2009 Bible College Graduation

Tomorrow is our Bible College's 2nd graduation. I've been trying to get a post up about it but I wanted to add pictures and that just wasn't happening and then it held everything up. What was I thinking?

So, it's busy around here, real busy. We've had guests coming in since 2 AM last night and they're still coming. Whew. From tonight or tomorrow morning everyone will be at the conference center, so the home hospitality aspect will slow down, but that doesn't take away from the fact that lots of people are coming in from all over India.

We're excited about the fact that the General Secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India* is our main speaker tomorrow night at the conference and he'll be with us til Sunday afternoon. The entire conference runs until Monday evening, so three full days.

I'm mostly excited for our Bible Students who worked hard and persevered for the past two years to reach this point. Please pray for them as they move on to follow God's call on their lives. Please keep the whole graduation/conference in prayer, there is a lot to coordinate.

*http://www.efionline.org/

Exodus

Last Thursday at our weekly ladies meeting it was my turn to speak. I'm not much of a speaker, I leave all that up to O. And if it were up to me I wouldn't probably choose to speak at all, especially not in Hindi. But it was assigned to me and the fact is, I kind of knew it would be my turn even before our leader told me, I already had the message on my heart.

Last October I was reading through Exodus and I came to this verse, "Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land." (14:21)

I have often read the story of the crossing of the Red Sea but last October three words jumped out at me that I had never noticed before. "All That Night."

Wow. For my whole life I had always pictured Moses holding his hand and staff out over the sea and the waters parting the way elevator doors open. Push the button and shooooop, the doors separate right before your eyes.

But it wasn't like that it all. There was a whole night involved and a strong east wind. Yet, the fact that the parting took longer than I had always imagined it had takes nothing away from the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea.

The story of Exodus chapter 14 was my message, with the emphasis on the fact that all of us have long and lingering problems of some sort in our personal lives and it may seem to us that God is not answer or taking too long.

I was able to give a very current example from our own life, so current that moments before I left for the ladies meeting O. shared with me that we were facing a big problem (part of a longer lingering problem) that had to be solved by the next day.

As I drove over to the meeting I thought, how can I give this message if I don't have faith myself in what I'm speaking. I did end up sharing our problem with the ladies, we all prayed and the next day many of us fasted and prayed some more. By Friday night, the deadline was up and O. called me over at the end of our regular Friday fasting prayer meeting and said that at around 7PM that night our problem had been solved. Praise the Lord! I admit I had faith that something would happen, but I was suspecting more of a postponement of the problem than a solution.

Wow, I can't wait to share during testimony time with the ladies this Thursday.

Of Two Blogs

I've been skimming through the past several years of my blog because I have been allotted the task of making the "History" of our ministry to be read at our Bible College Graduation this weekend. It's a history of what God has done since 1999 when our ministry started. But I don't always remember everything and I definitely don't always remember when something happened.


Anyway, all that to say, my blog used to be a lot more interesting than it currently is. Sad.


I'm going to blame this on being the mother of (not only) four children, but being the mother of two children under the age of two.


Yes, I do realise that my blog has definitely become "The Mother Blog." Hummm.


This brings me to my point of me considering keeping this blog as it is and then also starting a separate ministry blog. Considering. Considering...

She IS My Daughter!

I make this same face.
Constantly tortured by G.

The Grape Incident

After the G. feeding P. the peanuts (actually, it was carrot pieces!) the other week I've been extra vigilant in watching them together. Then last week I saw G. put something near P.'s mouth. I walked over to take a look and while trying to get my finger in P.'s mouth I accidentally plugged her nostrils and out popped a GRAPE.

See picture of P. and offending grape below.
Mugshot of the carrot/grape feeding culprit.

Loading Pix

I have really really been trying to load pictures for several days now and it is just not happening.

Longing For The Tropical

Hummmm. Last night while watching "Herbie Goes Bananas" (dubbed in Hindi) with my girls, I got a serious craving to be somewhere tropical. It's not even cold here, as a matter of fact, it's pretty stinkin' hot. Yet, I long to be somewhere, somewhere tropical. I've had the traveling itch for the last week or so, but it wasn't until I saw Herbie last night that I really narrowed it down.

Then, to make it worse, I caught a glimpse of some travel show featuring the Maldives* today. That was the clearest water I've ever seen. And tropical looking.

Thanks Herbie, thanks a lot.

