Road trips – you end up where you started!But this 1557 km journey from Vellore to Karur, Munnar, Kumarakom, Kumily, Thekkad, Vandanmedu and back gave us enough memories to last a lifetime. Thank God for an amazing time and safety! This is our first major road trip ever since we returned from OZ and even though the drive was very different, the scenery was just as spectacular as Australia or New Zealand!

Ooh the joy of having a dentist as a mom! J now prays this every night.“Dear Jesus, Make all the black hearts white hearts by your precious blood. Make all the bad people good people and make all the dirty teeth as clean teeth.”I hope God is listening! I am sure he is!!

I’m not even sure if it is spelt Mathew or Matthew, but he is the guy who made Grahams trip to India possible. He’s just a regular guy in a shirt and jeans. I met him for twenty minutes during dinner with Graham on Saturday and I must accept that today I feel that he has impacted my life as much as Graham did over the weekend. After spending 9 years in the UK he made a choice to come back to India to serve and follow Gods calling. He came back about 4 months ago and had his first child 2 months ago. I know how huge such a change is – We barely managed to tolerate the move…

Its always nice to meet someone who has influenced your choice of music. And when I knew Graham Kendrick was coming to Vellore, I knew it would be an awesome weekend.“Shine, Jesus, Shine” was one of the first songs I had learnt at TAMI with India YFC. “Servant King” was one of the first new song I learnt at CMC as it had CMCs motto in the first verseSo after grabbing my tickets and registrations from Roshan I was fully prepared for friday night after 2 sleepless nights in the nursery. I left work an hour early, grabbed a power nap and we scooted off to Scudder Auditorium. We were very lucky to get seats! “An Evening With Graham” was…

Today is one day when I am glad I was born in the modern era. I needed a couple of complicated dental extractions and my mind was numb with fear as images of people screaming, getting drowned in blood and needing to be tied down flooded my mind. But that was thousands of years ago.The only thing that was numb was my mouth and gums. All I needed to do was lie down with my mouth open and brilliant Dr. Saurabh took care of the rest. A few deft jabs to get the local anaesthesia in and even though the extractions were pretty difficult with brittle teeth remnants and complicated roots I could close my eyes and be a little…

End of the month and these are the songs that left their mark in my ear and my heart. Top five songs:1. Praise like Fireworks: Rend Collective2. Desert Soul: Rend Collective3. Boldly I Approach: Rend Collective4. Alive: Hillsong5. Dhanya Tera Naam: Sheldon Bangera Artist of the month: Rend Collective (You would have guessed that by now!) Lets see what the next month throws at me!

J’s favorite activity after a busy Sunday school at church is train watching. The drive back from church takes us across a railway crossing and he must be the only person who gets upset if the gates are open and we make a quick crossing. He loves it if there is a delay and he gets to watch a couple of trains toot and zip across the crossing. Even though it can mean a 15 minute delay, we have grown to love this time.I sometimes wonder if I tend to miss out on the simple pleasures of life by quickly zipping through life and not pausing to watch something as innocuous as a train thundering past. Sometimes those fifteen minutes…

After celebrating 68 years of Independence on August 15th, lots of people were chatting and facebooking about what has changed after Independence. Ironically this full page front page ad on the post independence day newspaper seems to sum up what is so wrong with our society. The ad involves a top newspaper, a well known jewellery store and two well known celebrities. You would expect the message to be positive given that it was the day after all the Independence Day celebrations.Unfortunately this ad is wrong on so many levels it’s almost impossible to blog about it. This ad could  be legally banned in a lot of countries.At a time when womens equality is a norm and people are professing…

Today, as we drove to church, a store, a lunch get-together at Bagayam and then back home, the predominant music playing in the car was by Rend Collective.Stumbling on to the band was semi-accidental.When we were in Chennai last year, we worshipped at a church called Ashraya. The worship leader led in a very lively song that stuck in my mind for weeks and then slowly faded away. In November 2014, my sister visited us at Vellore with her family. As we caught up and did lots of exciting things, we also played some songs that our children liked. J said that K loved this song and then played a video for us from youtube – the song was “Build…

I was leading worship in church after a break of 3 months. We met up an hour early and practised.As we entered the third song, the power went off and the lights and the fans stopped. The projector, mixer and sound still worked on backup for a few minutes. I could hear the beep indicating that this too would stop in a few minutes. Pastor and Rabin Chacko went out to fiddle with something. Halfway through “Shout to the Lord”, everything went blank.  Since this was a familiar song, we continued. Then magically in less than  a minute, everything came on except the projector. Anisha walked up and reswitched the backup UPS and switched on the projector and soon “Jesus,…