Well our trip to Nepal is off to a great start. We’ve been here 5 days now and the ministry has already been very rich. From the moment we arrived, I could tell the team was immediately taken back by all the sights, sounds, and smells of Nepal. This was not quite what they had expected. The traffic on the narrow Kathmandu streets is chaotic to say the least. We find ourselves dancing around rickshaws and dodging motorcycles to cross the street. Walk just a block and you will experience waves of smells from burning trash, to burning incense, to perfumes, flowers, and diesel exhaust. Night falls around 7:30 and the local clubs blast their music out into the crowded streets, that is of course, if the power doesn’t go out.
We start our mornings with breakfast on the rooftop of our hostel. In the distance you can see the foothills of the Himalayas as we sit and eat our porridge. We spend an hour each morning in “quiet time” studying passages like Philippians, Proverbs, and Nehemiah, drawing out key ministry principles and attitudes. We spend time praying together as a team, taking time in silence to let God speak to us. Eventually we grab some lunch, load up our day packs and water bottles, and head our for ministry.
On our first day out we visited a famous Buddhist temple located high above the Kathmandu valley, unofficially known as the “Monkey Temple”, because the place is crawling with monkeys looking for tourists with food they can steal. We observed many of the Buddhist rituals they do as they seek “enlightenment”. The following day we visited the largest evangelical church in Kathmandu. They gave us headphones to hear the church service translated into English, but as I looked around I noticed many of the students had taken out their headphones, because they found themselves moved by hearing the Nepali people worshiping in their own language.
Yesterday we traveled to a Hindu temple known as Pashupati. There we witnessed Hindu cremation rituals as they burned the bodies of their deceased loved ones, and dumping the ashes into a river, hoping that would send them to heaven. It was a somber day, and the students had very little to say, but we were all thinking the same thing; this is a dark place full of people who desperately need hope. That same day we were also taken to a palace where a little girl was held because they believe she is the incarnation of a god. She stepped out and we saw her face. To the people around us they were seeing the face of a living god. To us, we were seeing the face of a young girl in captivity, much like the people who worshiped her.
While working to understand the spiritual lives and religious practices and beliefs of the Nepali people, we have begun to engage ourselves in two types of ministry here. The first, we have started calling “intentional shopping”. The students go out into the shopping district of “Thamel”, and go shopping. But as they shop around, they are working hard to meet people. Store owners, peddlers, restaurant servers, laundry and internet shop owners, rickshaw drivers, and even the hotel workers. Our students have been building relationships, getting names and phone numbers, learning about their families, sitting down for tea, and are openly sharing their faith. It has been amazing to hear their stories as they come back each night telling the team about the Nepali people they met and made friendships with.
The other type of ministry we have been doing is evangelism in the smaller villages outside of Kathmandu. As I type the team is preparing to spend the entire afternoon in a new village today. We start with a street performance with dancing, puppets and drama, and we spend the next hour our two having one on one conversations, presenting the gospel anyway we can. Some tell bible stories, some use gospel tracts, some open up their own bibles and share scripture, and some share stories from their own lives and testimonies. We must have drawn a crowd of 100-150 people at the village we went to yesterday. It was an exciting moment and our team rose to the occasion in an incredible way.
Our evenings are spent having dinner in the local restaurants and debriefing the day together as a team. We share stories, thoughts, questions, and encouragements with each other and finally shuffle off to bed exhausted from pouring ourselves out all day.
The rest of this week will consist of lots of village ministry, lots of “intentional shopping”, and on friday we are planning to visit a local orphanage. So far, the team has been very healthy and has great attitudes in everything we do. Rain is frequent, but short lived and has not succeeded in drowning out the work God has for us to do here.
We thank you for your prayers and encouragement. We know that while we are here in Nepal working hard to get the gospel out, there are many people lifting us up and have made many sacrifices so we could be here. It is on your shoulders that we stand and serve Christ in Nepal.
- Posted by Job Hammond July 12, 2011
