The jet lag is still getting the best of many on the team, so those who could slept in this morning. But as the smell of breakfast filled the house, people’s heads began poking out of the bedrooms, irresistably drawn to the scent of freshly cooked toast and eggs. Josh’s mother is a great cook. The warm hospitality shown by his family during our stay is such an incredible blessing for all of us.
We were all fully up and at em by around 9:00, which was really pushing the limits since we had to be on the road by 9:30 to get rolling in ministry. Billy and Barrett went with Josh to Christudoss’s church for a pastor’s conference. There were about 75 pastors present for the meeting, including a handful from the neighboring state of Pondicherry.
Barrett brought a powerful message drawn from the life of the Old Testament figure Caleb, encouraging them to look beyond their present circumstances or obstacles in ministry and look ahead by faith to the promises of God. Billy spoke on having a proper perspective in ministry in relation to how we view our roles as leaders, how we deal with problem situations and problem people, and how we know when God is being glorified in our ministry. Overall, the pastors gave us good feedback in how those were both timely messages in their own personal lives and in the churches represented there. Several pastors came and identified with the message, confessing that those were some of the exact issues they were in a serious struggle with at the time. Of course, this gave us great encouragement in knowing that even as we were preparing for this meeting, God was guiding us according to what needed to be said and taught.
During the pastor’s conference, the rest of the team met with Deva and Caleb and went to the gypsy kids day care center in Vandalur. They spent about a couple hours with the kids, playing games, singing songs, doing short Bible lessons, and Yasab gave her testimony (which I heard was quite amazing) to the kids.
These are children who were born into gypsy families on the street. The gypsies live lives of vagabonds, moving from place to place, never having a real home. They find some government lands and make tent-like homes, then live there until they are booted off the land, and move on to find a new place. Caleb’s church has taken the responsibility of taking the kids in and giving them showers, food, teaching them ABC, 123, giving them clothes, etc. Until then, none of them had even been inside a building before. It took them 6 months just to get them to sit still so they could begin teaching them. Calling it the day care center is kind of a misnomer, since it is actually more of a boarding house. The children are actually taken in full time and live there.
After meeting with the children, they went over to the gypsy colony to visit with the parents and the older children. There is one particular girl that some of the team was anxious to see. Last year, she turned 12, and her parents came in the middle of the night, took her out of the day care center and gave her in marriage to one of the guys in the gypsy camp. We tried everything we could and made ridiculous offers for her to be kept in the day care for at least a few more years, but their traditions and way of life within the gypsy village are so strong that they refused, and gave her to him despite our best efforts to convince them otherwise. It was a real heartbreaker for many of us who had been here and spent time with her. But we know the Lord can use this. It was only a matter of time before some of the kids would probably end up going back, and this may be the perfect opportunity for the rest of the gypsies to see the value of their lives being changed by the Lord Jesus Christ. She will definitely have an incredible influence on those around her. We have to believe that God has a higher purpose in allowing her to be brought back into that situation, and so we conquer our pain by faith in His divine plan. The whole point in starting the day care center was to effect positive change in the culture of the gypsy village, and this is one of the ways in which that change will begin to happen.
The gypsy camp was pretty chaotic. Lots of people running around without clothes, and disorder everywhere. They were able to gather everyone around long enough for Zach to give them a short message before they gave out more bags of rice to the families there. Once they produces a bag of candy things got really out of hand. There’s no way to do it in an orderly fashion when you are dealing with people who have never stood in a line. Hands were groping, pinching, etc. People were getting pretty wild, so they had to bail and head back to meet up with the rest of the team before heading off to our evening crusade.
We had another small crusade in the slums, this time in a different location. When we arrived, we were surprised to see that there were about 150 kids piles into the seats. Barrett was on schedule to preach tonight, and he just smiled and said he would change his message accordingly. One of the cool things they did was have a few small dances before the preaching. Two groups of young girls dressed in beautiful Indian clothing came up and performed some energetic dances. This made the crowd swell to a few hundred. The dances were actually quite entertaining.
Barrett preached with Josh as his interpreter, and there were a bunch of people responding at the altar call. Then we asked them to come forward with prayer requests. Just about every person within earshot responded to this, and we laid hands on each of them and asked the Lord to bless them. Then somebody had the great idea to bring out the candy again. Let me just say that the slums in India are not the best place to pull out a bag of candy. It quickly turns into a mob, adults and children included. You want to give out as much as you can, but have to be careful how you do it because if some people dont get any, they will most likely end up fighting over it or bullying smaller children for their candy.
We gave out a bunch of candy and beat cheeks to the car, then went for a quiet dinner and celebrated Zach’s birthday. He’s 32. Send him something. Haha.
Anyhow, another day is in the books here in India. Tomorrow we have a tough place to go to, so we need to get some rest. Will get out another update as things continue to progress. Thanks again for your prayers!
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