What's Wrong with Our World?

A brilliant young speaker was our preacher this Sunday. To a dazed and startled congregation, he skillfully narrated the tale of the legendary Reverend Jim Jones who was charismatic enough to lead his own cultic church and convince thousands to leave their jobs and daily lives and follow him and live in a small, secluded hermit community around him. A man who was dynamic enough and psychotic enough to persuade almost a thousand unfortunate devotees to commit mass suicide through cyanide poisoning. A deranged monster of a man. And what was it that attracted so many to him? The fact that in an unfeeling, uncaring world, he and his cult seemed to care for them. "What's wrong with the world?" our speaker boomed from the pulpit. And it prompted me to think. What IS wrong with us?

I think we as a race, have evolved to such a level that we no longer know what is important to us. There is today a painful scarcity of that rarest of all commodities - Love. When was the last time you said "I love you" to someone? Think about it. Spouses, parents, friends, sweethearts....all of us....we hesitate to say "I love you". Why? And even when we do so, what do we really mean? Do we mean, "I love you because it is convenient, painless and necessary for me", or do we mean, "I love you in spite of everything because I can't help it"?

In a world that teaches us to grab, wear blinkers, climb over fallen comrades and fight our way to the top, where is the space for Love? It's a 'dog-eat-dog' world and it's every man for himself. Parents push children to over-achieve when they should be allowing them space to blossom on their own; children focus on their own dreams and force their parents to fade into the background. Husbands don't think they need to tell their wives everyday that they appreciate them; Wives breed resentment because they believe they are being taken advantage of. Even friends use each other and move on when they are done. Really, where is the Love?

Since childhood, I have done my best to avoid movies like 'The Passion of the Christ' because I could never reconcile myself to the fact that God sent His only Son to die so painfully a criminal's death, for my ruddy sake! It just seems so amazingly unfair to me. With every painful, dragging step as He carries the cross to Golgotha, with every crack of the thorny whip on His shattered and furrowed back and with every blow of the hammer on His bloodied, nailed wrists, I wince and tremble and ineveitably end up blubbering into my neighbour's sleeve. I did that at 7 and at 30, I continue to do it. However, there is one big reason why I keep watching these movies.....for just one scene that will always remain before my eyes - the courtyard scene with Peter and Jesus.

Jesus has been dragged to the High Priest's courtyard and flogged within an inch of His life through the customary 39 lashes. Peter is lurking in the background trying to sneak a look or maybe garner some information on what awaits His Lord. By the light of the bonfire there, a woman recognises Peter. He waves her away hoping no one has heard her. To his great dismay though, soon many more identify him. "Weren't you with the Nazarene?" they ask. "Weren't you part of his entourage too?" "We know you, we saw you with him...", they badger Peter. Trapped and cornered, he chooses the smartest way out. Thrice he utters the same lie - "No, no, leave me alone. I tell you I do not know the man!" At the 3rd utterance, the cock crows (as Jesus once predicted it would) loud and clear. Shaken by his betrayal, Peter looks up, only to gaze directly into the eyes of an exhausted Jesus who meets his look from across the courtyard. Unable to bear that look, Peter flees the place.

I have often wondered what it was that Peter saw in Jesus' eyes that night. What was it that caused him so much grief and shame and later toughened him up so much as to become the rock on which the church was built and even unto a martyr's death? Was it disappointment? Couldn't be. Jesus knew this was coming. Bitterness? Sorrow? Pain? Tears? After much deliberation, I can only conclude that to effect such a reaction from Peter, the expression in Jesus' eyes, could have been only one thing - Love.

To be betrayed by all you knew and healed and fed and cared about, to be deserted by your closest friends, to be at death's door with no one who loves you enough by your side, to lie there bleeding and friendless and dying.....and to still be able to convey with just one look all your heart's passion for someone...now THAT is Love. Where is that Love in our world today?

Admit it. All of us are starved for love and affection in some way or the other. The old beggar at the beach deserted by his family, the young software techie making a lonely living faraway from home, the silent suburban housewife wishing her husband would come home early, the little orphan child hoping someone would adopt her, the widowed woman with kids wondering if someone will ever love her again, the aging single man desperate for just one woman to love him as he is......face it...we all need Love.

