Bihar, India

We created this blog to so that our family and friends could be praying for us as we head to Bihar, India March 13-21.  Here is a little bit about what God has been doing in our lives and how we ended up going to India...

During the Summer of 2010, God began to open our eyes to many new things.  We realized that we have not been living our lives in complete obedience to Jesus and His command to go and proclaim the Good News to all nations.  We honestly rarely thought about the lost in other countries and seldom thought about those who do not know Christ in our own community.  We were living a complacent form of Christianity that was self-serving and not pleasing to God.  God began to drastically change our hearts.  This began when we read Radical by David Platt.  Since reading that book, we have continued to dig deeper into God's Word as we have prayed to know Him more.  We also began to pray each day that God help us to love Him more than anything else and that He would show us how He wanted to use us.  We knew that we did not want to stand before Him one day and have nothing to show for our lives here on earth.  Works don't save us, it's the grace of God through the precious sacrifice of His son, Jesus Christ that removes our sins and allows us to be seen as righteous before a holy God.  But works should be the evidence of our faith.  Unfortunately, there was little evidence of that salvation in either of our lives. 

We then began reading the book Operation World.  This book is a guide to prayer for the nations.  Each day of the year a different country is outlined and specific needs and prayer requests are listed.  We, as a family, became so burdened for the lost around the world and for our brothers and sisters in Christ who are persecuted and often completely ignored, even by the church.  As God changed our hearts and the hearts of our children, our family developed a deep desire to share what we have with others.  We didn't want to just participate in an effort that would help people only physically.  We wanted to give our money to help spread the Gospel to reach people who have never heard the name Jesus, ever. We began to pray for God to show us how He wanted to use us.

In October, we were on the NC Baptist Missions website one night looking at some information on a missions conference.  We saw a video about a ministry in India founded by a man named Biju Thomas.  Biju has a passion for the people in the 44,000 villages of Bihar, India, the poorest state in India and one of the poorest on earth and one of the least reached with the Gospel.  God had called him to move away from his home in another part of India and minister to these people.  The biggest physical problem for the people of Bihar is that they have no clean drinking water.  More importantly, the 86 million people who live in Bihar have never had the opportunity to hear that they have hope in Jesus Christ.  Only .01 of the poplulation is Christian.  Biju started an organization called Tranformation India Movement(TIM) to help build wells in each village and to share the love of Christ, who offers us Living Water.  Through this organization, individuals, families, churches, etc, can adopt a village and provide a well, church planter, Bibles, literacy training, sewing training, care for orphans, etc.  Please click on the title at the top of this blog (Bihar, India) to see the video about the ministry or click here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGbyjgE1oqo

We immediately felt drawn to this ministry and decided to support TIM financially.  We were blessed to be able to adopt villages through TIM.  The person that we contacted about the villages mentioned that their organization takes trips to Bihar twice each year.  He asked us if we wanted to go....we were floored...we had been praying for months for God to show us where to go and it just happened while we weren't even looking for it...God is amazing.  We have been completely sold on this ministry from that point.  We turned in all of our paperwork right after Thanksgiving and we leave to go to Bihar on March 13th.

Just think...we could see people in India come to Christ because of this very small sacrifice of money and time and it all started with prayer for the nations!  We are discovering the joy of storing up treasure in heaven.  It is so much more rewarding & exciting than obtaining worldly possessions could ever be...and so liberating!  We hope to support this ministry further and we are excited to see where God will take us next.  Please pray for Biju Thomas and the people of Bihar, India and that they would reach the goal of reaching the 44,000+ villages in Bihar with the Gospel.

We would also appreciate it if you would pray for us.  Pray that lives will be changed in India and that our little ones will be safe in His arms here while we're gone.  We know that God is totally in control and cares for our children every day far better than we ever could, but it is still going to be tough for us to be literally on the other side of the world.  We will post specific prayer requests and our schedule for each day that we are there so that you will be able to keep up with what is going on while we are in India.  We are so thankful for each on of you!

Marianne and Jayson