Our visas allow us to stay in India for up to two 90-day periods in each calendar year, and as unbelievable as it sounds, we are approaching that first 90-day marker! By the end of April we need to be out of India and remain outside the country for at least one week before returning.
We’ve always had the sense that wherever we went after these first three months wouldn’t merely be an interval to our time in India, but that God would be involved in where we go, what we do, and how long we stay there. Through discussing this with Alex’s parents and telling God our thoughts and wonderings, we felt right about two things, each one seemingly independent of the other. The first was that we’d like to spend at least a few days in Bangalore (now known as ‘Bengaluru’) which is a few hours north of Kochi in the state of Karnataka. And the second was that we’d like to visit Nepal to support a pastor who some friends of ours had met last year. These two destinations both sat right with us, and it was good to be able to distinguish between our sense that these places felt like the next steps for us, compared with how God directed us to come to Kerala in the first place.
There is a difference between God’s clear direction and our own sense that something feels right in our hearts. It’s the difference between the words of the apostles in Acts 15:28 — “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” — compared with the words of the Holy Spirit in Acts 13:2 — “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them”. The distinction between the two can appear slight, but we know there is a vital importance in identifying what is a word from God or the Holy Spirit, and what is a sense that something ‘seems good to us and the Spirit’. We are foolish if we label a sense or feeling as being the word of God to us, and equally foolish if we downplay God’s word as being nothing more than a ‘feeling’. If we want to remain sensitive to His leading, we have to acknowledge that our feelings can be wrong and that we can confuse thoughts and emotions for the prompting of the Spirit.
However, it has been lovely to witness how God has confirmed our sense to go to Bangalore and then onto Nepal, joining the two places together in a way we didn’t expect. First we discovered that only three cities in all of India fly direct to Kathmandu, and Bangalore is one of them. Then it turned out that the flights from Bangalore to Kathmandu only run a few times per week, but there happened to be a flight on 30 April (which is the last day of our visa) with seats still available. And, in another lovely touch, as we were sitting in a café a few days after we booked our flights to Bangalore and to Nepal, Alex glanced up and saw the word ‘Bangalore’ floating above Emma’s head. On a wall of framed artwork at the back of the café, only one of the frames contained letters instead of art, spelling out ‘BAN - GAL - ORE’.
Without making this into anything more than it is, we did want to acknowledge and thank God for this small and simple confirmation that going to Bangalore is the next step.
We also felt grateful that we could make these decisions while we still had some time left in Kochi, freeing us to give ourselves to the people here, knowing that our next steps were already taken care of. As trite as it sounds, knowing the date when we would be leaving did sharpen our desire to make the most of our remaining time in Kerala with the people God has brought us across.
