After five months spent in India and Nepal we had a fitful 36 hours trying to get from Nagaland to Delhi and then on a plane out of Delhi, which included cancelled flights and a 10-hour delay due to a roof collapse at the airport. Alex also came down with a bacterial eye infection which we needed an optometrist to sort out. So our planned holiday in Japan with Emma’s mum and her husband did not begin restfully!
From Japan we flew to the Philippines where we could stay for up to 30 days. To be honest, we didn’t have a particularly strong sense of God’s direction for our time after Japan, so we had lots of conversations and times of prayer, wanting to be open to His leading without trying to force anything. In the end, it came down to a simple decision — that it didn’t sit right with us to go straight back to India and that there was a church in Manila we could visit and support. Alex’s dad and brother had visited Manila at the beginning of the year and came across a local church and established friendships during their time there. It seemed right to follow up those relationships and see how we could give to the people there.
But there was a distinct lack of excitement within each of us when we first landed. If anything, we both mostly felt weary. Part of it was physical, as we’d been busy during our six weeks in Nagaland and then had those travel delays as we left India, and then we’d done the tourist circuit of Japan and had crammed a lot in. But we were also both a bit emotionally flat. Even though we were staying in a nice part of Manila, surrounded by cafés and shopping malls (and parks filled with cats), we both felt tired.
It wasn’t until we met some people from the local church and had some times of fellowship that we were able to identify what this feeling was — it was a lack of emotional excitement, a lack of feeling like we were fulfilling God’s purpose for us. Compared to living and giving in Kerala and Nagaland after four years of God speaking to us about those places, coming to Manila just because we were free and nearby and there were people here that Alex’s family had met, wasn’t nearly as inspiring. It sounds bad, but we had to recognise that there is an emotional element to doing God’s will — a feeling of excitement as we saw what He had said to us being fulfilled, the exhilaration of making a leap of faith and finding Jesus’ arms on the other side. Simply going somewhere because we could and God’s people were there, with no other particular spiritual direction, is a bit less thrilling in comparison.
But that’s real life. It would be false to always be riding the wave of positive emotions. At best our emotions are a veneer that overlays the spiritual reality of our lives, and at worst they are a bewitching distraction, leading away from the truth. There is something deeper and more solid to be found when we discover that we can actually give and love and keep being focused on God even when it doesn’t feel particularly exciting or significant. We want to give to whomever God leads us to, in any part of the world, no matter how we are feeling. That is a foundational aspect of our commitment to Him. So in a way, we are grateful to have experienced this ‘coming down to earth’. It’s a reminder that real life isn’t always emotionally thrilling.
The My Utmost for His Highest on May 1 includes this paragraph from Oswald Chambers:
“If we continually try to bring back those exceptional moments of inspiration, it is a sign that it is not God we want. We are becoming obsessed with the moments when God did come and speak with us, and we are insisting that He do it again. But what God wants us to do is to “walk by faith.” How many of us have set ourselves aside as if to say, “I cannot do anything else until God appears to me”? He will never do it. We will have to get up on our own, without any inspiration and without any sudden touch from God. Then comes our surprise and we find ourselves exclaiming, “Why, He was there all the time, and I never knew it!”
Never live for those exceptional moments — they are surprises. God will give us His touches of inspiration only when He sees that we are not in danger of being led away by them. We must never consider our moments of inspiration as the standard way of life — our work is our standard.”
If we rely too much on how we feel, we won’t be able to recognise God’s truth about where we are and what we’re doing. Once we both took a step back from our flat feelings, we realised that from God’s point of view, not much had changed from when we were in India: we were still available to Him in terms of our time and resources, we were involved with His people, and we had an endless supply of His love to give in whatever way we could. Just because we don’t always feel that way doesn’t make it any less true.