Beautiful Things.

Three weeks ago, Adam and I sat around the living room at Love in Action, a children's home in Bangalore, India. We sipped chai tea and teared up as Enoch told us the background stories of the children who live at this home. Many came from broken families. Some lost their parents after their conversion to Christianity. Others were sent to Love in Action from impoverished villages that lacked any educational opportunities. Three siblings arrived after fleeing from an extremely violent home that led to their mother's suicide.

As we listened, it was hard not to think, "God, where are You?"

We were soon interrupted with giggles and shouts as the children arrived home from school. We met them outside and played all sorts of games in their dusty front yard.  They laughed as we bumbled our way through their fancy version of Duck, Duck, Goose. They let Sara win at Steal the Bacon. They repeatedly requested, "Uncle Adam! Teach us one more game!"

That night at devotions, we sat around that same living room and these thirteen beautiful children sang with sweet, loud, confident voices that You Make Beautiful Things Out of Dust.

And in that moment, it was impossible not to think, "God, you are here."

And it's funny because we thought that we were taking a 22-hour plane trip to see our friends in India and teach them the Big God story when instead, we went all that way to learn it a little better ourselves.

We're back!

Hi friends!

We are excited to share some photos with you from our wonderful trip. Please excuse the length of the video--neither of us are exactly known for brevity. :)

Due to technical issues, we recommend you watch the video in "small player" and not in full screen as it gets quite grainy.

We will be sharing more thoughts with you soon but wanted to start with this.

Enjoy!

Thankful hearts.

We can't believe we leave this week!* Wow! We are rolling all of our clothes tightly, making very long lists and praying that our shoes can squish down just a tiny bit more so our suitcases latch! (One of us probably needs more prayers in this department and we'll let you guess who!) The countdown is on!

We owe a big THANK YOU to all who have supported us through prayer, generous donations, and encouraging words. Thank you for sharing life with us, for caring enough to ask questions, for loving us and others well. We feel so very blessed to be a part of such a giving community.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Due to your generosity, we were able to purchase some of the school supplies for the children but plan to purchase the majority of the supplies needed upon our arrival in Bangalore. Please pray that our bags of resources get through the airport underweight and unscathed.

Also, we are excited about some new details regarding our trip. Our friend and interim missions pastor Don will also be in Bangalore hosting a conference for his house church ministry. We look forward to spending a day with Don and seeing yet another way God is working in Bangalore.

We also confirmed a two-day stay in London on our way back home. We are strategically planning those precious 48 hours and are so thankful for the hospitality of our host family. Thank you for being so gracious!

This will likely be our last post until we return. Please be sure to check back in a few weeks for photos and updates from our trip!

Love,

Adam and Sara

*In case you are curious, we have 22 hours of flying in store for us Saturday. That's right. 22 hours in the air. Pray for Sara. Well, on second thought, pray for Adam.

Who would have guessed?

For those of you that know Adam and/or Sara well, we are a rather unlikely pair to be jet-setting across the globe. Until we were dating, Adam had never been on a plane, and as Fred likes to report, Adam went all the way to India to dip his toes in an ocean. :) 

As for me (Sara), I am not exactly known as "laid back" so traveling presents all sorts of challenges for my Type-A planner nature, and while I have no doubt that I will easily and immediately fall in love with the girls and the Anthony family, some of the other aspects of traveling (flights, time changes, different food, etc.) can leave me a bit anxious.

...And did I mention that neither of us have a good sense of direction?

It can be hard sometimes to explain to people why we are making this trip.  And people understandably want to know. After all, taking a trip like this isn't exactly on everyone's life to-do list!

For me (Sara), it can be hard to articulate why we are going partly because I want to be careful to explain why we are not going.  That is, we are not going to change the world or because we think that in two weeks we can take on a social issue in another country and solve it or because we hold some sort of ultimate answer. We are just two twenty-somethings from Kansas. What do we know?

We are also not going to (to put it bluntly) throw money at something and walk away patting each other on the back, not knowing whether or not it actually helped anyone.

I hope you will forgive my frankness, but it is really an important distinction for both of us to make and quite honestly, it is extremely easy to fall into these thought processes.

With a typical Robertson preface out of the way :) here is my best attempt at why we are going and why we are so very excited to step on that plane in a few weeks:

Basically, for us, it all comes back to relationships.

We are building on relationships Adam began in 2009 when he first visited Love in Action. We are supporting the work of the Anthony family and the beautiful girls that join their home. We are encouraging them in their daily ministry to their family, to their neighborhood, to their city, to their world. We believe in what they are doing--loving each other, fighting for justice, bringing Hope into dark places--and we believe that they are doing it well.

We willingly support their work financially because we believe that to those who have been given much, much is expected. We believe that we are a global family and we are excited to share our resources with them just as our generous community has shared resources with us.

For us, this trip is about saying yes to something that we don't fully understand. We are saying yes to the homemade stenciled invitation we received on pink construction paper last fall addressed to Auntie Sara and Uncle Adam that now hangs in our kitchen. We are saying yes to the call God has placed on us and our marriage from the very start. We are saying yes to something challenging, something stretching, something we expect will cause growth, something that has already caused growth.

Thank you for joining our journey.

How India stole Adam's heart.

As we mentioned before, Adam spent about six weeks back in 2009 interning at Love in Action.

Adam was a first-year teacher and decided back in December to begin planning his summer. He got in touch with Fred from Heartland International Ministries, who is connected with Love in Action in Bangalore.  Before he knew it, his bags were packed and his journey had begun!

