From India

I have not posted in several days, because I left on Friday for Chennai, India, where we have our overseas office. This is my third time to Chennai, so I’m quite used to it, but I haven’t been during the rainy season. The streets are flooding, and it’s warm and humid. Which is so different than the rainless, hot, and humid days I’ve experienced in April when I’ve been here.

Anyway, my posts will be fewer for the next two weeks because of the fact that I’m working halfway around the world, and I'm working really long days. It is so interesting to be in the heart of the Hindu nation and to be working side by side with Hindus, Christians, and Muslims.

There are only two sights that are worth seeing here in Chennai, and one is quite interesting:

1. The Mylapore Temple - a beautiful painted temple with more than 10,000 Hindu statues on it.

2. The San Tome Cathedral - the cathedral in which the apostle Thomas (Doubting Thomas) was buried.

When Jesus sent the apostles forth to spread the Good News, Thomas was sent to India, and there is apparently a cave nearby where Thomas lived (I haven't seen it, and nobody has ever mentioned it except I read about it on a website once last year). Thomas was killed very near to the cathedral. His body was buried and marked by the Christian converts and when the cathedral was built, it was built over the place he was buried. His body has sense been moved to Rome.

Anyway, it’s amazing to be halfway around the world in a country that most people consider very non-Christian and to be in the same city where one of the twelve disciples was buried.

And it made me think of the doubt that we all sometimes experience. The times when we ask ourselves whether we truly believe in something real or if we just want it to be real so badly. I do believe in God and that Jesus was His son and the Messiah. But sometimes I find the logical part of my brain asking me tough questions to prove my beliefs. And that is difficult because faith is belief without proof.

India has actually given me a little bit of insight into this. When we send a project to our Chennai team, they often come back and say, "I have doubts." The first few times this happened, I worried that they meant they doubted whether they could do the project or not. Not true. What they meant was, "I have questions." But because of the way they are taught, they often substitute the word 'doubts' for 'questions.'

Doubts are perceived negatively, while questions are perceived as a positive part of our intellect. So perhaps when I worry about 'doubts' I have related to faith, maybe I ought to consider that 'questions' is a better way to look at the ideology and beliefs upon which my faith is founded.