11 Getting Baptized this Week

One of our leaders told me today that he recently decided to teach some believers how simple people could use story telling to start new house churches.  He said most of the Chrisitans in his area are illiterate or barely literate and he wanted to equip them to share the gospel and start house churches using storytelling. 

He told them 6 stories, creation, the creation of spirits, the fall of man and a couple more and ended with the ten commandments.  He then told them how they could use those stories to explain to others the man's need for Christ.

He was excited when three of the believers he shared with came back soon after and had implemented what he said.  The result is that there will be a baptism this week for 11 new believers! One of the three, a young man named Roman shared with his father and the rest of his family who were not believers.  They not only put their faith in Christ, but donated land to the church. Praise God for what he's doing!

Thanksgiving

I know, I know, Thanksgiving was almost 2 weeks ago.  Better late than never I guess.  We really do have a lot to be thankful for and had an awesome thanksgiving celebration.  Trish got home on Thursday from the appendectomy she had on Tuesday, so we postponed it a day and celebrated on Friday. 

We had about 30 people over for a feast.  Here's the leftovers:

We baked 4 chickens, had sweet potato casserole, corn, biriyani, rice, dahl, chutney, a spicy shrimp curry, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls, fruit salad, green beans and of course lots of desserts. 

Victoria's teacher Megan went to a lot of effort to decorate for thanksgiving.  It was really nice.  What I like most about what she did was her thanksgiving turkey.  She put up a picture of a turkey and had cut feathers out of construction paper and had markers for people to write what they were thankful for and then they taped them to the turkey.  Here's a picture when the turkey was about half filled with feathers (I didn't get a picture of it complete):

Some of the things people were thankful for include:

I'm thankful Trish is home without her appendix.
I'm thankful for the good food.
I'm thankful for God sending his son to die for me.
I'm thankful to be born as a human being (written by a buddhist friend)
God's perfect timing, confirming my calling in Calcutta
I'm thankful that God is helping me always

We had a great time which was followed by a flour bomb war.  I've made a facebook photo album which you can view here.