Love

Life appears red
In a funnel shaped glass.
On a 40 inch screen 
Runs my favorite TV show
Memories go back
All the way 7 years
Used to sit on a couch
With a beer bottle for company
A few months later
You took the place.
It was all fizz and no barley
Take a while it did
But happy I am now
To have completely drenched in you.
The wine the beer
And an occasional tequila
They all seem to bend their knees
No better intoxication than you my love.
Want to live and not just that
If you ever decide to leave
Know that I can't be on the couch
All alone again!

The Lost Love!

She stayed in the corner of that house which was dark most of the times. Though surrounded by many known faces, she lived in constant pain of loneliness. It has been months since she lost her sweetheart. One day he just vanished leaving no trace at all! They were always together and had travelled to faraway lands. He ensured that she stayed right next to him all the time during each such trip.

No one really could console her since there was no news at all about him. The modern world was mocked at, for all its advanced technology and communication. None of that could find her love and bring him back to her. She cried in silence mostly during the nights and during the day, she’ll sit idle remembering the good old days when they were together.

Here is the irony of life! Not too far from where she stays, in a completely messy house, deep down in the cellar was lying her sweetheart gasping for his breath! He got locked in this dungeon from where there seems to be no escape. He could hear the wailing from his dear one but was absolutely overpowered by the mighty forces above him.

When all hopes seem to have ended, one day he started feeling the pressure on him getting reduced. The forces that tie him down seem to be getting lighter. With each passing day the chamber where he was held a captive was getting filled with fresh air and good light. Finally a day came when he was freed up from the clutches. The first thing he did was to get a perfect hot water bath. He then got himself dried in the sun which was denied to him for all these days!

Finally, one of the grey socks lost deep down in the laundry basket was united with his love who was sitting all alone in the cupboard for the last few months.

They lived happily ever after…

The Other Side of Faith

Article for Bethlehem Matrimonial - Aug 2016

During a recent retreat I attended, one of the brothers shared an experience. One evening his 2 year old son developed a fever. They tried to give some medicines but the fever was not subsiding. He tried to call up one of his doctor friends, usually always available on call, but that day he never answered the phone. He then tried contacting a nearby hospital and for some strange reason even after multiple attempts the hospital staff also didn’t answer.

He got really worried about the situation and that’s when he suddenly felt someone talking to him from within. He very clearly heard a question being asked to him. “You’ve tried giving medicines, called the doctor twice and called the hospital multiple times. How many times did you call Me?” That’s when the brother realized that despite being a man of faith, God became the last resort for him in the event of an emergency instead of being the first one to have called for help. He apologized and the rest is history!

How many of you could really relate to this story? It is an interesting observation that I saw him making that day about many of us. Most of us, especially facing adverse situations in life, often tend to resolve the problem ourselves initially in many ways. At last when everything else fails, we turn to our good God for help. Our faith most often becomes the last thing to be taken out and applied in our lives. Ideally it should’ve been the very first weapon we should’ve wielded to fight against the negative forces that cast its shadows in our lives.

Faith plays a crucial role in every form of life, married or otherwise. The complexities increase in your life especially when you share your life with someone and later when you are blessed with children as well. This makes it all the more important to be aware of the fact that it is not just enough to practice your faith, but to live it. Going to a church on a weekly basis or remembering God during bad times are merely practicing your faith. It isn’t that easy to bring in the concept of living the faith in our lives though that’s what we are required to attempt.

One of the easiest things to do in life is to take people or things for granted. Look around and observe how many blessings that we’ve in our lives that we never bothered to be grateful for. Right from our childhood; think about all the good things that happened in your life. Starting from loving parents and siblings; getting good education, landing up in a good job, being blessed with a wonderful partner and kids, leading a healthy life and many more positive aspects in your life. How many of them are we really thankful to God for. We take many of them for granted as if we were supposed to get it!

There are many good things that happened to you in the past and there are many happening now and many more are bound to happen in future. They are all there, not because you worked for it, but because you are blessed to receive it. This blessing requires you to be constantly thankful and the only way to do that is to live in faith. It is quite easy to be complacent and ignore the source of these blessings. It is easier to question your faith especially when you go through bad times. But that’s when you need to remind yourself about the other side of your faith. It is the side where you go across your current boundary of faith and experience the love of your Creator.

Your bad times are similar to those days when you have a fight with your partner. The day when you hug each other and look in the eyes of your sweetheart and say a sorry, you feel the rush of happiness back in your life. The feeling is similar when you get back to your Creator and try to be one with Him in your faith. You won’t even realize how quickly bad times give way for good ones!

May you be blessed to experience the other side of faith and live in the love and peace of our good God! 

Laundry Basket Theory

Article for Bethlehem Matrimonial - Jul 2016

As is the case with most of the homes we also have a laundry basket in which all the clothes that need to be washed are stored. Every time we take a set of clothes to the washing machine we carefully separate the dark colored ones lest their colors affect the lighter ones. We also separate those clothes that cannot be machine washed and together they go back to the laundry basket.

