Life Changing Words Ministry
President's Journal
12 Dec 2006 – Home
This is my last entry in my India Adventure journal; the first entry made available electronically; and the only entry made solely electronically.
When last I wrote, it was just before church on Sunday morning. So, I went downstairs, packed bags in tow. As I entered, the people sleeping in the gathering room were just finishing getting up and cleaning up their "bedding". I got tea and a piece of cake for breakfast. Service was supposed to start at 8:00 am, but I'm not sure anyone else knew this. :-) It finally got started between 8:15 and 8:30, though most of the congregation didn't start showing up until after 8:45. After praise-and-worship and testimony time, the 3 LCWM-ers were honored / presented with gifts: Bill and I got shirts; Georgene, flowers; and I was also given two sets of Indian-style metal flatware, so I can eat Indian-style when I desire (with an extra set, "just in case" I am not eating alone). The service ended at 10:15, pretty close to the 10:00 goal we'd set, given I.S.T. And we did, in fact, finish loading the car and leave the premises at 11 (IST, anyway), and made it to the bus station early enough that Georgene and I were both happy / comfortable with the timing. :-) The bus journey back to Mulund was reasonably uneventful, except for seeing the aftermath of a really bad car accident on the side of the road.
"Back at the ranch", or the Mulund IPH in this case, I reorganized my suitcases, so everything fit reasonably, and I wouldn't have liquid or toenail clippers in my carry-on. I didn't think that I'd bought that much, but my three bags were just as stuffed as my two bags originally were. Either I was a better packer the first time around, or I bought a larger volume of souveniers than I thought. :-) (Hmm... in typing, I'm much more lilely to use a smiley of some sort than I am in handwriting, though I think I put a couple of smiles in the handwritten.) After packing, I tried to take a nap, but I wasn't sleepy, and didn't want to "waste my last few hours in India". Went upstairs (for the first time), chatted with Georgene and the Joseph family. Got to watch them make the "pizza" (using chili catsup, and all those wonderfully flavorful veggies that my stomach loves so much), which was our dinner for the evening. I gave Georgene my induction-coil flashlight and my spare rupees – in exchange, I got some more coins for Edd. Even trade, right? ;-)
We took B+G back to the Powars' house, and I said goodbye. Sundar and Paul then took me for the whirlwind night tour of Mumbai – I got to see the Gateway of India, as well as some of the waterfront (so now I've seen the Arabian Sea). Coming out of the Gateway of India, the car developed a flat. Paul flagged down a taxi, and took the flat to be repaired (tyre repair shop open at midnight! Definitely not in America!) After that detour, we directed ourselves to the international airport, and I was dropped off. Paul helped me fight off the porter who wanted to push my luggage cart for me, and I found my way (eventually) to the check-in counter. (There's a distinct lack of signs near the entrance.) Got myself checked in, and baggage checked through (to PDX, I thought). Snag at customs, since I didn't have my "departure form", but I just grabbed one from the Air India counter and made it through on my second attempt, no problem. (G had told me to get one, but I forgot... a lot had happened since we'd talked Sun afternoon. Besides, I'd been up for 20hrs already by that time, so wasn't in the best mental condition.) Transferring int'l planes in Delhi wasn't too bad: a lot of redundant ID and security checks – two passport checks in the physical distance of about 20ft spacing, by the same checker, while getting from the disembarking from the MUM-DEL flight and getting to the DEL-FRA-LAX flight: like I said, redundancy. Plus, in getting into the gate waiting area at DEL, the inspecting agent/officer did the false beep on the metal detector wand to worry me, and asked all sorts of irrelevant questions, which quickly got annoying. But I made it through. In the Frankfurt deplane/replane, we were sent to a ground-floor waiting room... and I was standing next to a door outside when an airport employee came through, so I've had "un-processed" German air, and been inches from being "outside" in Germany. So close, and yet so far away. The flights themselves were pretty good: the DEL-FRA leg was about 6 hrs, during which I slept around 3; the FRA-LAX was 11hrs (fighting the jet stream / primary high-altitude wind direction this time) – and I slept 5-6 of it! I was surprised at how much easier the sleep was this time – of course, I was rather more tired, given the 22+ hours I was awake before beginning the flight. Doing the time-zone math, I think it was about 34 hours from the time I entered MUM airport to the time I was out of the terminal at PDX; and, I saw both midnight ends of Dec 11th, from start in Mumbai to end in Aloha, making Dec 11 thirty-seven-and-a-half hours long for me! Bus departure from Pune on Sunday to final touchdown at PDX made for almost exactly 48 hours of focus-on-travel!
