T-MINUS 25 and counting!!!

In approximately twenty-five hours, I will join three others from my Rotary Club - Dick Bergeron (president), Lawrence Furbish and Shawn Sullivan, at the location of our regular weekly meetings, and pack up the van to drive to Newark, New Jersey. Hopefully, several members of our Rotary Club and family and friends will be there to "Flag off our group" as they say in India. Each of us, along with all of the other members of our team from the US and Canada will plan to meet in Newark at the Continental Airlines ticket counter mid-afternoon tomorrow.
Over the past two weeks, I have been amazed and humbled by the outpouring of generosity exhibited not only by the members of the ROTARY DREAM TEAM - INDIA 2008, but also from family, friends and total strangers who have heard about our mission and have donated funds or gifts for children, and more. If one were to count up individual gifts, including pencils, pens, note pads, Frisbees, stuffed toys, solar calculators, tee-shirts, book bags, whistles, yo-yos, tiny plastic farm animals and dinosaurs, stickers with smiley faces, stickers with lobsters, pins with lobsters and pine trees and blueberries and apples, and so many more too numerous to list, we would have a total nearing 20,000!!! Once in India, members of the team will gather all of the gifts and sort through them to separate gifts for the little ones, gifts for teenagers, gifts for the women of the village, and make up packets to be distributed later on. I think each of us is taking one suitcase filled with nothing more than gifts!

This morning, I opened an Email from a dear friend, which was entitled, Where He wants me to be. It was a slide show set to the music by ENYA (one of my favorite singing artists) and was very moving. It brought back memories of a previous trip to India, when I was there for six weeks. After the third week, I found I was a bit lonely and began questioning whether or not this was where I was "supposed" to be. I paused a moment or two and prayed that somehow God would show me some kind of sign that I was, in fact, where I was supposed to be right then. A short while later, I arrived at a Rotary district-wide cricket match. As I stepped from the car, and began walking on the grass, a white butterfly with sort of a purplish-blue edge to its wings flew up from the grass and circled my head three times. I looked up and it was gone, but I simply said, "Thanks!" If there is such a thing as coincidence, and I do not think there is, the fact that a friend shared the particular Email with me this morning, reinforces that where I am going and where all of my teammates are going is WHERE HE WANTS US TO GO. There is absollutely no question in my mind that as Rotarians, we ARE doing God's work throughout the world - that one step at a time, and one hand-shake ar a time, and one smile at a time, we WILL achieve better understanding person to person, thereby making the possibility of achieving world peace stronger.