Last week Katie shared from her heart about finding Joy & Hope in India.  I was also with her on that trip last fall and her words of beauty and poverty stirred both memories and emotions in me as I reflected on our experience in that amazing land.

{Our first day in India.}

{Rajpur, India}

Recently I shared the experience of our trip during a lunch meeting and an older gentlemen, whom I sit with regularly, said, “What an amazing job you have, Jen!”

He’s right.

I do feel blessed to find no obvious lines between my heart work and my day job.  If you take nothing else from this story, hear this: the work you do matters. 

Every little bit of it.

And finding that place where your heart and your mind and your skills align can make the “work” of it glorious.  And that’s where I’ll start.  With a woman who also probably has trouble finding that line between heart work and day job.  Her name is Melody Murray and, like myself, her journey to India began in Siloam Springs, AR as a graduate of John Brown University.  You can read her story here.

{We took this after barely hopping on a little public transport bus to go “up the hill”}

It’s apparent Mel, founder of JOYN, has found that glorious alignment.  I met her here in the states, long before our paths crossed in India.  She was passionate about the work JOYN was doing and took every chance she had to talk about their approach to job creation and ultimately community building though manufacturing.  Once I traveled to India it became so clear that JOYN was about so much more than manufacturing.  The men and women who run this small company are legitimately changing lives.

They’re doing heart work.

Katie was right when she said they’re sharing hope and bringing joy.  And they’re talking about Jesus.  How there is freedom in Him.  How He made the lame to walk (they’re doing this, not miraculously, but in their own way) and fed the hungry (doing lots of this, too).

In the short three days we spent with Mel and her team, we had the privilege to meet with three organizations that are also her “suppliers” in the manufacturing process.  This was a perfect representation of how the heart and hand work was coming together to enable and equip the impoverished as well as create beautiful products.  The first group we were introduced to were the ladies of the Women’s Development Society.

{The women of The Women’s Development Society}

These women carefully stitch together fabric and leather and hardware to ultimately make a final masterpiece.  Many of these women represent single parent households and the work they do each day both supports their family and gives these women a sense of worth and empowerment in a male dominated society.

Our next stop took us to the very beginning of the manufacturing process, the KKM Leper Colony.

In all my world travels, this was a first for me.

I always thought of leprosy as this biblical thing.  No one talks about it in the states.  I would read passages in the Bible of the shunned and outcast and in my mind it was just a metaphor for those in our society who we treat as “less.”  But leprosy still exists, and it brutally ravishes the body.  Even now, people don’t want to look at this disease.  In this place, I didn’t find despair or anger or even self-pity.

I found beautiful people. 

And they were finding joy in the work of their hands (and feet).

I found a community of artisans, carrying on a tradition of weaving that most of the world is neither aware of nor finds valuable.  Mel has given this colony a steady income.  They wake up and weave each day, and smile, a lot.

Lastly, we found ourselves surrounded by children.

At the Streetsmart Outreach, with hungry kiddos all around, my heart broke.

There were so many.

I was happy they were getting a good meal and had the option of a clean, safe place to stay, but as I thought of my daughter, I would be lying if I didn’t admit to feelings of both guilt and thankfulness.  The longer we lingered there, learning about how they are not only feeding and sheltering these kids but also teaching them a trade and apprenticing them for the future, feelings of hope once again began to stir in me.  A child of the slums can become a master artisan.

{At the Streetsmart program kids can apprentice in the craft of woodblock printing.}

Hope.

I know I’m only echoing what Katie spoke so fluently about last week, but it’s there, and so tangible you can almost reach out, grab it up, and stick in in your pocket for later.  I think I did that a little on this trip.  I’ll find myself thinking back to those sweet smiles and kind gestures.  I know it’s easy to sit in my office in front of my two computer screens in a comfortable environment and write about hope.

I know.  But there there are days hope is far away for me too, and “anything” seems a little less than possible.

Albert Einstein once said, “There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

I believe in miracles.

If you think about it, hope is a miracle.

Especially hope in the midst of despair.  For me (and for my friends at JOYN) that hope is found in Christ.

Wherever you are today, may you find so much hope.  The kind that brings joy.  We’ll keep blurring the lines between heart work and day job to bring you the kind of products that mean so much more.

“In Christ alone my hope is found, He is my light, my strength, my song”

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