicating with me.  He knows that I have a hard time paying attention to things unless they’re put in front of me over and over and over again.  And the thing so persistently in front of me right now is India.

At the beginning of the semester, the leader of my prayer group mentioned something about possibly taking a trip to India next summer.  She said “Hey, you could come along and be my travel buddy.”  I laughed and said that that’d be cool, then we moved on.

But that conversation WON’T LEAVE ME ALONE.

It’s crazy, right?  I need to spend next summer working to pay my way through school.  There’s no way I could come up with the money for that kind of a trip!  I want to spend those months with my family.

And yet…  The thought of this sets a fire in my soul that I haven’t felt in a long time.  We’d be working with a mission organization that ministers to the community with food, clothes, job training, shelter and medical care.  They also just started a mission school to rescue girls out of sex trafficking and minister to their bodies, minds and souls.

It’s crazy.  Spending an entire summer in a country where women (especially young white women) are not valued, at the height of monsoon season, exposed to a whole new host of illnesses…  Culture shock on a massive scale.

I’d need a passport.  I’d need shots.  I’d need to figure out how to live in a new country.  I’d have to find a way to pay for that all!

But I am so deeply in love with this country, with these people.  How can you love a place you’ve never been to?  How can you love someone you’ve never met?  Yet it’s something I can’t deny.  I have been in love with India for so many years now.  And it’s reawakening.

It’s absolutely crazy!  

Seriously though, shouldn’t we be doing something crazy?  Christians as a whole aren’t stepping out and doing things that anyone else wouldn’t do.  What kind of testimony is that to the God we serve?  We say that He’s big enough to do the impossible – all things are possible with Him!  Do we really believe it?  Are we living it?  Maybe it’s time for the Church to step out and do something crazy.

Will I be going to India next summer?  I don’t really know.  I do know that there’s no way I can make it happen in my own power.  But I’m open to the fact that God is big enough to make this happen.  And I can’t wait to see what He does.

What I do know is that I feel more passionately alive than I have in a very, very long time.  To be a totally sappy girl, I will quote Nickolas Sparks.  “The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.”

I do believe I’m in love.