Some Pictures

Click on the thumbnail to see a larger picture.

	Our lovely half-hour in Shanghai China. It looks like America except for the UPS workers are Chinese as are the letters above them! Okay, so we only saw the airport...
	The city of Gurgaon, like Delhi is very much modernizedand has a great deal of malls similar to those in the west.
	A snapshot of the streets of Gurgaon.
	Hanuman, the monkey god...
	A small boy sitting outside the Hanuman temple, with a brahmin priest in the background.
	The hill country of Bhimtal. The weather is considerably cooler, much like California. The hills are amazing!
	Roadside shops in Bhimtal. People are always selling things everywhere. Even children risk their lives running beside cars two-inches away from a steep ledge, just to sell pears. They do have much experience though.
	This dog was a friendly guest in the YMCA center in Bhimtal.
	This is a wild, un-zood monkey. These little guys carry diseases and are the equivalent of large rodents in India. Except on the day of Hanuman, the locals will feed them bananas.
	Everyone from the retreat.

A Taste of the East

Right now I am quite literally like the father of John the baptist before his birth when it comes to online communication. Do not be suprised at the sudden shift in focus. The reasons for this will come later.

...

India is an amazing place! After being here a week now, I am still six days behind in taking all of this in. I have learned more in this week than any other week or month in my entire life. There is so much, but my heart is so slow in taking it in... no it is caliced. I hope that it will open up to engulf the lives that these people live that are so different from my own. Here are some of my thoughts (the most precious I cannot share, later I will)

A tractor driving slowly down the street in the seering heat pulling a widetrailer carrying large sticks. On these sticks sit three boys, silently. Their days work is light, they pay too is even lighter. What do they talk about together, what do they think? Their lives are so simple!

The mountians, these foothills of the Himilayas are covered in green providing a relief to the furnace outside. Our pine trees are neatly stacked on our mountins, a uniform canvas. But here the hills are very steep and the trees on the tops of the mountains stretch so much higher and their trunks are exposed well above the hilltop. These are things I have only seen before in my dreams.

A people so different so exotic. Some speak sixteen languages, others usually three or four. Every 60 kilometers a new language and new region and new culture. The road system is the very embodyment of choas, yet it is more efficient than the streets of California. One god blends into the next, and the western gods too, the heralds of materialism, they too have entered the sythesis.

A small temple stands next to a large factory. In a village, the temple is the pinnacle. The huts and homes bow down. But in many places here, the greater diety, Progress has assumed a throne, raising the earth and calling many forth into the hectic lifestyle we know in the west. Others choose to sell watermelons in the shade by the street all day.

Again, I apologize for the obscurity, you will find out soon why. I miss everyone so much. I have so much to share. I hope all your lives are going well, and your summer is not fleeting into obscurity, but you are finding deep satisfaction in Living Water.

What Have I?

I am about to embark on the second scariest thing of my life...

Six days from now, I will be ****.

Now I ask this: what does a twenty-one year old male southern California philosophy major, trained in western thought and lifestyle, raised in suburbia and economic prosperity have to offer these women? I remind you again that I am a guy!

And these women, who are they? Many likely to be older than I, raised in India which defies description, land of 300 million gods, where the urban and the rural are in flux and poverty is rampant.

And what deep experience of life and suffering these women must have! How can my words speak to their soul, what can I say that will be of any service to them? I who am young and inexperienced, they who have much in experience in life and perseverance...what have I to offer? ... Nothing.

Yet ****, the missionary we have come to serve, has Anthony and I coming to speak of God to these women. It might be easy at this point to ask "what was she thinking!?"

But it is not us. The words we say, if not built upon the words of God which have sustained millions to this day, though they be stories of the ancient world. The story of His Son, who imparted peace, love, and reconciliation with God to this woeful world. The words of this God in flesh, Jesus Christ who offered Himself up for us all, these words, O these words can do something for anyone's soul!

Yet words from two-thousand years ago, and stories more ancient still...are they dead words? How can such words be useful to these women who live in the midst of a suffering nation in lives that are full of many things I have never known or imagined... I may speak them, but who am I to speak them? What weight will I have with them? ... None.

It must be the power of God. If my words, whatever they are based on, are to do anything for these people, there must be power. Words cannot bear the sorrows, the guilt, the grief that all of us have. There must be a person behind them, a presence.

But who, among all us humans could bear even one person's needs? Are we not all crying at the top of our souls to be know and to be loved, our thirsty souls...(or we stuff this longing with the amusements of this world) ... when we face ourselves at night... O how needy we are!

That Person, that sacred presence, God who has chosen to dwell in men and women must meet them through His words. ****

I long to see God move. I want to know what it means for Him to speak through me, to give me the words to say. I don't know where any of these women are at, and am the least qualified to speak to them. But God loves them so much!!! Giving His Son over to death on a cross is a proof of that love! I must give my tongue and words to God, and bow before Him who meets hearts and loves sinners for any good to come of this...