Namaste again,

Things are going well here at the Mission India campus. Carie and I are healthy and in case the story about the 50 degree heat wave worried you, fear not, our air conditioners work nicely, ha. In fact, I wake up in the middle of the night almost every night freezing! Our room temperature with the air conditioner is 25 Celsius which is about 78 degrees F. That is normally hot to me, but thats really cold to me at night.

I ended the last blog with a request that you pray for the Christians of India as they face so much persecution from the Hindus all around them. I want to add one more request to that. In the second most populated country in the world, its overwhelming to think of the number of people that do not know Christ and are trapped in a false religion. There is no question that they deserve to have the love and grace of Jesus Christ just as much as we do. Eight hundred million people in this country serve false Hindu gods and goddesses! Another 120 million are Muslim (more Muslims than any other country in the world)! Changing all the people's hearts is an impossible task. But if I (if we) could just believe what the Word says... "what is impossible with man, is possible with God"... amazing things would happen. So pray for those who are following the lies that satan is feeding them, that they would know the ONE TRUE GOD. Not just in India though. I want to believe that the missions that feel impossible in the U.S. are possible with God, too. Its difficult to say which is harder to fight... Hinduism or nominal Christianity. So let's all pray that God will amaze us with his power and use us wherever he sends us or wherever we are to do things that we never thought were possible.

Saturday, May 19th was the graduation for the summer session students. The summer session was a month-long program for anyone who wanted to participate. The actual college session starts in the beginning of June. But, the graduation was very nice. Carie and I were given seats of honor with some of the faculty up near the front. After a time of worship and a message from the Word the certificates were given out and the faculty prayed over the students that wherever they go, they would take the knowledge of Christ they had attained to represent Him to the people of the world. After the graduation we had a great time hanging out with the students before they would have to leave the next day.

Sunday, May 20th, Carie and I were asked to sing an English song for the church and we hesitated at first, cause... uh... we can't sing. And I actually told Bansal I did not want to because we were not good singers and he said, "None of us are good singers, its for glory to God." Ouch. We accepted and sang "Firm Foundation". What a lesson in humility though. All the students left after church. I will miss them. A few of them will come back to visit before Carie and I leave, but most we will not see again until that day in Heaven when we will have the AMAZING blessing of seeing all our brothers and sisters that we have had so say goodbye to. That'll be nice. What an understatement!

Monday, May 21st I met a Hindu priest... sort of. Let me just say that meeting a Hindu priest is very odd to me, but this was even stranger. The summer session of classes is over and we are waiting til June 1st for the regular college students to begin arriving (until then Carie and I are just working in the Library in the morning and afternoon, then in the Mercy Home in the evening). So, with the session over, this Hindu priest shows up at the campus and says he wants to enroll... here... at the Mission India Theologcial Seminary. What!? This guy is a Hindu priest, but he claims to have come to know Jesus THROUGH THE HINDU SCRIPTURES. He says that since he came to know this Christ-figure he has continued to live as a Hindu priest and has been pointing Hindus to the Savior. He is not a Christian yet but through his own scriptures he has come to believe in Jesus who he believes to be a Savior of some kind and he wants to enroll here to learn more about the Christian teachings about this Savior. How crazy is that? How could he come to believe in Jesus and want to know more about Him just from reading the Hindu scriptures? Another guy who works in the library with us said that he saw a book in the library a few weeks ago about things in the Hindu scriptures that might be considered allusions to Christ. However it happened that's amazing. Our God is so powerful that He can use the scriptures of the false gods to draw people to Himself... how amazing! Anyway, he stayed the night here and ate with us but had to leave until the new session begins. So I guess we'll see him again in June. I cannot wait to see what God is doing in his heart and his life.

Tuesday, May 22nd, was Samuel's birthday. Samuel is a guy that works in the library here at the Mission India campus. So, he came into the library that day with some candy for everyone. I like this custom, ha. That night we had a special treat... Carie and I got to go to an Indian wedding. It was quite exciting. The ceremony itself was quite American-ized except that everyone in the audience was in traditional Indian clothes and the bride was actually wearing a white sari instead of a white wedding dress. The reception, though, was quite unusual. There were probably 500 people in the church during the ceremony and 1500 people at the reception. There was music and lots of food. Getting the food was quite an interesting experience. There is a line, but you don't really wait in it. You just kinda shove your way through and squeeze up to the food and get all you can as fast as you can. It could be described either as stressful or fun, whichever way you want to look at it. It was outside, too, in the middle of the city of Nagpur (4 million in that city) so it was quite hot. Fortunately it was at night so it had probably dropped down to about 105 degrees. If you wanted a drink at this reception you would go over to a water table where there were about 10 metal cups... that all 1500 people were sharing, ha. And for those of you that know what gulab jamun is, you'll understand my excitement when I say that we finally got some... yes! It was so good! In case you do not know what it is, it is an Indian dessert that's kinda like little pancake balls soaked in this delicious syrup stuff. Wes Gunn thinks they taste like Church's Honeybutter biscuits. Anyway, they are good, I know that.

