Wednesday 7/25/07

Wednesday morning we woke early and started packing for the return trip home. We drove to Salem and then boarded a train for Chennai. The train stops for only short periods and during this time all luggage and passengers must exit or board or get left behind. (Poor Suganthi told me she once had actually fallen underneath a moving train in a desperate effort to catch it.) Bro. Guna and Bro. Nixon rode with us – Bro. Guna all the way to Chennai and Bro. Nixon to Vellore to return to his home. His wife Jody is currently working at the Christian Medical Center (the large hospital located in Vellore) and he was returning to his wife and small son, named Chris. Bro. Nixon sat in the seat across from me and we took turns talking for about an hour about our Christian experience and how God had blessed us and our families. Bro. Nixon’s father had been Christian but he died when Bro. Nixon was just 3 years old. His mother raised him and she was Hindu. He became Christian as a young man and belonged to another denomination until about 2 years ago when he first heard the message of sovereign grace preached by Bro. Guna. He told Bro. Guna, “I do not believe that doctrine.” Bro. Guna gave him a copy of Bro. Zack Guess’s book on sovereign grace doctrine and Bro. Nixon read and studied it. He is now a very able Old Baptist minister. He told me that when he first became Christian, his response was more outward actions but little inward change. He believed in the Christian God, but knew that the doctrine he was being taught was not what the Christian Bible taught. When he came to the knowledge of God’s sovereignty, he said he finally had joy in his heart because he knew that doctrine lined up with everything in the Bible. Today he is a very happy man. I wish our church members could all meet him. I was surprised that Bro. Nixon spoke pretty fluent English because I had not noticed him speaking much English before that time. At the end of the conversation he told me it was a miracle we were speaking because he usually did not speak or understand English very well. When he left me and came back a while later we tried to make idle conversation and could barely communicate with one another. What an interesting conversation indeed!
We arrived in Chennai (a city of approx. 6,000,000 and formerly named Madras) at around 11:00 p.m. Indian time. (It had been a really LONG train ride – approx. 7 hours, although I did sleep a while with a migraine headache). We came in from the train station and saw a much more beautiful side of the city than the side we saw upon arrival. The airport is in a more rundown section of town and I wondered when we arrived that I saw almost no traffic lights in a city of 6,000,000. The traffic in the rundown section of town we were in on our first day in Chennai was AWFUL, but it wasn’t so bad on the return trip – nicer area with traffic lights and a more modern city. Anyway, we shopped in the Chennai airport for some beautiful Indian handbags, jade hand-carved elephants, and clothing items and then we left by plane at 2:00 a.m. for an almost 10 hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany. In Frankfurt, we had breakfast at McDonald’s (oooooh, wonderful!) and then really pigged out purchasing German chocolate – oh boy! There was not time in the Chennai airport to convert over my remaining rupees and I tried to convert it in Frankfurt, but against the Euro, I was going to lose about half its value. I told the cashier no thanks, but it wasn’t a lost endeavor because a young American serviceman was standing beside the cashier and Jill, Ashley, and I struck up a conversation with him. We found out that he lived only about an hour away from Jill in Alabama. Home was getting closer! Next we boarded the plane from Frankfurt to Charlotte, NC. I do not sleep well while traveling – whether by train, plane, or car – and the flight to Charlotte seemed to take FOREVER! We also had a lot of turbulence over the Atlantic and were told to remain in our seats with our seatbelts fastened for quite a bit of the trip – it made me quite sick at my stomach – actually, I think about all of our group felt pretty lousy on that flight. We arrived in Charlotte and it was actually ahead of time – no delays like we suffered on the trip over. We went through customs since this was our port of entry. We had to receive our luggage and re-check it for the short flight to Atlanta. On the flight to Atlanta, I think we all finally slept before we actually got off the ground and we were in Atlanta before I realized it where we were met by a bunch of warm, loving family members. We loaded up our luggage (no lost luggage this time) and Leah rode with Karen and me to exit 201 to pick up her car. We arrived home midnight Friday night and thank the Lord for a wonderful, safe trip and a comfortable bed on our return!