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Lead on MacDuff!

Delhi - Hyderabad on Jet Airways could be worse. 2.5 hours in the air passed quickly in comparison to the waiting that preceded it.

Flying over India in the darkness is strange. All of the stars are in the wrong place - Orion's belt is orientated completely differently from here... it is sideways on! The moon is wrong too - it is waxing (or waning??) from bottom to top instead of side to side. Weird.

There are so many villages scattered across the landscape - flecks of light against the blackness. Couldn't help but wonder just how many of those lights have never heard the name of Jesus. So many people born and dying in the dark. The older words of a well known hymn have been going around in my head as I have been staring across the horizon:

Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
Does his successive journeys run;
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

The heathen lands, that lie beneath
The shades of overspreading death,
Revive at His first dawning light;
And deserts blossom at the sight.

I feel like a very small cog in a huge wheel. There is so much to be done here before the Lord returns.

Amy Wilson Carmichael was a missionary in India. She laboured for many years amongst pagan people, preaching Christ to them. I was moved by something she wrote during her time there:

"I could not go asleep. So I lay awake and looked; and I saw, as it seemed, this: that I stood on a grassy sward and at my feet a precipice broke sheer down into infinite space. Back I drew, dizzy at the depth. Then I saw people moving single file along the grass. They were making for the edge. There was a woman with a baby in her arms and another little child holding onto her dress. She was on the very verge. Then I saw that she was blind. She lifted her foot for the next step - it trod air. Oh, the cry as they went over!

Then I saw more streams of people from all parts. They were blind, stone-blind; all made straight for the precipice edge. There were shrieks as they suddenly knew themselves falling, and a tossing up of helpless arms, clutching at empty air. Then I saw that along the edge there were sentries set at intervals. But the intervals were far too great; they were wide, there were unguarded gaps between. And over these gaps the people fell in their blindness, quite unwarned, and the gulf yawned like the mouth of hell.

Then I saw, like a little picture of peace, a group of people under some trees, with their back to the gulf. They were making daisy-chains. There was another group. It was made up of people whose great desire was to get more sentries; but they found that very few wanted to go.

Once a girl stood alone in her place, waving the people back; but her mother and other relatives called, and reminded her that her furlough was due. Being tired and needing a change she had to go and rest for a while; but no one was sent to guard her gap, and over and over the people fell, like a waterfall of souls.

Once a child caught a tuft of grass that grew on the very brink of the gulf; it clung convulsively and it called, but nobody seemed to hear. Then the roots of grass gave way, and with a cry the child went over. And the girl who longed to be back in the gap thought she heard the little one cry and she sprang up and wanted to go, at which they reproved her; then they sang a hymn. Then through the hymn the pain of a million broken hearts rung out in one full drop, one sob. It was the Cry of Blood."

Emotive stuff, but a real picture of what is going on all around us. My being here is an attempt to stand in that gap. Like the man throwing back fish that had been washed up high onto the shore of a beach where he had been walking. There were hundreds and hundreds in that unfortunate shoal, and they were all dying on the shore. One passer-by laughed at what he was doing, pointing out that throwing ones and twos back into the water was a thankless task - it would make no difference to the hundreds that were dying. The man refused to look up, and continued throwing fish one by one into the surf. "Maybe", he said, "But it matters to this one, and this one, and this one..."

I'm not called to win a nation - but I want to do what I can.