Restoration

Inconsolable tears I often shed;

Anger and self-pity my daily bread,

Confident and courageous I duly seem;

And yet I know God's not in my team.

I pull it together and make the days pass,

The nights! How with their long hours they harass;

Hymns of adoration though I gaily sing,

And yet I know God's not my only King.

Oh! Why this misery? Why this shift?

When I know it is others I must lift!

Duty, relationships and the daily grind;

Excuses! Excuses! Do I want to be left behind?

Alas! And did I at long last see;

It is not my Savior who abandoned me!

For in striving to enter the promised land,

I had forgotten to hold my Father's hand.

He leads me beside the still waters. - Psalm 23:2

He's got His eye on a sparrow

I know that I should not let my life pass me by. You cant just sit there and let life happen to you right? When I was a child, I saw everyone around me and you thought my life was going to be different. Not because I did anything to have it that way, but because its 'my' life and it has to be different. There is this fantasy and surety where I have my life all planned out.. Me.. I was just someone different.. sometimes I would want to be a rancher in the Pampas, a wildlife photographer with Natgeo and more recently, a travel host on Travel and Living. I always thought I will be in a hostel in a great college and be a great business woman. I wanted to have my own house and my own car by the time I get married. I wanted to have many friends. I wanted to follow the motto of "Work hard, and Party harder' . I wanted to travel the world even before I got married and many times after. After all, my mom did. There were places I had to see, people I had to meet, rooms to stay, lakes to swim, mountains to climb, food to eat, and a life to LIVE. Life passed you by? No. That would not happen to me. Why? Its me we are talking about.

Has life passed me by? Probably not, you would say. Come on, you are a young woman on the brink of adulthood and you have all your life ahead of you. But you see, this is all I planned for. All the fun I thought I would have was only till here. This is the threshold of all that you can be while you still have a chance before the world heaps a hunk of responsbility on you, you ready or not.

What am I now? Travelled the world...been out of the country yes, to 3 countries so far. Cant really call myself a country hopper. Never been to the Pampas, let alone have a ranch there.
Watch T&L with a passion but thats all there is to it. Studied from home in a college which no one ever heard of doing a course no one ever heard of and as a day-scholar and right now Working in a company no one ever heard of. The only thing common here is that I am a Software Engineer same as thousands and thousands of other people my age. I have joined the herd.Friends? Are there any left? Am not really sure. Life even the fun I did have is changing with friends from college and work leaving one by one. Each one has their own dream. And I stand alone.

So, whats so special about me? What have I become? In this short span of a quarter of my life, a few great things happened to me. God chose me to be His child and join Him in His Kingdom. He chose that I be washed from my sins and shown a way to eternity. He ensured my future and He cleant my past and He holds my present. What does this give me? A dear friend in the Lord Jesus Christ and a close companion and guide in the Holy Spirit. It gives me the assurance that my life is safe and sheltered like a Sparrow in the hands of God. Thats me.

A lot of things dint happen the way I planned. A lot did. My life has not been a one bucket of successes. And neither is it a barrel of failures. Its flavored. And when you look back, you see that you have been getting everything that you wanted and needed and more. And things that you dont plan happen to you, coz its planned by a greater being. And all you need to do is let go and trust in the Lord who made you and knows you inside out, your plans and desires and your ambitions and He will get you there. And the journey is sweet. For He is driving.

MITRA thoughts

Sometimes in life you don’t really get the bigger picture of why you are doing something until after its done. You get stuck with the flow and somewhere in the middle you think why am I doing this work? It is not going to mean a thing to anyone a few days after its done, right? So why do it? I thought CSR was one such thing…

CSR… Corporate Social Responsibility was a new term for me when I joined my first job. After all, who talks in terms of CSR in the normal world? It was just another management lingo for community service. And the more I heard about it, the less I liked it. It was just another platform for the big companies to do their branding. Hold a banner printed for a pittance of their salary saying Green Walk or World peace and other such high sounding terms, walk around the busiest street you can get in the city, put as many people into inconvenience holding up traffic as you can and BAM! There comes your name with photo attached in the next day’s paper and you get all the branding you want without spending a paise.

Well, that was CSR for me, and I used to stare into my screen hard when someone came along looking for ‘volunteers’ to join their Peace walk, hoping they would think I am busy. what good it would do, my Walking in the sun with a placard over my head, which I am supposed to be holding up to bring about peace I do not know. Until, MITRA.

MITRA was born right before my eyes. MITRA is a village adoption program.

Huh? We were talking about ‘adopting’ a village to make it go green. In true sense, all we really wanted to do was get some land to plant some trees on. But after some time of pushing ideas around, everyone felt that it was adopting we were talking about, it had to be full-blown. Adopt the village, it’s people, every house and every tree. When we started thinking about it that way, the village was our oyster. So the guys from the tree-planting foundation found us this nice village near Red hills and my friends and I set out to take a look at ‘our’ village.

Now since all the villages I had been to had miles of green fields and wells and a hut here and there, I couldn’t really be blamed if that was I expected to see. But enter the area and nothing. I kept looking around for a ‘village’ standing in it!
But it turned out that that village had it’s own needs, surrounded by industries as it was. Our first activity there was a medical camp conducted in the local school. With of course, the tree planting and a round of data collection about it’s people. The fire in our company to be a part of MITRA was amazing. I still cant understand how people want to come and spend a day in the sun. But that’s how it is.

Activity Two was a distribution of uniforms, school bags and footwear to the kids in the school. Once again, I was miffed at the number of people who wanted to come with us. After all, it was a Friday and its not so easy to cut a day of work, they being billable to the client and everything.

But it still happened.

And the kids were so great. With their enthusiastic reception, and eagerness to get us to gulp sodas and arrange benches and chairs.

The way they smiled, with their shy but sweet faces, hands clutching their bags. The way they all crowded sound you for a snap, the way they took care of us, the way they brought their parents to meet us.

We went there to serve, but we were the ones served.
We went to put a smile on their faces, but we were the ones left smiling broader in the end.

He wants to be first, let him be the last - Luke 22: 26

Sometimes you feel that life is at it's lowest ebb and that though everything seems to be the same, nothing is. I think at times there can be no mood-killer as bad as boredom or having nothing to do for long periods of time. They were right about idle minds. Not that am necessarily thinking something evil, but then dint God say Rejoice! Rejoice. simply because God is in charge and hence there is nothing to worry about. Rejoice for there is a way out of everything and everything happens for a definite purpose and all things work together for good to them that love God?

I think the key is to remember to be consciously cheerful. Like the one where this guy has to get up in the morning and decide whether he is happy that it's 'nother day or mad at the sun for waking him up. Comes down to the Stephen Covey principle. No, am not bringing management into this.

But living life to the lees is an option to every man.
It's all your choice, really.

Rejoice, again I say, rejoice! - Philippians 4:4