I've had a lot of people come up to me since I returned home from India and ask me in all sincerity, "So, how was your trip -- good?"It truly was -- but I don't like leaving it at that (and I usually don't). I don't want to say, "Yeah, it was good," as if I went fishing up north or took a weekend vacay with my wife. It was a trip to India to see amazing work among the poorest of the poor, work that gets a lot of financial support but not a lot of attention or in-depth thought from people here.
The thing is, it deserves a lot of in-depth thought. Easy answers, like "It was good" or "Yeah, God showed up" don't seem to cut it. I think sometimes we want the easy answers rather than the full answers, because the full answers require us to hit "Pause" on our lives long enough to think about uncomfortable things. It's hard to find time for that.
Dealing with the poor and foreign cultures and God's work there requires a lot of thought about what causes poverty and how that foreign culture differs from my own and how God is reaching into that culture with his transforming love. A lot of times, those thoughts need to be refined and re-thought, just because of my own ignorance or new information that trumps the conclusions I came to before.
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