The Cross and the pen

'Under-valued' Grace One of the perks of working in a Christian organization is time spent in morning devotion at the Lord’s feet. At work, we follow a daily devotional called Everyday with Jesus by Rev. Selwyn Hughes. It will have a small Bible portion, a thought to meditate on and a prayer. We spend some time discussing the thought afterwards. Every month will have a theme to meditate on and February was on the topic of Grace. Some truths about it were eye-opening and the illustration I am going to talk about was birthed after about 5 months of meditation. Grace to a regular church’ go-er’ might sometimes sound like a narrow topic. We hear and sing about it so often that we know it is ‘amazing’ and it is because of that we have eternal life today.  But just a superficial understanding of grace with important and regularly used Christian jargons can terribly under value grace and we start treating it as an exclusive right that we can demand than an undeserved privi...

‘Giving’ within in the Christian world, is a very diverse and versatile word. There are so many thing facets of giving. One has to give his or her time, money, resources, talents etc to God. Usually this is summed up by saying “One has to give his/her whole life to God”. I am sure no one is going to question in me on this. As Paul would say, this is a trustworthy saying. But since giving is diverse in our definition, there are some pitfalls every Christian has to watch out for in the process of giving. And to be honest, this is a reflection of one of the struggles that I go through and hoping to change in the new year. One mistake a Christian has the potential to make is giving what is …wrong. Duh! That’s obvious! In the old testament, in the book of Numbers, we see the God giving detailed instructions about sacrifices. Male goat, a year old, without any blemish, healthy and so on. So, for an Israelite to sacrifice a weak grandpa goat which was limping was outright wrong! So h...