Sunday in India

This morning, we got to sleep a bit later than we had the past few days which was nice. After breakfast, we headed to church at one of the Good Samaritan schools. We got to worship with the people and then Abner gave the message. He did a great job! After the service, Ananthi announced that we would individually pray for people if they wanted - told them to come over to us if they did and asked some of the students to translate. A lot of people took us up on that and asked for prayer. I think each one of us probably prayed for at least 8-10 people. I prayed for a lot of people with pain and health issues and several for provision for jobs. Several of the kids came up after and asked me and a few of our other team members to pray for their exams. They so value their studies - it is so obvious by how proud they are to show us their work and how much they ask for prayer for exams and to do well in their studies. After prayer, we had tea and hung out with the people and they we helped clean up. Ananthi wanted to teach them not to throw their trash everywhere so she asked if we would be willing to help clean up so we could be an example to them and get them to help us. OF COURSE we would be more than happy to do that. And it worked like a charm - the entire school was out there picking up trash, sweeping and I even got to show a few of the kids how to mow the lawn. It's one of those old school hand push non-powered mowers. Fun! Afterwards, Ananthi took us to a fancy hotel downtown to a really yummy Chinese restaurant. Of course, you can't come to India and not have Chinese. ha ha Abner has been saying that they do have great Chinese food here though and he was right. It was SO good. The hotel let us a use one of their conference rooms - Abner talked them into doing it as a "favor" and not charging us. Sweet. We got some video of Ananthi telling her story and some stories of specific kids she's helped. What an amazing woman - the Lord is using her in such mighty ways. And she has such joy in her eyes. I rarely ever see her not smiling. She is a precious, precious woman. When we got back to the flat, we did a rooftop photo shoot with Abner and Amanda - my team members of the fabulous duo johnnyswim. They were so kind to model our Visiting Orphans t-shirts. We will now have some seriously high fashion photos of them. The fabulous Sarin, also on our team for these first few days to shoot video and photos - took the photos. Amazing. Can't wait for y'all to see them. Now we are chilling at the flat and getting ready for our big week. We'll be teaching bible stories, doing art with it and sharing music with the kids all week. Each day, we work with several different classes. With over 2000 kids total, we won't have the same kids more than once so we're working on one message to do with each group. Thank you so much for all the prayers. We can feel them and we so appreciate them.