God's love is of course available to all of us. But there is one conditional clause. God's love can reach people only via media other people. If you like me are wondering today what's wrong with the world, then stand up and do your part. Go home and love your family. Go out and show someone you care. Little by little, one person at a time, we can heal the world.

Afraid you'll get hurt if you do love somebody genuinely and with all you've got? Honestly speaking, you probably will. You can't love someone without emotionally investing yourself in them. But then again, think of Jesus, (the Son of God who ought to have been sitting by His Father's side, reigning in royal majesty), rolling around in His own blood, torn and battered because of you, and still saying, "I love you so much". Maybe that will help.

A Blessed Easter to you friend.....

"This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. " - 1 John 4:9-12

2009, Thy Name is Change!

"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." - Proverbs 23:7

I've always been a self-confessed pessimist. Never shy about admitting it, I've occasionally been known to even crow it proudly from the rooftops! Flabbergasted? Hang on. I had a good reason to so blatantly endorse a negative thought pattern. Atleast I thought I did. I thought it was smart to be a pessimist. That way, if something nice happens to you, it's a pleasant surprise and if something terrible happens, well you knew it was coming anyways!!

Being the smart person that your are, you must have noticed by now dear Reader, that the previous paragraph is mostly in the past tense. Since mid-January '09, I have made a 180-degree about-turn on what I once presumed was an infallible philosophy. In my usual scatter-brained way, I shall now assume that the minutest details of how my weird brain works is of exquisite importance to all the world and shall proceed to enlighten you on why I have so drastically changed a policy that I had imagined so long, was working for me. If you're yawning already, please feel free to skip to the last paragraph. But if you're the stubborn kind, stay with me Reader, for I'm gonna take you on a ride that might change your life. It certainly changed mine.

I didn't choose to be a pessimist. I don't think I even spent a minute thinking about it as I was growing up (Ever seen a pessimistic child?). As is usual, Life happened to me and after having received a substantial number of kicks under the belt, I naturally chose to be wary of what's coming around the corner. Except that as is normal for me, I was extreme about it. I was the young woman who wouldn't take a risk at anything. I would throw away raffle tickets long before the draw date, build mountains outta termite heaps, moan over things that I imagined would happen sometime or the other and pretty much spent my youth shadow-fencing with life. I wouldn't even try bowling with my friends 'cos I was absolutely sure it would be a gutter ball and everyone would laugh at me! The same went for snooker, entering the best B-school possible, growing in my chosen field of work and even in finding my prince.

I was always the one that hung behind, peering suspiciously, pussy-footing and finally nodding vigorous No's at the myriad opportunities that literally thrust themselves in front of my nose in so many life spheres. My attitude puzzled a lot of people who thought I had all it took and more, to face life's challenges and come out tops. Some even believed I was unfairly equipped as compared to other people. Frankly, their attitudes puzzled me too. I couldn't for the life of me, see what was so great about being me, especially with a magnificent list of past failures to my credit.

By the time I was 30, I was a hardened pessimist who believed that life had a roaring lemon business going, considering the number of lemons it handed out to so many unprepared mortals everyday. I vowed I would never be one of them, and went about it by screwing up my face and bracing myself every time I came to a moment of truth. Truth is though, however hard I braced myself, I still found myself reeling anyways when the expected blow finally came.

Looking back now, I think it mostly came because I was expecting it to! This over-cautious attitude of my past has truly done nothing for me. Sure, it sapped me of positive life energy, allowed me to turn the other way while the chances of a lifetime danced past me, completely lowered my self-esteem and significantly contributed to a string of failures in life arenas where I should by all right never have failed at all. Apart from these ignominious achievements, my negativity has done zip for me.

Mid-January this year, I went through a personal crisis that threatened to swallow up my sanity and envelope me in the mother of all depressions I've ever been swamped in so far. Consequently, an innate sense of survival kicked in and I was forced to re-examine my attitudes and the way they've affected my life. I could remember most of my close friends telling me atleast once that I was negative about something even before I embarked on it or had a chance to explore it. Directed by an intuition that I can only call the 'still, small voice of God', and strengthened by the counselling of His Holy Spirit, I chose to reinvent my attitude towards life.