Wednesday, May 23rd was an interesting day. The power went out early in the day around 11am and stayed off until 415pm, so it was HOT during that time. Also, we were unable to enter books in the computer in the library. So we both took naps and I tried to learn some Hindi. Well, at about 6pm some of us were going to go to a vegatable market nearby when suddenly we realized that since the summer students left on Sunday no one has watered any of the plants. So I helped the faculty that remains on campus carry buckets of water to all the plants. There were a lot of them to water. They have such a servant mindset here that they do not want their guests doing manual labor at all (also I think they know that Americans can't do much manual labor here without a trip to the hospital, ha) and you have to convince them to let you help sometimes. (Sidenote: I realized in the last couple days that I should try to just deal with the fact that they want to serve me cause that really is the way they show love and service is not seen as a burden in the least bit... instead they see it as a blessing that they get to show love in this way. So, its been hard to be served so much, but I'm trying to get over that and accept their acts of love) Anyway, they were trying to only fill my buckets half full so i didn't have to work as hard... there were 18 year old girls in sari's carrying full buckets and they are giving me half buckets, ha. I eventually was able to graduate to full buckets too. That was really fun, though. Then came the really interesting experience...

After cleaning off the mud I learned that some of the faculty were still going to the market. So I walked over to the gate and Thomson was there on his motorcycle. My mother will not like this part of the story, but he invited me to go to the city with him and of course I accepted. Riding on the back of a motorcycle in Indian traffic, dodging bicycles, cars, buses, other motorcycles, cows pulling carts, cows roaming free, and people is an experience I don't think I'll be able to forget! Thomson's not-quite 3-year-old daughter rode with us, too. But she got really tired halfway to the city so we turned around to take her back. Because she was falling asleep, he handed her to me and we rode back to campus with Thomson driving, me holding tightly to him, and his daughter squished in between us. It was hilarious. If you are reading this Nathan Capps, it reminded me of that picture on your computer of the two people on the motorcycle with the little kid squished in between. She was asleep immediately. Anyway, after we dropped her off at the campus, we drove the the city. In the city we went to a few shops, got some coke (different brand called Thumbs Up), bought a live chicken, watched them kill it, cook it and bag it up for us, drank some sugar cane juice stuff (very strange) from a vendor on the street, and rode back to campus. VERY interesting experience.

In the trip to the city and back I was able to observe more of the Hinduism that rules this country. Each shop had a little mini shrine to some god or goddess with incense or candles burning. As we rode back to campus I saw some of the worst poverty I've ever seen with people living in terrible conditions. But right next to their communities would be these nicely built buildings that served as shrines to Hindu deities. I asked Thomson who builds these shrines and he (former Hindu himself) told me the people in those communities build them. They are living in indescribable poverty and they spend their money to build temples to false gods. Its so sad because they are worshiping these gods, begging them to free them of poverty or heal their diseases or just to end their suffering. Unfortunately, unless the devil answers their prayers just to pull them deeper into the lies he's feeding them, no answers come from these prayers. God please draw them to You somehow.

Words cannot completely say how much I love Thomson and his family. He, his wife, and his daughter are such a great family and they are so kind to us. They have both faced a lot of suffering in their lives. Thomson comes from a Hindu background and his wife a Christian one. His father died when he was 2 and his mother was too sick to care for him. Thomson's wife grew up in a Christian home but both her mother and father died when she was young. They, like most of the couples in India, had an arranged marriage but it was arranged by friends since they did not have parents to do it for them. They are so happy that God brought them together. We'll share more of their story with you later.

Today, Friday, May 25th, was another day plagued by "load-shedding" from the power industry. You may know what that was, but I didn't so in case you are like me, I'll explain. In the Indian state of Maharashtra (the state where we are working) the power companies, in an effort to save money, shut off the power for about 3 hours per day. The first week and a half that we were here they did not do it, but now it has become an everyday thing. And of course they decide to shut it off somewhere between 11am and 3pm... the hottest time of the day. So we have been sweating even more than usual, ha. It is more than just inconvenient, though, because the load-shedding has caused the computer system in the library to lose about 2 months worth of data (about 3000 books entered). So now we are trying to have all the books entered so the students will be able to have access to the materials as they begin their Biblical studies. So they are trying to find a sponsor to pay for two more data entry stations so that five people can work at the same time on this project. Anyway, the students for the regular session will be arriving on campus in one week. There will be about 200-250 students at that time.

Thank you for your continued prayers. We are praying for you as well.

2 Corinthians 4:7