I wanted to share a story with you that has taken about a year to bring fully develope. I’ll start by saying I wish I could tell you that being here in India confirms that I have a truly radical unshakable love for people, but I really don’t. I’ll rewind to last year about mid summer where I met a young girl by the name of Keerty, She’s a very funny 9 year old little girl. I shamefully confess to you that I didn’t like to interact with her because she had little sores on different parts of her face. In my worldliness I gravitated to the children who had no physically deformalities. I’m not going to sit here a justify myself with some crap logic, I was just to worldly to get past myself and see her need instead of her illness. To tell you the truth I wasn’t even convicted of my favoritism until just about the last day of my trip last year. I remember the morning perfectly the kids with the help of the adults were putting together a going away party for me. They dressed in their very best; the little girls even put on make up “ they looked so silly”. They ushered me into a room where Malar was sitting. She and her husband Ashok over see a great number of projects here in Chennai. She had come all the way from the city just to be a translator for the kids. It was very moving to hear each child share how they felt about my time with them. Keerty very excited to share stood up a shared some thing that hunted me for the next 10 months. She softly spoke “Uncle thank you for loving me, I felt like I was your favorite”. (Tears of shame flood my eyes as I type). As I flew home a pondered those words “I felt like I was your favorite”. How could she say that? She honored me in a beautiful way when I spent most of my time rejecting her? I quickly became sick over my sin and decided I would do everything I could to be different. For the next six months I prayed, “Father I pray that you teach my hands to love like Jesus’s did, that every touch of my hands would reflect his love. Father I pray for the words I speak that I can speak just the way Jesus would to these children. Father I pray for my eyes that they would learn to see people like Jesus does. Teach my eyes to be filled with his love so I can look past peoples infections and see their need for love. I’m so grateful God showed me my favoritism so that i could ask him to change me. I’m so happy to say that he has completely filled my eyes with love. I am so happy to share with you now that God has answered those prayers in a great way. I’ve come back this year ready to serve, And I feel like God used what happened with Keerthy last year to prepare me to love past myself. Many of the children currently have all kinds of infections, but to god be the glory I see them but I don’t see them. What mean is I’m not at all affected by it anymore because I took that worldliness and cried out to God to make me different. I happy to tell you I pour so much love of on Keerthy to this day. Everyday I tell Keerthy I love her but more Importantly everyday I show her.

You know, being India has a hand full of challenges to deal with everyday. Some days are out right hard but God always seems to give me moments of laughter to take the edge off of things.

This is a short two-part story I’ve titled flytrap 1&2. The first part begins with a 4 year old named Angel. This little girl is so funny she should be on (Indian Kids Say The Darnest Things). She is often getting into mischief so that makes her and easy target for jokes. She also has zero understanding of boundaries and how they work. For instance I’ll be sitting in a chair eating and she will crawl into my lap and start eating off my plate, She just feels that comfortable. Because of our special bond I go out of my way to play silly games with her. This morning I noticed this Giant flytrap sitting near one of the door ways, I was impressed by the shear size of the thing. I must of spent 5 minutes watching fly after fly give there lives to it. About 25 mins later we were finishing breakfast and I began playing with Angel. We were chasing each other around and would you believe that little girl planted her entire foot in the center of the flytrap. Any of the other 32 children would have stopped to address the large foreign objected connected to their body but not this child. Unphased she tried running off with this thing glued the bottom of her foot. I quickly grabbed her and took her outside to where we wash. Of course she is squirming like a worm as I’m trying to get this thing off her foot. I finally got it off, now it was time to work on the glue. There I am trying to lather her foot and scrape off glue with a spoon. She laughed for twenty minutes as I worked that spoon like a fine tool. I did the best I could to get all the glue off, but let me tell you it was priceless watching that little walk away mumbling something as each left footstep stuck to the floor.

Part two starts with Vinodini, a tiny eight yr old girl. Vinodini is physically our weakest girl, she almost always suffers from skin infections, Fevers, and in fact I’ve never seen her without a runny nose. Despite all her complications she is a beautiful little princess, her voice is so gentle and quite you can hardly hear her when she speaks. One thing that she has in common with most children I’ve met is difficulty at the dinner table. Some kids are picky eaters, some kids throw things away in their napkins, you get the point. Well Vinodini happens to be the slowest eater in India. Most of our kids finish all their food in 1 minutes flat, Vinodini on the other hand takes about and hour and a half. Almost daily one of the ladies is  rushing her along, to me it always seemed so harsh. Well Monday I was in the office and got a little bit of education as to why the woman are so hard on her. Priya told me “ Rocky just watch her eat and you will under stand why we have to hurry her along. Before I finish I want to tell you two small things to give you some context, well around here we have no shortage of flies. You can actually walk into a really classy restaurant and eat right below a bug zapper. Now this probably shouldn’t be funny but I found it to be. I was sitting watching Vinodini eat and minute-by-minute flies would collect on her plant. Now I’m not sure if she feels a connection to the flies, kind of like an imaginary friend or some thing like that, Or if she is just so slow that her movement doesn’t scare the flies away. After some more observations I’ve found that she just doesn’t seem to notice the flies and they definitely are in no way threatened by her. So I came up with a solution, we need hire someone to sit a wave the flies away from her plate.