Prompted by my father who to this day regrets his negativity in most things and encouraged by a colleague who is the very soul of optimism, I took to reading 'The Power of Positive Living' by the Late Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. In a matter of days, armed with Biblical references and true-to-life testimonies, the good Rev.Peale's argument for positive thinking and renewed faith turned my life upside down and showed me I'd had it all wrong all along. I had earlier cultivated to an art, the ability to take the most positive of situations and turn them around so that I was a depressed, whimpering pathetic heap of humanity at the drop of a hat. I found to my great delight that I could use that same ability now, to turn myself into a live-wire engine of upbeat positivity and intense faith within that same time frame. It was only a question of what I wanted to do with those few odd seconds. No wonder then that I found myself healthier, eating better, sleeping better and feeling lighter and happier than I can remember in years. And all this, while I am still immersed in my personal crisis.

Positive thinking didn't change my life. It changed me to face life. I have learnt to recognise that life will always have rainy days and fearsome shadows and dark valleys, but I don't have to dwell on them. Instead, I can choose to lift up my soul in the memory of sunny days gone by and the hope of heaven on earth to come. For a confirmed veteran pessimist such as I, this hasn't been easy. I have had to give myself a complete inner makeover, throwing out old ideas and fears and clinging instead with all I've got, to Philippians 4:13 - "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."

Positive thinking demands an unwavering faith in God. I have reasoned that if it true that the Lord of the Old and New Testaments performed miracles then, and if it is also true that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), then it also follows that our changeless God is capable of those same miracles even today. In Mark 6:4-6, Jesus is amazed at the lack of faith in His hometown and finds Himself unable to perform many miracles there, save a few scattered instances of healing here and there. I think the message is obvious. Many a time, it is our spectacular lack of faith that blocks what God is yearning to do in our lives.

I am done with losing out on the abundant life that Jesus promised. These days, I subscribe to Rabindranath Tagore's view that, "Faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking and sings while it is yet dark". This so closely mirrors Hebrews 11:1 -" Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." And when I say 'faith' here, I mean a complete confidence in the character of God regardless, of past disappointments or future fears or the circumstances we find ourselves surrounded by. It means jumping off the cliff of doubt without a safety net and completely believing God's gonna meet you half-way there. True faith is like the true love of 1Corinthians 13. It always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. And of course, true faith never fails either.

Faith is not a virtue one acquires and is done with for life. I have learnt the hard way that instead, it is an everyday struggle, where it is quite acceptable to stumble, pick ourselves up and keep going. The key to unlocking a life filled with pure joy and faith then, is to be able to let go of all that we hold onto in our insecurity....every worldly thing that we think will break our mad tumble into failure , despair and anonymity, and simply cling on with the unquestioning faith of a child, in a God whom we trust, will always give us the best (Matthew 7:7-11).

My faith journey has just started and I have a long way to go. But I am encouraged to know that God is with me on this every step of the way. After all, He did say, "I have not given you a spirit of fear, but of power, of love and of self-discipline" (2 Timothy 1:7). And I 'm also privy to the knowledge that when I delight in Him, He gives me the desires of my heart ( Psalm 37:4). Even if He won't, I am willing to believe it is for the best because my God is good ALL the time , not just when He's keeping me happy. With the dawning of these realisations, has come the enabling to action the command in Romans 12:2 - "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is — His good, pleasing and perfect will." And consequently, I know without a doubt, that one day, I will sing in the Psalmist's words, "I waited patiently for the Lord; He turned to me and heard my cry" (Psalm 40:1), praise God!

My challenge to you today is this: Will you step out in faith today, thrust away everything that whispers in your ear that nothing good can happen to you, put your hope in Him (and Him alone) and believe that He will never suffer those who wait on Him to be shamed (Psalm 25:3a)? It's a New Year people.....Chew on it.....

"........Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief" - Mark 9:24
(For more on what the Word of God says about faith, please click here)