The garbage was piling up, and there was no bin to roll out to the curb. In fact, I couldn’t have told you where the nearest curb was.

We were visiting the Sharma family, and I had offered to help Daha make a garbage run. Plastic bags are banned in this part of India, so the Sharmas collect their garbage in discarded sand and cement bags.

Dusk was falling as Daha and I began carrying the bags up the path through an apple orchard to the single road that goes through the village. The garbage collection site at the far end of the village was only about a kilometer away, and I expected we would easily make it back home before dark. Little did I understand the dynamics of walking through a village in India.

Soon after reaching the road, we stopped at a small shop. Daha greeted the owners and introduced me. Then he spent about 15 minutes chatting in Hindi with them while I examined their meager wares. We then proceeded two or three shops up the road and repeated the introductions and conversation with those shopkeepers and several other customers. Along the street, almost everyone greeted Daha, and he stopped to talk with each one. After dropping off the garbage, we stopped beside a little tent where three itinerant blacksmiths were cooking their evening dahl over their charcoal forge. As we walked back home in the dark, we stopped at a couple more shops, and then Daha took me to a pharmacy to introduce me to another friend.

As we returned home with the help of our flashlights about an hour and a half after leaving, I reflected on the real significance of our garbage trip. Building friendships is the first step in bringing people to Jesus. As Christ’s disciples, this is part of our calling. How do you build friendships? Maybe you need to rethink how you take out the garbage.

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