Dad + PJ met me at PDX and drove me home – getting there just before midnight. I took a quick shower – it was so nice having the water flowing over me as I cleaned off the dirt of 48hours of travel. Then I climbed into bed, got a solid 7 hours of sleep; had a quick breakfast and unpacked, and put in my first load of laundry, then got back into bed "just for an hour or two" – and woke up another 7 hours later. :-) It's going to take time for me to get back into the Pacific timezone, I can tell. Spent the afternoon & evening deleting spam and reading incoming emails, and sending out brief "I'm back" e-mails. And finishing it with this entry.
Oh, right, I almost forgot to mention the "fun" at LAX. So, as we landed in LA, we were "reminded" (or told for the first time, in my case) that all luggage, no matter how far thru it was checked, would be on the baggage carousel and needed to be picked up and manually moved through customs, at which point we could "easily" check it back in for our remaining domestic flights. First, had to make it through immigration, where I was "lucky" enough to get asked some of the safety questions (had I heard of such-and-such an address [no], and had I had any trouble with the law [again, no]) – so it took me a little longer to make it through than the people nearby, but it was only a minute or so longer. Then, onto baggage claim: I had my Delhi-bought duffel as my carry on, and my two harder suitcases as my two checked bags. My larger checked bag was one of the first dozen pieces of luggage off the plane, which I thought meant I'd have a really quick time down there. I then spent the next 45 minutes waiting for the smaller bag, which never came. An Air India rep was in the claim area, and said that she'd take the group of us who had missing bags to the right place to fill out the missing-bag form – took us out thru customs, which was a 30sec hand-in-the-form, then continued following the rep into the exit tunnel... where an LAX rep (maybe security, not sure) asked me if I had missing bags, to which I said "yes", so he pulled me aside saying that right there was where I was supposed to be; I didn't think that was right, since the AI rep had mentioned something about "upstairs, because the agent doesn't come downstairs anymore", but by the time I'd had my quick conversation with the LAX guy, the AI rep had disappeared, so I didn't have much choice anymore. So there I waited (with a few others that he'd directed there) for 45 minutes! At which point, someone discovered that we'd have to go upstairs, so that's where we headed. By the time we got to the counter upstairs (which turned out to be the main AI counter, where I'd started in LAX 3 weeks earlier), no one was there. Five minutes before an agent found us, and another 15 to get the lost-baggage form to us, and filled out. So, presumably, my bag will be delivered to me sometime after Wed (since the next India-to-LAX flight isn't until Wed, and it will take time to get it from LAX to my Portland suburb) – assuming they can find the bag. So, by the time all this was over, I asked the AI agent what the best course of action was: take my remaining checked bag back downstairs for the inter-flight re-check, then ride the shuttle to United's domestic terminal (#7, on the other end of the airport from the Int'l terminal). He said no, it would be better for me to just take my baggage all the way there myself. So I got to walk the full length of LAX again... joy. At the United check-in, I had more struggles (they only had the auto check-in booths, that I could see, and the instructions on the screen were ... lacking): When I tried to scan my passport, I knocked the scanner (with passport) INTO the counter; they had to call an agent from somewhere, to try to find a way into the counter to get it out. Eventually, they opened up enough of a passage from the agent-side of the counter that I could get my arm down in from the passenger side and grab my passport. After more struggle, while waiting for the agent to get into the counter, I got my remaining checked bag re-checked: More struggle, because the self-check-in kiosks weren't setup for re-checking-in after going through int'l, so assumed that since I'd checked in the bags earlier on the journey, I didn't need any checked in now... and when I said I hadn't checked in bags, it just finished the whole checkin procedure without ever calling an agent over to get me a boarding pass. When the agent came to open the counter, everything finally got sorted out, and I got my bag checked and my pass... On through security, where my power-adapted in my carryon (why hadn't I moved that out earlier!) got me chosen for a full bag inspection. Then on to the gate, where I arrived just a couple minutes before boarding began.... Instead of having a couple of relaxing hours between flights sitting at the gate, I got to stand the entire time, going through struggles. On the other hand, when I got on the last flight, I discovered that I was in the "plus" seating, which meant an extra couple inches of legroom.
