A couple of comments about yesterday. It is Sunda, not Sudan. We have been buying and bringing box lunches with us when we visit the orphans which has added to our expenses in an unplanned way, but our God wants us to be generous as He is generous, so we happily feed these children. Last night, it was interesting to see these little ones, maybe 5 or 6 years old, manfully stuff the whole box lunch down, probably because they have been taught never to waste food. One little girl smilingly said this is so good, because they almost never get to eat meat, in this case a piece of chicken maybe 2 by 2 inches and a half inch thick, which we might eat in two bites.
Tuesday, July 12 - We had another early start today, leaving the hotel a few minutes after 8 AM to head off to our first prison. We picked up Grandma (Oma) Wisa and found out that all the arrangements had been made for us to go to the women's prison before we leave Bandung Thursday. Thank God for answering all our prayers. This men's prison is a different one from the ones we went to last year. There were about the same number of prisoners as us and we completely filled the chapel. The prisoners led worship and then 9 of them sang a song to us, well blended with harmony. It was led by a man of Chinese descent who said he used to sing in a church choir, left Christ, got in trouble, divorced but found Christ in prison again. Our program just blended together beautifully, each song and testimony and skit seemed to touch the prisoners' hearts, orchestrated by the Holy Spirit. Janine and Brian Lee shared their testimonies and we performed two skits (the puppet skit and a new skit about being burdened down with the temptations of this world) before Pastor Ben preached from John 3:1-6, about being born again. When the invitation was given, about half the prisoners raised their hands. We then asked who wanted to be prayed for and perhaps a dozen prisoners came forward. The time was pretty intense: one older man with scraggly hair and beard teared when Jeremy and Jeff prayed for him while Andrew translated. One young man wept when Brian Kuan, Josh and Glory prayed for him. Thy were joined later by Pastor Ben and he really broke down as God was doing some deep work in his heart. At the end of the meeting, the chaplain came up and surprisingly, he shared that God was moving in his heart and that today, he also raised his hand with the prisoners to accept Christ as his personal savior. Even though he had all the training and been chaplain for many years, this was apparently the first time he had given his heart to Jesus, praise God! He then prayed a powerful blessing for us.
We then returned to our hotel to eat the box lunches which we had been carrying with us all morning. We then had some worship time and then did a quick debriefing before our group devotion (in small groups of about 5 people each where we meditated on Jesus being Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. During the devotion time, the heavens opened up and it really poured. Marshall remembers simply asking God if He could stop the rain at 2:30 when we needed to walk from the church to the bus across the street. At 2:20, the rain slowed down. We prayed the spiritual armor prayer for protection together. At 2:25 it stopped, and we could cross the street completely dry. We then drove to the Kinderdorf orphanage, part of a world-wide group of orphanages started by an Austrian; a non-sectarian orphanage so that if the children were from other faiths, they did not have to come to our meetings. We were told to there were 90 kids at this orphanage so we brought food for them but when we got there, only about 30 young children were there. Due to a misunderstanding, they told us the number of kids at the orphanage but many of them were in the city while this orphanage was in the north part up in the hills and trees, a beautiful place. But when we told the ladies (several obviously Christians) running the orphanage of our plans to sing and share, they texted the neighborhood kids, and God added to the orphans so we ended up with a total of 53 elementary and 30 junior and senior high school kids there, many of them children from M families. All in all, about 14 high schoolers and a similar number of elementary kids raised their hands to accept Jesus. One very cute boy repeated what all the bead colors in his bracelet meant and said, but I am an M, can Jesus love me too? When told Jesus loves him and died for him, he happy agreed to have the bracelet put on his arm too. This happened to several more of the kids of different ages. One girl said in a soft voice that Isa (Jesus) was now her God. An older boy told us we were the "best" group to ever come and visit, because the other groups came and just played games or do things, but we brought the good news with us. Last year, we were kind of disappointed that we could not share with the M. people and this year, God brought them to us. One other exciting news to report is that much of this was done by the Indonesian team members! God hand picked those kids to come (and we used up almost all the food we brought) and touched many young lives tonight. Pray for them, especially the M kids, that they will know how to grow up in their culture and yet follow Isa faithfully. One other factoid. The skies started to darken when we started VBS (about 5:30 PM) but the rain never came and we had to walk perhaps a kilometer from the bus to this orphanage but it stayed dry the whole way, although apparently it rained only a few feet from where the bus was parked. God is gracious and good. We had a great day of ministry, and can't wait to see what surprises God has in store for us tomorrow!
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