what about the Bells?

Jan 1 2009
Modern day Jesus has kind of been a theme in my reading lately, with books like "the shack" and "Messiah of Morris avenue"

but today i saw something that made me think of modern day Jesus...

we arrived in Kitwe after a ridiculously insanely lame bus ride, where we waited 3 hours for the bus to fill and then another 3 hours to get there, all the while the chickens and children on the bus are squawking, we arrive to a brightly shining smiling James. Who brought us to a guest house and then took us to his own home.

I'm going fast but i don't' know how to tell this story.

James was only expecting two of us and it was cool to see how "whatever" it was that we where four.
Anyway! he took us to his home where we met his beautiful family and chatted for a bit. After a few minutes we decided to go into Mulanga, where they run their home base care and feeding scheme, its been raining so the track from his home to where we are headed is mud city, James joked about how the need to budget for gum boots, so needless to say the four of us in flip flops got very muddy and it turned out that the path was impassable due to the hugest puddle known to man.

So we trek it back up to James' house and he brings out buckets of water for us to wash our feet and he eventually washes Jessie's shoes...it just put a new twist on the Bible story of Jesus' washing his disciples feet and you can see the one James serves shine through him.

Jan 2
I am so impressed and inspired. I asked James as a joke if i could move into his house, because i want to stay here! i just want to do home base care and hang out with the children.
This morning James came and got us and we went to whats pretty much there home base care head quarters, its a home that they run there feeding program out of. Inside lives a lady they call "Mama Junior" (apparently in Zambian culture they just refer to you as mother of so and so, so her sons name is junior that's why they call her that)
Mama Junior cooks for all the children in the feeding program and lets many of them stay in the house with her.
It was so cool because it was like all these different people giving what they could for the benefit of the children.

We did two really quick home visits and it was cool, this is what you would call a slum, its kind of like a isolated township inside a city, the paths are muddy and "streamy" and full of garbage and after about 5 seconds we had a parade of children following us.
it was so surreal

Its strange/awesome how chatting with people brings out different points or sensory details.
I was talking with Alisha and she brought up how she was so impressed with the way the volunteers interacted with the Children.
Pastor Blessings would always hold any child that was any where near him, on our first home visit there was a little toddler soaked in pee and he just held her....In Africa "Pastor" is generally a hugely held up title and from what i have seen of lots of pastors they wouldn't have done it...but here is this man taking Jesus seriously. So inspiring!
also we where walking along and this one girl recognized Crispan and her face just totally lit up and she ran and flung herself into his arm, it was cool to see these things because like...you could tell they weren't just putting on a show...this is there being!