Time and comfort
Part of acclimatising to life in India is getting used to a different approach to making plans. The Western way of orderly schedules, of maximised minutes, of dinners with friends booked months in advance, none of that seems to exist here. Instead, events happen shambolically and at the last moment, without much forethought or communication. This approach to life is not unique to India, but it is diametrically opposed to our usual approach. We are guilty of scheduling our entire lives, turning our weeks into a complex logic puzzle where we are trying to fit together work, church, family, friends, exercise and housework. Our solution was a joint calendar and a colour-coded organisation system.
When we’ve previously visited countries with a more relaxed approach to time, we’ve done our best to work around this casual attitude by being more organised. However, if you want to form relationships with people in the country you are visiting, you do end up needing to adapt to their culture, or else become the anxious foreigner trying to organise people to suit our preferences — which doesn’t exactly allow for heart-to-heart fellowship!
Thanks to the way God has led us, we are in a position to adapt to the local ways. We have no obligations to anyone, no deadlines hanging over our heads, no schedule to adhere to. What can sometimes feel like too much time on our hands is actually a lovely resource which often felt scarce in our lives back home. So we are learning to make the most of last-minute plans and saying yes to things which give us more opportunities to form deeper relationships. Even though many people in Kerala work six days a week, our times of fellowship have not just been limited to evenings and Sundays, which we are grateful for.
We also feel that God is leading us out of our comfort zones, not only regarding organisation but also generally in the things we are doing.
This includes visiting a hospice run by an order of nuns who provide palliative care for cancer patients in the final stages of life. A few people from the local church visit this hospice semi-regularly to spend time with the patients and pray for them. Although this was confronting and not something we have ever done, it did feel like a privilege to witness each patient’s dwindling time on earth, pray with those that we could, and speak to those who were alert enough to do so. We were told that many of the patients either do not have family or their family does not visit them, so even just a friendly face to see or a hand to hold gives them joy.
Emma has also volunteered at the kindergarten run by the church, supporting the teachers there and trying her best to help, despite the classes being filled with children who each speak a different mother tongue (depending on what state their families are from) as Kochi is a melting pot of people from all over India.
We also were invited by the woman we mentioned in our previous entry (the one who reminds us of our grandmothers) to take a train with her to a town two hours away called Changanassery, as she was visiting her daughter’s family for the day. We had nothing planned so it was easy to just say ‘yes’ and go along for the ride. We enjoyed meeting the family and getting to know her daughter and two grandchildren, and even though it was a long day, we reflected that we rarely had time for such spontaneity in our lives back home.
In our personal relationships with God, we have also loved having down-time to spend with Him, talk to one another, read the Bible and pray. Some days can be harder than others, feeling like we have nothing of substance to do. We can also feel inadequate at various times, not necessarily doing anything which would give us an outcome to show others. However, we cannot deny what God has put on our hearts and we feel the privilege of responding to Him for His sake alone.
Next steps
As time has gone on in Kochi, we were reminded that God said to us ‘Kerala’ and not just ‘Kochi’. Trivandrum (now known as Thiruvananthapuram) is the capital of Kerala and we had wondered about visiting. This wondering continued to grow as other people mentioned the city and we met one or two people from there. So we decided to head south to Trivandrum via Alleppey (now known as Allapuzha) and Varkala to see more of what ‘God’s Own Country’ has to offer, with the intention of coming back to Kochi after a few weeks.