The Cure

I don’t know if you ever saw The Cure? It’s a movie that was done in like 94 or something. Well it’s a movie about a boy who becomes friends with another boy who happens to have AIDS. This little boy becomes obsessed with finding a cure for his friend. He even goes to the distance of running away with the boy just to meet a doctor to is said to have the cure. Anyway there is one scene towards the end of the movie that I feel I had the chance to live out the other day. In the scene the boy with out AIDS has been invited to dinner, and he is going on and on about all the plans he has for his friend on the day they find the cure. During the dinner the boy’s body just shuts down on him. Apparently his will to eat was overpowered and his body shuts down leaving him asleep on the table. The other boy is sent home sad and even more passionate about finding the cure.

Ok now that I have established a little bit of context I’ll tell my story

So it was around 7:30 at night and we were all laughing as we enjoyed our dinner. All of a sudden I noticed that the children where talking and pointing about something. As I looked over I noticed one of our boys Baghat had falling asleep on his dinner. Now this little boy hadn’t falling asleep because he had been running and playing all day. It was the same scene as in the movie his body shut down on him. I tried to wake him but he was just too physically weak to respond. Now where we eat is not the same place the boy live, It’s about a seven minute walk away. I gently picked up his little body and carried him home. Walking down the street many people offered suspicious stares. My heart was so heavy as a looked down at him because i realized like the boy in the movie that i’m powerless to change the inevitable. I put him to bed and walked home thinking about the the motto of the burial team for the army ” We are the last ones to let you down”.

This week has been amazing because i feel like i was able to participate closely in the actions of Christ. On the other hand it was also one of the most difficult yet.Monday some strange sickness came through and all of our children became very sick. One after another they were getting really high fevers. With in a few hours 29 kids where in the hospital. The rest were well enough to stay behind. Later that night the rest also caught the fever. Lrudayaraj and I began praying for each individual child. It’s heart breaking to look into the eyes of a suffering child as they look to you to make the pain stop, I mean what do you do. You can try to be funny or light hearted but really what does that do? The next day me and two boys were on our way to the hospital to deliver dinner to our kids. It was really awesome to go bed to bed and pray for each child. Then something happened the Hindu women asked me to come and pray over their children as well. As i walked to the end of the ward i started to become more and more grateful for the health of our children. These other children were in really bad shape, were talk 3rd degree malnutrition, children dying of Aids and children with bad cases of TB. I had the chance to pray over one 2yr old, His body was emaciated from Aids. His parents looked at me with total trust as i laid my giant hand on his body. One after another the women would bring me there children just looking so desperate for their own little cures. Each pray I did my best to call on Jesus name in a powerful way, I also prayed for the families to come to a faith in Christ. it was bittersweet leaving, Part of me felt at great connection to Christ, Part of me wanted to cry because of how real people’s suffering is. I’m so sorry if some of this is heavy to read I could stop sending you emails if you want, This is the reality i was able to pretend away everyday living in the US. It’s just so easy to miss but here it’s in your face completely raw and unadulterated, there is no way to escape it.

Lastly I began teaching this week in the hope school. It’s funny because i avoiding going back to the school till now because i knew i was going to love it and i just wasn’t sure if i could take on one more thing. For the most part i’m teaching 8th and 9th grade which is a real joy, For the most part the children are very well behaved and enjoy my teaching. About halfway though the day I was asked to oversee the kindergarten class for a period. Now I knew i was going to have to be strict to get them to fall in line but you know me WHAT THE HECK DO I KNOW ABOUT STRICT? So i walk in the class and command them to get out there books, instead of getting out their books they kindly repeat “get out your books”. Naturally i repeat No, get out your books! They in turn repeat. So for maybe 15 minutes i’m trying to get these children to stop repeating me, all the while trying to keep my composure.  You can imagine what happened next Mr. Strict lost it and started laughing hysterically. So i’m pretty much the worst kindergarten teacher in India I should of went to class dressed as a clown it would of been a better fit :0)

God be with you bro thank you for giving me the support to be here and love these children like Christ.

The tshirt idea i think is a really cool Idea go with it.

Love your

brother

Rocky