Those who may remember Nat and Julian from the amazing Motormission will be interested to know that at least half the dynamic duo flew out last week for the sub-continent again, but this time with a Sydney Anglican team in tow…
Team member Lockie Colman is part of Nathan Brown’s team. He shares the thoughts filling his mind as he prepared for the big trip.
This fine Friday afternoon, sitting in my lounge room watching "Antiques Road show' with Luke "Brombo" Bromage and Dave Sanders, we suddenly break into a discussion of where we think we will be at this exact time next week. Sanders reckons it will be Ho Chi Minh city, Brombo's estimate is somewhere high above Indonesia and I am once again made aware of not just how inexperienced I am at Short Term mission trips but at International Travel of any form.
Everyone on this trip is coming to the party with different levels of experience and only two people in the team have actually been overseas on mission before. There are different levels of fear and different expectations on what will happen while we are over there. Yet over the year I have watched and experienced an amazing growth in the faith of each team member. It has become the core of our crew and is the platform we have learned to stand on. The faith that our God has it all in control, He knows what struggles we will face, He knows the people we will meet, He knows the thoughts of our hearts, He has been to India before even if we haven't, He has been to the very Church we are visiting and next Saturday when we arrive in Hyderabad He will be there with us.
The path the team has followed to get to where we now sit has seen us through some interesting preparation. It was only a few months ago when 21 of us finished a team training morning at our local church only to get told that it was time to "go and try out what we'd learnt.' Those with cars were given an address and drove off in the direction of Auburn. Arriving early to our destination I witnessed 21 of my friends, quite bemused and with no clue as to what the rest of the day would involve, crowd into a small foreign lounge room cluttered with big green sofas, gourmet muffins, two Germans and a man called Deon. I then witnessed 21 expressions change from bewilderment to something just shy of horror as it was explained to us that the afternoon's activity of "cultural surveying' at the Auburn Multicultural festival would be topped off with a nice bout of door knocking. For youngsters like us this was a scary thought in our own suburb let alone Auburn.
I'm not sure if it was the initial fear subsiding or everyone just got better at hiding it but pretty soon we were kicking it around the streets desperately trying to remember all the things we had learnt that morning on cross cultural evangelism. The most important lesson we could have learnt was to approach people as learners. When we go to India we will be going to love those we meet, to listen to them, to help them if we can but most of all to see where in their lives God is working and introduce them to His son Jesus.
