Large and bright on the wall halfway up the stairs to our room is THE poster with THE rules of conduct for THE Hotel. Last, but by no means least among the tribes of Law is number six. There shall be no hooliganism . . . Todd and I have tried to abide by the dictates of this command. Unfortunately we have yet to find a definition for Hooliganism. Apparently our dictionaries are not quite up to date.
The seminars here in Chitwan province, Nepal have been a wonder of God grace and mercy. Todd and I arrived all ready to go through a short introduction to the Catechism, that is we had two days to go through the whole thing. When we arrived Raju told us that there were a number of new pastors and perhaps it would be better to go through the “Statement of Faith and Purpose.” Back in 2007 when I was considering this call, Dave told me one of the most important qualities of a foreign missionary is flexibility. This is just one example of that. Fortunately I happened to have with me my notes from last year when we went over the statement, and the statement itself. Raju had plenty of copies of the document but his were all translated into Nepali.
So Todd and I shoved off the first day starting class at 10:00am making our way through the first six sections with relative ease. Today we started at 7:00am and managed to make it through only two sections by 11:30. This was not really surprising since we knew the two areas where they had the most questions were in regard to women’s roles in the Church and Infant Baptism. We were certainly delighted to have a good discussion about these two important doctrines and I believe many of the new pastors accepted the teachings of the Bible, recognizing God’s authority.
Initially the seminar was supposed to be simply for the nine pastors who were already members of the HCLC-Nepal, but we were glad to find out that a number of other pastors were coming as well. When we began our seminar there were Twelve but that number quickly grew to Twenty-two. Some of them had to leave for various reasons and some no doubt left because they did not agree with what we said but by the end of the second day there were still sixteen pastors. We thank the Lord for bringing us altogether and pray that they all prospered in hearing the Word of God.
The weather here in Chitwan remains cool and damp, about what you would expect near the end of September. The sun is obscured by clouds and fog. Two days ago as we were traveling from Hatuada to Chitwan we drove far enough up the mountains that we got above the clouds. When we came down again on the other side the clouds lay below us like a rolling sea of white cotton, the sun also was setting at the time and the combination of the sky above and the clouds below with the hues of sunset skipping across both and the rugged mountain peaks nestled in-between was simply beautiful. Of course I tried to take pictures which of course don’t do it justice but some of them turned out okay. You can find these pictures in the “Mountain Lands” post below. Also there are a number of pictures of the Himalayas as seen from the top of a tower in Daman, Nepal. On the top of this tower was a telescope, I tried to use the telescope to get a closer picture of the mountains with mixed results.
Raju and Rajan keep promising that when we have time we will go out and ride some elephants, but so far we have not had time, too much work to do. Perhaps we will get the opportunity, but then again we will hopefully be back often as we continue to work with these men to spread the Gospel here in Nepal. So if not this time maybe in the future.
Praise the Lord,
Matthew Ude