Good Friday

Hey guys,

It’s been a while. Over the past 3 weeks It has really hit me on how little time I have left, so I have been trying to spend every single minute that I can with the children and I have neglected email and facebook. 

There’s so much I can blog about and I have so many amazing journal entries and funny stories I could share with you, but I’ll save those for in person. 

This Friday I leave, and it’s going to be the hardest day of the year for me. Every single trip I have made to India I have bawled my eyes out by the end of the trip, and that’s after only being there for 1 week. So I’m really not looking forward to Friday morning, and the children haven’t been looking forward to it either. 

About 2-3 weeks ago I was sitting on the counter in the kitchen where the GCH kids eat,  some of the girls were sweeping the floor and Swathi, the girl our family supports, was sitting next to me holding my hand. After a few minutes she looked at me with her big dark brown eyes and said, “Caleb, don’t go to America.” I almost cried right there and then because I realized I didn’t want to go. The GCH kids don’t feel like kids anymore, they feel like my family. I know all of them so well and I will never forget their faces.

What’s going to make Friday morning even harder for me, is that I don’t know if I will see half these friends ever again. It’s going to be very hard to get back here within the next 4 years because of school, and by then a lot of the kids will be gone, married and far away. What I find joy in, is that one day we will all be back together in heaven.

I think India has changed my viewpoint on heaven. To me paradise is living with hundreds of people that you have so much love for that you cannot contain it. And you’re constantly laughing and joking with each other. So on some level, these past 2 months have been heaven for me, and no one wants to leave heaven. 

With all these emotions going through me, I also feel so much joy and excitement to get back to New York. Last night, I skyped with Communitas during the gathering and at the end my dad said I’d be back by saturday and everyone clapped and cheered. It made me realize that I also have a family back in New York that misses me and is excited for me to be back. 

I will talk about this more in my next blog, and I do plan on doing about 2 more blogs, but I have changed so much. If I were to be honest, I haven’t spent as much time with God as I would have liked to. I mean, I probably spend half my day reading the Bible, other books, praying, journaling and stuff like that, but I thought I would commit more time to it then I did. Either way, God has made the most of the time I gave him and has grown me in so many ways. I truly feel like a different person. 

On some level I think I had some anger inside of me that I had grown accustom to and was completely unaware of. God has worked with me over the past 2 months in cleansing me from that anger. It’s hard to describe how I feel now because it’s still a new feeling to me, if I had to describe I would say unconditional love. I have so much love for people now and I feel like I already had a lot of love for people before. I look at people or even think of people and get the biggest smile on my face, it’s like God is just pouring his love on me and I’m exerting that love onto everyone else. 

I will talk about this more later but I wanted to tell you this now so I could give you another reason as to why I’m excited to come home. I feel like I’m a different person now than when I left for India, and I’m excited to bring the new Caleb back to New York and continue life with my family and friends, only I feel like it will be very different this time around. I don’t know if that makes any sense. It’s kind of like when someone goes to school for 4 years to become a teacher. When they graduate they cannot wait to get out into the real world and have a class room and students of their own. Maybe that confused you even more, well it makes sense to me. 

I was supposed to post these a while ago, but a week after I left they started to dig to reinforce the foundation for the chapel they’re building. It’s been cool to watch all this work being done without machines. 

Also, the water buffalo had a baby a month back and I forgot to post the picture. He’s very friendly. 

This is one of the tile pictures in the children section of the hospital. It gave me a laugh.

This was taken just yesterday from the top of the hospital building. 

Well, I’ll write one more blog hopefully on thursday, and one when I’m back. Or I’ll end up writing them both when I’m back. 

Love you guys, sorry for the lateness of this blog and for it not being quite as interesting. 

~Caleb