Baptisms and Bells 'n Rings

Well, I did get to Chennai pretty much on time, which was about 3:30 a.m. their time. Got through customs without a hitch, and both bags made it through, praise the Lord! As soon as they came through on the belt, I grabbed them and headed out of the airport. There was this fence looking thing that had about 400 Indians lined up behind it waiting to receive passengers. Right then it hit me how hard it must be for international people when they come to America - everyone looks the same. I was looking for Ghuna in a sea of people that looked a lot like Ghuna to me, lol. Well, I didn't ever find Ghuna, but his son Joel grabbed me towards the end of the fence and we headed off to the hotel.

On the way over to the hotel, Joel told me that the next day his dad was going on a trip to do some baptisms and wanted me to come. Cool right? Absolutely. There was just one hitch, though....we were closing in on 5 a.m. at that point, and they were leaving around 7 a.m. Well, I figured that regardless of sleep deprivation, when the Indian version of the apostle Paul says jump, "how high" is a lot better answer than "I'm sleepy". We got to the hotel and I caught about an hour and a half of sleep before getting up to get ready.

The baptism trip was really cool. After driving for 4-5 hours, we finally made it to this little village. There was a canopy with a bunch of people sitting under it and people were taking turns doing a capella solos. After a little while, Ghuna and his posse (me included) got up on stage. We did some worship, then Ghuna introduced me, concluding with something about my jet lag, which was probably a nice way of saying that if what I was about to say didn't make any sense, they could chalk it up to sleep deprivation and clap at the end anyway. Well, I got up there and gave greetings from possible organization that I was connected with in the states and then said a little something about how God has grown my faith already through this trip. After that, we got to the baptisms. There were about 20 of them, which was awesome. What I didn't realize until later was that as Ghuna was baptizing them, he was giving them new Christian names to replace the their previous names which were from Hindu deities. Ghuna then had a meeting with his pastors, and we headed out.

For some reason, it took us a lot longer to get back to Chennai, so I hit the hotel about midnight and went to bed to get some sleep before church the next morning.

Church on Sunday was pretty cool. Ghuna was preaching at the church we went to. Most of the service was in Tamil, so I just sat there and read my Greek NT (gave my English Bible away) for most of the service. On the way in the door to church, there was this guy handing out what I assumed when I took them were programs for the service. Upon closer examination, I realized that they were actually ads for a Christian mating service. I guess it's kind of like a Christian e-harmony without the internet, if that makes any sense. Apparently you send them a profile and they find you somebody. Anyway, I thought some of my friends in the states might be interested, so I kept the thing just in case anyone wants the contact info, haha.

After church I went with Ghuna's family to this cool vegetarian restaurant. I had some kind of nine vegetable/fruit curry thing on rice. It sounds like a weird combination, but it works really well for me for some reason.

After lunch, Joel Kumar took me by the Shrine of St. Thomas, which is where the apostle was buried. We walked around a little bit there, and then they took me back to the hotel to rest a little before flying out again...more on that in the next post.