Here are a few of his thoughts from that trip taken from various journal entries:

"...I have not been the same since my visit to India. I had the privilege of staying at an orphanage filled to capacity with about twenty children. It is a very humble space in the outskirts of Bangalore, about the size of a typical two-story house in America... but without the luxuries. Yet, I can say with confidence, that the children there have a wealth unmatched in the prosperous homes of America. They possess true freedom through discipline, daily prayer, regular labor, and most importantly, loving fellowship. The name of the orphanage—Love in Action—describes the place as precisely as words are able..." 

"...The family that started this ministry and who welcomed me into their home (which is the orphanage itself), is truly one of the most loving groups of people I have met. Please allow me to take a moment to introduce them: 


Enoch, the patriarch I suppose, is an elderly and vibrant man who is full of wisdom and humility, someone I already deeply respect. His wife Carunia, who I called Auntie, is a frail woman in her frame, but her strength as a mother and wife over the years is astonishing. And finally, their daughter Nancy, who displays such tenderness to all twenty children—she is the essence of motherhood..." 

"...Shortly after I arrived, I had the opportunity to celebrate Father’s Day with the children. I felt a little awkward honestly… Father’s Day in an orphanage… I did not know what to expect. After breakfast, the children announced that they would be hosting an event that evening and would like for us to attend… upstairs. Of course we went, arriving upstairs at the specified time. The children put together an elaborate performance of song and traditional dance, praising their Heavenly Father. At the end, the children also honored Enoch for providing for them and protecting them. I cried the entire time. I kept remembering all the verses I have read about justice—many of which are related to orphans—and felt as though all my recent clumsy efforts to grasp a Biblical vision for social justice were radically challenged by the simplicity and humility of love in action..." 

"...I do not dance. Most people who know me at least know that. Unfortunately, the little girls at Love in Action did not know this about me when I suggested that we celebrate one of our last evenings together. They innocently insisted that I join them on the roof-top where they intended to teach me some traditional Indian dancing. I explained that my body is not capable of such things... that someone might get hurt... that dancing is not Christian... that no human should ever be so undignified. 

Thankfully, it was late enough at night that there was very little light shed on my complete loss of dignity. I could not turn down twenty orphan girls. It was humiliating, it was ugly, and it was dangerous for those who got too close. The girls were overtaken by laughter as they watched me hop and stumble and bow and twirl and kick and... I don't know what I was doing. We all stopped to catch our breath after each song--the girls were laughing too hard, I was simply out of shape. 

But ultimately, I believe this experience was one of the more beautiful of my many lovely experiences in India. The beauty was in forgetting myself; it was a rare moment when I was totally free from my pride. That night we celebrated God: the One who saves us from evil, hunger, poverty, and ourselves..." 

Current needs at Love in Action:

As we mentioned in our first post, we will be spending most of our time at Love in Action, a Christian ministry that offers a safe and loving home for about twenty children in Bangalore.

This is a journal entry from Adam's experience at Love in Action in 2009:

"I spent one afternoon listening to all the girls' stories... how they got to Love in Action and what their lives were like before they came. They were rescued from all the terrible things that come upon impoverished children in India. Some of them had already seen too much tragedy. Most of them had to be broken of the habit of eating food out of the dirt in the streets... something they had done for survival in the past. But as Nancy was concluding our conversation, the children were coming home from school. Streaming in through the door, singing, laughing... greeting us with such beautiful smiles. I began to cry... the weight of it was too much. This place, this home is a beacon of God's goodness."

We are both so excited to spend time with such a loving family and know that we will treasure the days we spend in their home.

Love in Action is sustained through the generosity of churches and communities around the world, and we feel privileged to participate in the beautiful work this family is doing in Bangalore.

If you too would like to participate in Love in Action's ministry, here is a list of some of their current needs and the approximate price breakdown in U.S. dollars. We would love to meet all of these needs when we visit in six weeks:

• Chorus books and hymnals
• School supplies such as bags, stationery and shoes
• Cooking dishes for the children's kitchen

We could purchase all of these things for about $600. We would also like to contribute to some of their ongoing needs such as food for the children and vehicle maintenance.  

The plan is to purchase these things in Bangalore in order to support the local economy...and also because Sara doesn't exactly understand how to "pack light." :) 

To support our friends at Love in Action and our trip this summer, donate online through Heartland International Ministries' website. Click the "Donate" button under "General Monetary Donation" and make a tax-deductible donation via PayPal. Please be sure to read the following instructions to ensure your donation is credited to our project: When reviewing your donation, on the second page of PayPal, please click the blue link that says "Add special instructions for the recipient" and then type "Robertson-LIA India Project" in the message line. Then complete your donation as indicated.

You can also donate by sending a check to Heartland International Ministries, P.O. Box 23, Shawnee Mission, KS, 66201, and write "Robertson-LIA India Project" in the memo line.

Thank you for your support!

Welcome friends!

This is a blog about a trip we will take to Bangalore, India in June 2012.

Three years ago, Adam spent about six weeks interning at Love in Action, a Christian ministry that offers a safe and loving home for about twenty children in Bangalore.

Adam and Sara were dating at the time, and Sara could not believe it when Adam returned home from India with an engagement ring in his pocket!

After two years of marriage, we are excited to travel to Bangalore this summer and serve alongside each other. We've been planning for this trip for a long time and we can't wait to share more with you about the friends we will visit and what we will be doing.

We started this blog so that you could join our journey. We are incredibly thankful for the amazing community we have in our lives and we look forward to sharing this experience with you.

Thanks for stopping by! 

The sweet children from Love in Action from Adam's trip in 2009.