Standing Still

-->

As you already know, I’m planning my third trip to India this summer. The country of India first stole my heart almost five years ago when I stayed there on my study abroad trip. The poverty I saw was staggering and left me wanting more for the people I saw, especially the kids.

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t fallen in love with a country so far away, but I left a big piece of myself in India and I constantly feel a yearning to go back. These words are from my journal during my second trip: “India is incredibly alive. It’s shiny and grimy, happy and heart-shatteringly sad. I love it. It’s so incredibly overwhelming and I want to embrace it and keep it inside of me. I want to inhale and never exhale.”

So, while working two jobs, both at non-profits, hasn’t left me with a lot of extra money to spend traveling half way across the world, I am going to India in June. This trip is to help and teach, but also to research the culture of caring for India’s abandoned children with the long-term hope of living there and doing more. I’ll be working with kids in a few different orphanages and schools, staying with a local couple and learning as much as I can.

Will you help me get there? What I need most are your thoughts and prayers. No matter what or who you personally believe in, India has been incredibly influential to me, these are the words of my spiritual journey that began and continued in India: “I find a peace here that I fail to find anywhere else. This is where I first found God and I feel Him so strongly here. He is everywhere and I feel like I get to walk with Him and work with Him all the time. I’m not sure why I can feel so still here, but it’s like the rest of the time I am in the hurricane, whirling around, out of control and trying to stop. But here I can stop, breathe, feel. I am maybe still a little dizzy, but that’s ok, I am standing still and God is standing still with me. He is holding my hand and He has led me here.”

Second, keep reading this blog! I'll be posting now through my trip in June.

Finally, if you wish, consider contributing financially to my trip. It’s hard for me to ask for money, but I can’t do this alone. There are two ways to donate:

First, directly to my trip fund, but only through April 1^st: Trip fundraising.

Second, help pay for my plane ticket, through May 10^th: Ticket fundraising.

(You can also send or give me a check, that way we avoid the online fees: 919 27^th Ave SE Minneapolis, MN 55414).

I sincerely thank you for any help you can give, in the form of thoughts, prayers, reading or giving. Thank you for being a part of my journey so far.

Love the Unloved

I'm starting this blog a few months before I journey to India for the third time. I want a place to share my fears and worries about this crazy 2-week trip to a foreign country a month before I get married, but I also want a place for inspiration to happen. I wrote this sentence while I was in India the first time and it still inspires me today: "...for all these children and people suffering in the streets, there has to be something more."

The idea that there is more for the poor of India led me back to volunteer in 2011 and will bring me once again to India this year. When I was in India in 2011, I became fascinated with Mother Teresa. She is an icon, an amazing woman and an inspiration to thousands, or perhaps millions. Her legacy lives on in the many charities the Sisters of Charity run in Kolkata, India and other cities around the world. As I continue to read more about her, skim through some of her books and google search "mother teresa quotes" again and again, the same theme keeps popping up: love those who are unloved.

There are opportunities to love those around us every day. So for this first blog, I want to encourage you to check out this TED talk I discovered a few weeks ago: Everyday Leadership. We have the opportunity to create something more for the people around us every day. We can make people feel loved by the most simple, forgettable actions. So, to end on a quote from Mother Teresa "...we can do small things with great love."