You want me to describe India to you. You want me to tell you what it’s like. I can’t.

I could describe it with a thousand words. That wouldn’t be enough.

I could show you a hundred photos, but it wouldn’t do it justice. Words and photos only offer a tiny sliver, a slice that cannot show the whole.

India is a constant barrage on the senses. Light, color, smells, tastes, noise, beauty and ashes. India is a billion people. All different, and yet the same.

India is an ocean. I can tell you about the ocean, about how vast it is and of waves taller than a house. I can show you a picture of the expanse. But until you sit on a boat in the middle and see the water stretching from horizon to horizon… you cannot grasp it.

India is like that, except instead of a sea of water, it’s a sea of people—a sea of endless, painful, joyful lives.

If you have read the Gospels, you have a sense of what India is like.

In America, it’s almost impossible to imagine Jesus walking down our streets, sitting in our immaculate homes, and teaching in our malls. Our sins and our pain are disguised by our wealth.

In India, it is easy to picture Him. Healing that blind man. Showing compassion to these crowds. Speaking earnestly to those men. Talking about the beggars at that gate.

I can see the people Jesus would interact with; the blind, the lame, beggars, the rich, the poor.

It’s a strange feeling, like going back in time—except that in India, there are the screaming horns of rickshaws and taxis and I picture Jesus wearing jeans.

I’m glad I can see Jesus here. He’s the only one who can fix and reconcile the brokenness of the world.

I didn’t believe that before going to India. If you asked me, I would have said that I did. But I didn’t. Not in my heart.

I’m young. I haven’t seen enough brokenness. I’m an enthusiastic, middle-class, optimistic American. I can do anything. I can fix the world.

But then you take a ride across a city of millions, and pass the people asleep on the street with the dogs. You see the little beggar children raising their hands to your rickshaw window and the houses made entirely out of tarp. And you realize that this is just the fingertip of the poverty and brokenness in our world.

All the money and all the time in the world cannot fix a broken soul, much less a hundred million broken souls.

It’s only when I see the scale of the problem—the ocean, if you will—that I understand I would need a pretty big bucket to empty the muck from it. And I’m pretty sure the only one capable of making and using a bucket that big is God himself.

**This account comes from a college student who participated in a short-term media trip with Frontiers.**

Original article: FrontiersUSA.org/blog/article/india-is-an-ocean