Any Given Sunday

Some of you might be curious – what do you all do on the weekends? We have done some trips (Goa, Aamby Valley) and we have also just gone shopping or sightseeing around town. Today was worth noting because it was the first church service I have been in since the Anglican cathedral I visited on Christmas Day with my boys in Florence.

Interesting fact about India — things always happen later. Breakfast is small and is usually around 9-10 (if even eaten at all). Lunch is usually 1-3pm and dinner is typically after 7pm (usually around 9-10pm I have been told). It isn’t Spain where I once we turned away from a café because I arrived at 10pm for dinner and they didn’t open till 11pm. But it is a later lifestyle. My work shift starts at 1pm so I usually wake up around 7am — a far cry from the 4:22am I came to know and hate all too well 7 days a week in Oregon. We spend family time in the morning before I head off to work around 11:45am. Definitely different!

So that puts in context’s today’s adventure which included a 6:06am wakeup. Probably the earliest one I have had here in Pune. I got up, made my Starbucks Via coffee and paced the hallways until my wife, daughter, and mother in law awoke. By then I was caffeinated and EXTRA annoying. We ate a quick breakfast and then headed out via rickshaw to a church I had found on the internet Oldham Memorial Methodist Church.

We arrived a couple minutes after service started at 8am. I have now done church services in several countries but this one wins the prize for longest (1 hour 45mins, yes I know my Mormon friends do twice that), the most singing (sorry Lutherans), and the most praying (sorry Presbyterians). I loved how caring and thoughtful it was. They took everyone that had an anniversary or birthday in the last two weeks, had them stand up in front and we sang Happy Birthday and Happy Wedding Day to them. We prayed for God’s peace and blessings. We prayed even for countries like the US — yes the US. As my wife put it “I am used to praying for far away lands but I never thought about them sending prayers to us!”. She was right. There was a good mixture of traditional hymns as well as contemporary singing to fill you with the Spirit and worship the Lord.

It was fun to hang around after service and have so many people come up to us with smiles, dinner invitations, and questions about us. I’ve never had a church coffee hour with Samosa’s before! After the fellowship time we headed back filled with God’s Word, Love, and Community and for naps…

After naps we found ourselves in an unusual situation — we were hungry. But this wasn’t the typical “oh how about a soup and salad for lunch?” No greens and pretending to be healthy were not going to cut it. We had had it. We needed meat….red meat…and lots of it. But how do you find beef in a part of the country where slaughtering cows is illegal and most of the residents consider it an offense? Well your wife finds a Brazilian restaurant of course and believe or not there was one and it had steak. We even confirmed that it wasn’t water buffalo (the usual substitute for beef) when we got there.

I ordered the GAUCHO meat extravaganza and I was not disappointed. 4 types of steak skewers and pork and chicken skewers too! Plus like 6 different side items. This wasn’t like the buffet Brazilian places back home…here they served you everything at once.

It was like the 4th of July at the Lake of the Ozarks. Meat everywhere, cooked several different ways and some wrapped in bacon. I couldn’t believe this meal was legal! My body flush with new red blood cells, cholesterol happily surging, and blood pressure finally testing my arterial walls again — sent endorphins through my body. I immediately gained back 2 of the 10 pounds I lost since arriving in India but I was a happy camper. Now it was time to sit back in the 94 degree heat and enjoy the heat and meat sweats.

We felt so adventurous after the meal that we decided to walk home (more just wandered in that direction). We didn’t know till we got back how filthy our feet had become. So to go back to God, we did one of the biggest acts of love that you can find in the Bible — we washed each other’s feet. Of course they didn’t have warm flowing water and Marriott Signature body wash but the intent and the cleaning was there!

It was fun to serve in such a time honored act of love!

Well as I write this it is 4pm in the afternoon and Tenley is napping. What else could this Sunday provide for us? We are thinking about going out to the outdoor lounge area here and playing a few card games while Tenley plays on the gym. Given the quantities consumed for lunch — dinner won’t be very exciting…although I must admit that I cannot wait to eat a pork sausage in an Italian tomato sauce that doesn’t have 450 different Indian spices in it! After that I presume we may watch a movie, call loved ones back home and then back to the work week. But work week’s are worth it when you have these kind of Sundays.