*The Maldives, is an island nation consisting of a group of atolls stretching south of India's Lakshadweep islands between Minicoy Island and the Chagos Archipelago, and about seven hundred kilometres (435 mi) south-west of Sri Lanka in the Laccadive Sea of Indian Ocean. The twenty-six atolls of Maldives encompass a territory featuring 1,192 islets, of which two hundred and fifty islands are inhabited.
The Maldives is the smallest Asian country in terms of both population and area; it is the smallest predominantly Muslim nation in the world. With an average ground level of 1.5 metres above sea level, it is also the country with the lowest highest point in the world, at 2.3 metres (from Wikipedia)

Wow, this is almost near us...

Sleeping P.

Mother's Intuition

G. loves P. I mean really loves P.

Tonight I was in the kitchen and P. was on the couch in the other room. I heard some noises and realized G. was in their too. I said to my niece, "Go check on P." I heard some commotion then and my niece came back to say that G. had been feeding (11-day-old) P. peanuts.

G. strongly insisted that P. was "eating them."

After that someone else went to check on P. and fished a peanut out of her mouth.

You gotta watch 'em like a hawk - and trust that mother's intuition.

Quiet Day

Nothing much has happened since the situation on Sunday. It's been quiet - so that's good.

O. left late last night for a speaking engagement in Central India and a bunch of our people are with him. He'll be home on Monday.

It's the Hindu Festival Holi today so we stayed inside all day while the kids outside put colored powder on each other and squirted each other with water. Between staying inside all day to avoid getting color ground into me and O. not being here, it was a really quiet day. I did watch Notting Hill tho.

Ongoing Trials Since The Year 2000

Yesterday was O.'s birthday. After church we celebrated P.'s birth, O.'s birthday and G.'s (almost) b-day by having cake and lunch with all our believers.


After lunch all our co-workers came to our house to give a gift to O. All of the sudden I heard a sound like rumbling thunder but was in reality several pairs of flip flops running across our stone floors. I thought some of our co-workers were going to the back of my house to bring in the gift for O. but alas, no, nothing that mundane. What I didn't know was that just a moment before that one of our Children's Home children came running to my house and said, "Someone is beating Driver Uncle."


Our driver was taking the children home after church and a family who has persecuted us since we came to this city stopped our vehicle and started pushing our driver around.

It became a big bruhaha with people getting beat by belts and threatened with sticks and stones (literally). There was even a biting incident. Then by this time O. and all our male co-workers (and most of our children) had reached the scene. There was a lot of shouting and threatening and eventually O. decided to just report the incident to the police.

O. and all the men went to the police station and all the ladies and kids stayed at my house waiting for our delayed birthday party. We prayed instead and waited some more.

A couple hours later some police came to my house and asked what was going on. I didn't really know much but I said that nothing had happened here and pointed them in the right direction. All the ladies were standing outside and the police asked "Who are all these people?" I think they thought I had gathered a force of women to go fight. I said, "We were having a birthday party..."

The situation is still going on. This family has done things against us again and again. They put a case against us yesterday claiming we were here only to convert people to Christianity. We weren't even involved in the situation yesterday. Yet we see their planning and scheming all over it. Their desire is to destroy O. and the ministry. We know this because they said in front of everyone yesterday.

Please pray with us for wisdom in this case and pray especially that we will have favor in the courts and with the police. As Christians and as a minority no one stands with us in times of trial. Anything to do with religion is a major political issue over here and we can get stuck in all kinds of problems and bogged down in court cases. Pray for victory in Jesus name in every area as well as wisdom for how to proceed according to God's will.

Through it all O. kept saying, "It's my birthday today..."
Sometimes you just never get a break.

P.

I've been trying for 2 days to get pictures loaded and it wasn't happening. I better get this one up QUICK!

More Funny/Interesting Stories About The Delivery

Saturday evening before I delivered I got a phone call from some people we know who tend to be big talkers, big advice givers, basically generally annoying. They wanted to come over and visit.

The wife is a nurse. I said to O., "Don't tell them I'm in labor", he said, "I was just going to say the same thing to you." Wouldn't you know that she's the nurse we eventually called and she got us into the hospital and stayed with me the whole time so I at least had someone to speak English with in the middle of the night while I was in labor... "Can you see the head yet????"

