Everyday Hindu people draw very beautiful designs in front of the doors and gates to their homes to invite the good spirits and gods in, hoping that they will bring them good luck. For the new year, the people draw even more elaborate designs. I think these designs are wonderful and so “Indian”, so I take pictures of them all the time.
Here’s what we normally see as we’re walking around
This morning Bethany and I had a great time walking and waving to all our friends for church who live in the neighborhood as we went for a short walk to capture some of the special celebration designs.
Here’s what we saw this morning
Now, let me jump back in time to all the happenings of last year (please note here that we are in a “new year” and I’m really only going back to last week). In addition to the regularly scheduled mid-week church gatherings on Wednesday and Friday for Hebron Church, Thursday evening we had received a special invitation to lead the youth service at one of the other Nellore churches. The service began with about 30 mins of singing in Telugu led by the worship leader. Then they handed the rest of the service over to us… they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.
After I gave a short introduction, telling who we were and why we had come to India, Bethany took over the service. She explained, with Pastor David’s help in translating, that we as people have a body (our physical body, desires, and emotions), a soul (our character, beliefs, and wisdom or foolishness), and our spirit (the part of us that is like God and closest to Him). Then she asked for three volunteers to represent the body, soul, and spirit.
Our three lovely volunteers
Bethany explained that before we give our lives to Christ, our spirits are dead, but one we surrender to our Lord, our spirits come alive. The begins the tug-of-war for our souls – with the body trying to pull our souls away from God, toward the “delights” of this world, and ultimately to spiritual separation from God. Meanwhile, the spirit is trying to pull the soul toward God and the eternal joy and pleasure of knowing God as we were created to do.
Tug-of-war wonderfully demonstrated by our volunteers (with David acting as translator, “Thank you!”)
Bethany continued on to explain that we can actually decide who will win the war for our souls. We choose whether we will spend eternity with God or eternity separated from Him by what we do with our time, the things we watch and listen to, and what we think about. We can “feed” our body, making it stronger and more able to pull us away from God and toward eternal death by thinking about and spending our time on the things the world tells us are important, or we can “feed” our spirits by spending time thinking about and worshiping God. Bethany went on to explain, that beginning to feed our spirits is a lot like beginning to exercise – it’s very hard at first and you don’t like it because it’s not what you want to do, but as you continue to exercise on a regular basis (or feed your spirit) you begin to enjoy and look forward to it because it feels so good when you’re done. At the end of the service, we led the youth in another 30 mins of worship, this time without singing, just quiet music and some instruction on how to draw close to God. They all seemed to enjoy it very much. Please pray with us that this message will rest in their hearts and that God will use it to grow a desire to know Him more.
Sunday was both normal and special. In the morning, we taught the story of Jesus turning the water into wine from John 2:1-10 to a group of 20 or so restless Sunday School children– we pointed out that the servants who labored to fill the water jars did not get to drink it after it was turned into wine and the wedding guests did not know where the wine came from. Then we asked them, “Would you rather be a wedding guest and get to drink the wine or a servant and get to see Jesus do the miracle?” They all said they would rather be the servants. Father, please teach them what it means to be Your servants and to prepare the way for You to do miracles.
For church itself, I taught from Luke 10 on the story of Mary and Martha, encouraging to believers not to be distracted from knowing Jesus by the cares and troubles of this life, but instead to go through their daily responsibilities doing them for the Lord and not for men (Col 3:17).
Bethany taught the youth meeting about the underground church in China. She “took” the youth to a lonely region of China where they had to creep many kilometers through the “jungle” (part of the sanctuary) and gather in a small “hut” (a specified section of the room) to meet with their fellow believers. Everyone had to be very quiet, because if we were caught the Chinese authorities would throw us into prison and kill us. Bethany posed to question, “Do you crave spending time with believers so much that you would work all day in the fields, travel and worship all night, and then work another full day in the fields without any sleep for just a few hours of fellowship? Do you treasure your Bible so much that you would give up your clothes and your food before you would give up your Bible? Do you love Jesus enough to be tortured and die for Him?” Again, I pray that these words, questions, and examples will go deep into the hearts of the youth.
There are no pictures of our gathering, of course, because we were in danger for our very lives and could not risk the chance of being seen or of the pictures falling into the wrong hands.
Sunday was also a very special day because it was Suhasini’s (David’s wife) birthday. Her sister and nephew came for the occasion, in addition to the normal extended family who gather for lunch on Sundays, and we had a wonderful time singing “Happy Birthday” (Indian style, of course), eating special food and birthday cake, and visiting with the family.
Once again, you are caught up on all the happenings here in India. :)
Grace and peace to you all!
Wish your host "mother" a very birthday from us, too :-)
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