And that, my friend, ends my description of my trip. (Well, excepting going back and transcribing the pages of handwritten journal.) This last entry took me longer than I expected, and kept me up until almost midnight again, which is generally late for me ... but since I slept until 4pm, means that I'm not as bad off as I'd normally be at midnight. Then again, I am definitely still tired, so I'm hoping that I'll fall asleep easy tonight, too.
It's been quite the experience.
Until next time,
— PeterCJ
PS: 16 Dec 2006 – 4am, home
I lied. I'm not done with the journal yet, I guess. Partly because the story isn't over, and partly because some of the attitude I expressed publically in my previous "last entry".
So, 4am isn't exactly when I normally would journal like this... However, I don't think God will let me sleep until I get some of this down (and maybe not even after). I woke up from the strangest dream/vision/mental twistedness within the last hour. Time and space and my mind were all twisted up, strange vortecies, luggage twisting around itself, and my thoughts pretzeling around themselves. Like I said, strange. I don't know whether it was "just" from God, or "just" from the strange combo of medicines I've been taking recently while trying to force my body back into adjustment and the strange sleep habits I've had this week, or something of both the natural and supernatural source. But the end result, I feel like I've done a Jacobian wrestling with God. And as the Patriarch found, I really don't think I "won", though I might be better off for the losing. :-)
Something Georgene's mentioned a few times, both in the States and while I was in India, is that as Christians, we need to be able to let go of "things" much more easily than Americans generally do. She took her two bags-attacked-by-rats as opportunities of further letting go of her worldly possessions. I think, after tonight, that that's how I need to take my missing bag. There really wasn't much important in it – the souvenier gifts that I cared most about (ie, the ones that I bought for other people that I'd put the most effort and care into finding, rather than just the random things that "might be nice for someone") were in the luggage that made it, I had just "happened" to move my PDA from the now-missing bag to my duffel bag when repacking on Sunday before I left, and virtually all that remained was dirty socks and a couple pairs of pants and my shave-and-cleaning-kit. So, I don't know whether I'll ever get that bag left or not, but God, I'm asking that this will be a "letting go" time for me, whether or not I do get it back.
Especially because, I think that was a major part of this whole trip. I had to let go of my own Western-centric mindset to even allow God to convince me to go on this trip. I had to let go of a lot of conveniences that I normally cling to (and used as excuses for not going on a short-term mission with the church any earlier in my life). And I've had to let go of a lot of "my time": using vacation time for doing what I know He wanted me to do, rather than just for my relaxation; I was forced, due to the lack of my own entertainment center, computers, and library, to spend idle time in prayer and contemplation, rather than in distractions that I normally use; and while there, and since being home, I haven't been able to sleep on my schedule—which might be one of the biggest ones in my life: I've lived a lot more of my life under Benjamin Franklin's "early to bed, early to rise" proverb, rather under the Biblical proverb of "a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest... and poverty shall come upon you like a thief". When I've had trouble sleeping, in the past, and even in the past week, I've usually just gotten upset that I didn't get my 7-8 hours of "needed sleep", and end up grumbling through the rest of that night and the next day about my lack of sleep – sometimes complaining to people at work whose sleep is disturbed on a much more regular basis by kids or significant health issues, but they don't complain nearly as much about it as I do. And, I've noticed that when other LCWM board members and church-friends mention sleepless nights, they have usually used the time for prayer, which is probably a bit more productive than the complaining that I participate in. And, though I haven't noticed a literal poverty yet, I've noticed that my "tired days" at work are no less frequent after restful-sleep nights than after restless nights, so if the occasional loss of sleep isn't hurting me, and prayer during those sleepless nights would probably help a lot more than frustration, I think I need to adjust my attitude.
God, I have a feeling it will take a little longer than just tonight for all of this to settle in, and for me to put into practice these "letting go" lessons that you've been teaching me, but I pray that this is at least a starting point for me. Help me to let go of the anger over these recent inconveniences: the loss of sleep and the missing bag. Help me to understand and behave as if I believe that, compared to what the people in India experience their whole life, my "inconveniences" are insignificant. God, forgive my complaining spirit.
To any whom I offended or off-put by my complaining spirit in my Dec 12th entry, and especially to any onto whom my complaining spirit may have spread as a result: I ask your forgiveness.