The Cross and the pen

It was a morning flight from Bangalore. As much as I like the city, the gloomy weather which unfolds so very often there always doesn't help. I was on the flight to Delhi, leaving behind Abisha, my wife who was 9 months pregnant expecting our first child. I was feeling extremely low. I was uncertain about the different emotions I was experiencing. It was going to be the longest time I am going to be away from her especially when she needs me the most. But I knew that it has to play out this way for this season of our life and anyway I was going to meet her again in a month.   Yet the gloomy weather made me even more depressed. And life can do that to us. Circumstances, events, broken relationships, uncertain future, failures, setbacks can always create the gloomy weather around us. How do you feel at this point in your life? Gloomy, depressed and sad? It was just about a minute since the flight took off and we immediately felt the turbulence when the plane passes through ...

The Word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.” The next time you pick up the Bible, see how the different books are introduced. They are very interesting and different! The book of Jonah, is very direct and gets straight to the point. There was a problem, God wanted someone to get down under the car with the spanner and the wrench, get dirty and clean it up and that man was Jonah. Jonah, however strongly felt that he was not the man for the job. Bible scholars tell us different reasons why Jonah acted the way he did. Nineveh was a sinful and an arrogant city. Jonah was almost certain that sharing the news was pointless there…”these people are going to ridicule me, mock me…it’s throwing pearls before swine. God – I don’t like this plan. Please change it immediately and get back to me if it would be something that would interest me and go well with my personality.” ...

July 2014 was a great month for me! On the 11 th of July, I got a call from my office and heard that they had accepted me for the post I had applied for. Wow! That was great news but surprisingly, that was the second best news I had heard that weekend. The best news that I had over that weekend, beat the second best by light years. Life is an interesting journey… riddled with highways, narrow lanes, traffic jams, potholed filled roads, diversions, road blocks, one ways, breakdowns and many other features that you can see on any journey. In such a variety of pace and scenery it’s hard to know when, how and what decisions need to be taken. One such decision is about marriage. When do I take this decision? How should I take it? And more importantly who should I marry???? I just wish that it was as easy as it was for Adam, go to sleep, wake up and presto! There she was…. The woman God gave me. But it’s almost never that simple right? I was no different. The Bible says that God s...

I just want a normal life When I was a little girl, I had dreams. Not over the top, but just any little girl would have. I wanted to grow up, get married to a nice guy, have few children, raise them… Not asking too much am I? Just a dream to have a regular life with regular moments of happiness and sadness, pain and pleasures.. At first when things did not work out for me, I said to myself it’s just a matter of time before it falls in place… just a few hiccups now and then but there is light at the end of the tunnel and it’s just around the corner. I waited. It never happened. A life of satisfaction, peace and contentment never came. Was I too naïve when I was young to dream for a ‘normal’ life? Just before I hit 20, mom passed away. That was very difficult. I was close to her. Slowly, after a year, though it seemed like ten years, I knew I had to move on. Dad, however, was still mourning. Actually he never recovered. He would just sit back on his chair and stare into wha...

'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...

Things are much much harder now. I feel hunger..pain..but all that is just physical. Nothing is able to heal the pain in my heart. I lost my son! For the first time I felt so many emotions. There was grief, anger with the person who killed him,  frustration,  and anger with myself for my past decisions. For the first time I felt my body tremble as I touched my son’s lifeless body. The blood was flowing. I called out his name..I screamed his name…but…no.. there was no response. His eyes did not look into mine like it did the first time I held him. I ran, scampered, stumbled like a mad man. I could not groan anymore as my insides hurt. I coiled myself hoping that that would stop the thoughts of my son running to my brain..no it didn’t. I wanted to kill myself but I didn’t have the strength to do it. I cannot explain what was happening to his mother in this time. Why did this all happen? Is this why I was created? To see all this and go through all this pain? Surely there must...