Wow, where do I begin? Where do I pick up the story?

I’ll start in Philadelphia. I was sitting at a restaurant on Thursday with Tom, his brother Jacob and his sister Rachel, gearing up to hop on a plane in a few hours for India and Nepal.  About a quarter of the way through our meal, my phone started buzzing like crazy. We were having major web server issues, and the server was sending out alerts about once a minute.

Immediately, I started having conversations with two good friends and co-workers who were back at home managing the fort while I was gone. To be completely transparent, I went into a little bit of a panic mode. Well, maybe a lot of panic mode. They were doing the best they could back home, but every time they’d reboot the server, it would just go down again for no reason. 

Why? Why was this happening as I was about to board a plane for India? At a time where I was helpless to do anything?

And then it hit me harder that it has in awhile – I was under a spiritual attack. I had felt the weight of it going back to the previous night (and previous week for that matter) when we had similar issues, but instead of taking it to prayer, I did what we’re all prone to do – try and resolve it without God. 

So sitting in the restaurant, I signaled to Tom that we needed to pray. Now.

Tom and I prayed, and I sent out emails to a number of friends asking them to pray as well.  And wouldn’t you know it… the servers stopped crashing. In fact, they didn’t crash for the rest of the night, giving our team time to come up with resolutions. I got on my flight to India with total peace of mind that God had everything under control. The only frustrating thing was that I hadn’t asked him sooner.

So…

After 41 and a half hours of travel, and a very good night’s sleep, we find ourselves here in India. Because today was Sunday, it was a fairly low-key day. We visited two churches in Visakhapatnam, and got to see the city a little bit. To say India is a different world would be the understatement of the year. I mean there’s lots of familiar things about it – things I’m used to seeing in Peru (3x) and Serbia (2x) – things like crazy driving, friendly people, rolling mountains, old beat up buildings, etc. But there’s lots of things that are like nothing like I’ve ever seen before… the weird thing is that I can’t really put my finger on what it is. It’s just different.

Here’s the best way I can describe it: I feel like I’ve just entered something like The Matrix.

I’ve spent the entire day seeing things that are familiar, yet very unfamiliar. Something is extremely different. Tonight, as I get ready to go to bed, I think of Morpheus’ words to Neo just before he entered The Matrix:

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

In North American culture, it’s very easy to say “Thank you God for blessing me. I’ll take the blue pill, please and thank you.”

Tomorrow and for the rest of this trip, I’m going to take the red pill, stay in Wonderland and see how deep this rabbit hole goes. And in doing so, I will wholly put my faith in God that He has everything under control.

Keep us in your prayers.

Here are a few pics from today…