From Bangalore

Sunday morning we attended the Bangalore meeting, which was an amazing talk by brother Jeremy Morgan on the book of Malachi..going by memory here, I THINK that was the topic.

Linus asked the young people to stay behind afterwards (in the place of SS) and we had a discussion group very similiar to that at the Bible week on finding partners, and arrangements, and where to live after marriage. Quite a few of the young people are quite western in their idea's, but they all think that not taking care of your parents in their old age by living with them is a sin. The discussion got very heated and at one point it was discussed that we as westerners 'abandon' our parents by leaving them in a nursing home. We did set the matter straight by explaining that we do everything we can for them till they reach an age where they need more assistance than we can provide and we put them in a home and then visit them regularly. I think they had the idea in mind that we put our parents / grandparents in nursing homes and leave them there to expire without visiting them.

Following the discussion group we all got in auto's and the young people were all generously shouted to a pizza hut lunch by some loving Uk men.

From Bangalore Justin, Sarah & I had been asked to visit a sister on our way down to Kerala to do some baptism interviews.
We passed through Mysore and got slogged bigtime as tourists before getting on a bus to Coimbatore and lived through the scariest bus ride of my life. Since then I have read a newspaper clipping of a bus that overturned on the road through the mountains killing 7 people and injuring many more. However, we escaped with accident, but not without incident. There was a total of 3 times coming down the mountain (and it seemed like we drove through those mountains down to the downship all night) where the driver swung out too far over the s bend and had to reverse back up and then correct his aim.
Oh, and I can't forget the time when we were coming around one corner and there were 2 lorrys parked on the left hand side of the road on the mountain and there was a steep cliff on the right hand side. So our bus driver decides to overtake. We started ok but at one point we ended up with a wheel off the cliff and the bus wasn't going forwards. The driver to correct himself just slammed his accelerator down and I just kept praying. By the time we got around the corner my whole body was shaking. Wasn't such a fun trip. But by God's grace we arrived in Coimbatore safely the next morning.

We headed out to the sister's house and arrived there to discover that there were 3 men there. After some discussion once the chai had been brought round we figured out that the men wanting baptism interviews hadn't yet arrived and these people were just there to discuss their 'doubts'. Doubts is the word everyone uses over here for questions. If there is anything they don't understand...call it a 'doubt'.

Sarah and Justin set to work setting their doubts straight. One was a SDA who was really just wanting to check what the differences there were between the religions and fire some sabbath day questions. The other had a problem with the soul not being immortal.
To my pleasure I ended up with the happy task of teaching a family of 3, Mother, Son and Daughter about our hope of Jesus returning, and tried to weave as many doctrines in as possible. It was an amazing morning, for me at least. I think the other two felt more harrassed than anything else by the time we were ready to leave.
Sis Roja did serve us lunch before we left, and what a tasty lunch it was. I think everywhere we go now the common comment has become 'I haven't tasted anything like this in the whole of India'!!! But the reason is, we're constantly trying food from different states, and all states have their own way of cooking delicious items.
One of the items introduced to go with the rice for lunch was 'paper water'. I sat there laughing for some time...and then we figured out she was meaning 'pepper water'. Whatever it was, it was incredible.