Another thing, O. never does anything alone. This was his first labor and delivery (my mom and dad did the other 3, O. stayed at home.) So, of course he needed his support group around him. They don't let fathers (or anyone) in the delivery room here with the mothers but he was outside in the waiting room -with our entire staff. I think there must have been about 15 men there getting eaten by mosquitoes and drinking chai in the middle of the night while they waited for me to deliver.

At one point I said to the girl who delivered the baby that I'm going to shout. She said, 'Everybody does." Heh heh heh she hadn't come across me before, I've been told by maternity staff that I'm loud. Still, I pushed on, "You're going to want to close the doors." I glanced back toward them, closed, but there was an unfortunate 2' X 4" opening at the top of the door. I thought, "Not good."

O. and others later told me that at my first shout all the men in the waiting room ran outside and down the steps and into the parking lot. (I was in the back of the hospital on the 2nd floor). Every time I shouted the nurses, etc. would say, "Close your mouth, don't make any noise, bear down." I tried, I really did.

The men said they could hear me shouting clear out in the parking lot.

By the end when I didn't even care to try to obey the nurses anymore and I just let it out, O. and my brother-in-law came rushing all the way back to the delivery room. That's when they heard the baby cry.

Apparently, P. let out a big cry at first and they all though she must be a boy to have such a loud cry (Hadn't they learned anything from the loud woman shouting only moments before?) Typical.

Well, I'm not ashamed of being loud, I think these men should have some idea what we women suffer through to give birth to their children.

Ok, one last story. Both of my sister-in-laws' husbands were there when I delivered. One is a pastor and one a truck driver. Both of them came home and separately told their wives "When I heard Bhabhie (me) crying while the baby was being born, I started crying myself."

Bethlehem

It was a little bit like Bethlehem over here on Saturday night.

I was having contractions all day and by 11PM I decided to call the hospital to tell them I'd be coming in in a few hours. Unfortunately, I was told my Doctor was out of town for the weekend (She's the only OBGYN there.) I asked who else to call and they gave me the name of another doctor but they didn't have any number.

We decided to send O. and his entourage over to that hospital to try to get me admitted and that doctor was also out of town.

Lesson to be learned: never go into labor on Saturdays or Sundays in India - well anywhere, this happened to me with E.'s birth too - in the US!

Eventually, O. and his guys went to about six different hospitals and we couldn't find a doctor to take us. He called me up and told me the situation and I said, go find a midwife I'll deliver at home with her and my two sister-in-laws. However, O. decided to call up one more nurse friend of ours and she sent them to another maternity hospital and the doctor agreed to see me.

I arrived a little before midnight and he checked me out and admitted me. Praise the Lord. But here's the thing, he had no rooms open in his hospital so he kindly had a cot put in an administrative office room and let me stay there. That was fine by me.

This doctor and his wife have a large practice and they have just built a million dollar hospital but they were shifting everything over to the new facility on Sunday - I reached when - Saturday night. The old hospital where I delivered was so nasty and run down - even by Indian standards - they had just let it go knowing they were building the new facility. At that point in my labor I didn't care, not even about delivering on an old metal table with other people's dried blood and gore dried on it - yeah - not an exaggeration.

Yet, God was good, I walked up and down the hallway, once the pain got real bad the pressure started almost immediately. They checked my dilation and I was only 4cm. I couldn't believe it. That's it! I got off the table and tried to walk some more, I got about 10 steps and grabbed the girl (who eventually did the delivery) and pulled her back into the room with me. I suffered thru another contraction, hoisted myself up on the bed and called for Rohini (the nurse friend who sent us to this hospital) - She said wait a minute she wanted to finish drinking her chai along with everyone in the waiting room.

Bam, that baby came fast. Later someone told me that from the moment they heard me shout the first time to the time they heard the baby cry was about 10 or 15 minutes max.

Eventually, the doctor came and did all the finishing things - which took about an hour - very unpleasant.

And The Baby Quiz Winner Is...

Jenny W. - My sister-in -law.

Here were her original picks (in black): (Actual birth facts in red)
March 1st March 1st
3 AM 1:53 AM
Boy Girl
7lbs. 11 oz. 7lbs. 9oz.

Other than the sex, she was either right on on pretty close.

Everyone clap now.

It's a GIRL!

P F O was born at 1:53AM (IST) on March 1st. It was a quick labor (thank the Lord) and mom and baby are both fine and home from the hospital - we were released around lunchtime on Monday.