Sunday, January 20th

This weekend people from the Churches of Christ around North East India came here to the Baptist Compound in Guwahati to participate in a weekend retreat. Next week there will be a youth camp held here as well that we will also participate in. During this weekend I have sat in a room with an average of 40 people in which 6 Indian language groups were represented. It was encouraging that 7 distinctly different cultural groups could come together like that in the commonality of our Christian faith. India’s official language is Hindi and their second official language is English. From my limited experience so far it seems that more people speak English than Hindi which I find interesting. I am very thankful that I was born in Canada and that I speak English as my first language. English is used in so many places around the world and it has opened so many doors of opportunity for me. During the first devotional of the retreat I was very moved to be able to sing and worship in a common language with all of these people. I start to wonder why these people from different tribal backgrounds can look past their differences and see their brother and sister sitting across from them and more often than not we at home don’t even acknowledge that it is our brother or sister we are dealing with and simply focus on the differences between us.