This practice continued for a while till we reached a day when the basket got piled up with such clothes that cannot be washed in the machine. We’d a problem in hand! The basket will never get empty with this pile of clothes and we started worrying about how to resolve this since manually washing that pile of clothes in one day was an impossible task. We decided to do something smarter.

Every day we started to soak one of the clothes each from the pile which could not be washed in the machine. On a given day even when we had clothes washed in the machine it was not a burden to wash this one piece manually. As days progressed the pile of clothes that had to be hand washed became smaller and smaller and soon enough our laundry basket was totally empty! Suddenly we had nothing to worry about with respect to the laundry.

Do you see any similarity to this laundry basket to the tensions we’ve in our lives? Over a period of time we accumulate quite a lot of matters in our life about which we are constantly tensed. The thoughts about these items that create stress for you get piled up one on top of the other just like the laundry that needs to be hand washed. Nothing seems to be getting resolved and to make it worse many more get added to the list. Your frustration gets the better of you and you start to snap at every minor incident that affects you and more importantly the people around you.

We should learn to apply here the technique of washing I mentioned earlier. It’ll never help if you try to solve all your challenges together. You’ll neither be able to focus on all of them nor resolve even a single challenge. It is better to tackle them one by one if feasible. Specifically address the issues one after the other and find the resolution to remove them from the list of challenges. After a while you’ll be really happy to see the mountain of challenges getting reduced to a tiny hill or even better.

Have you ever driven or been in a car during an extremely heavy rain with the wiper of the vehicle struggling to clear the large volume of water on the windshield? You’ll experience how difficult it is to drive in such a condition since the road ahead is not clear. You may even have to stop the car for a while till the heavy rains subside. The situation is pretty much the same in our life when we’ve a heap of challenges and we find it quite a struggle to proceed any further. Instead of losing hope we should ideally try this approach of resolving the issues one by one. This is as good as taking a break from driving when you can’t move ahead due to the poor visibility of the path ahead.

Always remember that there isn’t a challenge in this world that cannot be resolved. The degree with which you’ll find a solution for your one challenge may vary from the other. Nevertheless if you approach the challenges all together it may seem to be a daunting task and you may possibly end up not solving anything at all. Hence here is my humble suggestion for you to approach your challenges one step at a time and see if you could reduce the pile of problems you are facing.

So the next time when you see your laundry basket, remind yourself that your tensions are just like that basket. Nothing will be difficult for us if we learn to change our perception about challenges and constantly remind ourselves about this laundry basket theory.

May the good God help you wash off your tensions one cloth at a time! Take care!  

Palace of Junk!

Article for Bethlehem Matrimonial - June 2016

Alex and Nisha had invited some of their close friends for a party at home. They ensured that the house was neat and clean before the guests arrived. Every nook and corner of the house was made to look pretty for the party. Their friends arrived and the hosts were quite happy to get compliments about their beautiful house and how well maintained it is! 

In between the party one of the guests wanted some ice cubes. Being quite close to the family he went directly to the kitchen to get it from the fridge. The moment he opened the fridge he almost let out a scream. The sight that welcomed him almost made him faint. The refrigerator had food stuff that was days or even weeks old and some of them even had developed fungus around it! The smell that came out of the fridge due to this stale food was unbearable too. 

He spoke to Alex about this and they decided to clean up the fridge right away. They looked for a vessel to get the stuff out to trash it. The kitchen cupboards were opened to find a suitable vessel. That’s when the next shocker hit Alex’s friend. The cupboard was overflowing with a lot of stuff, many of them untouched for ages and had layers of dust gathered on it. There were old and useless utensils, broken house hold items and a whole lot of junk! Alex and Nisha started realizing the feeling of disgust their friends were experiencing in the otherwise ‘beautiful’ house of theirs. 

Alex was asked to get some old clothes to clear out the junk and they opened the bedroom wardrobe for that. That’s when all hell broke loose! The moment the wardrobe doors were opened there was a mad rush of over stacked clothes and other covers as they started falling out freely! The wardrobe was an ultimate disaster where clothes both new and old were all scrambled up and jam-packed. The party was soon over! While the friends were leaving they made one remark that pushed the hosts to a deep thought. They said, “You appear to live in a palace, but it is in fact a palace of junk!” 

It is worthwhile to think how many of us may have had similar experiences. How many of our homes are actually ‘palaces of junk’? It is not just enough to think about our physical houses when we talk about this. It is equally or even more important to look at our lives as well. Take a step back and look at our life. Do you see yourself carrying forward many of the stale and filthy experiences from the past? Are you still carrying a baggage of hatred or distrust about someone from your past? Do you still have that hostility in your mind about that one friend of yours who double crossed you and you’ll never be able to forgive him or her? 

All these and many more are the junk you carry in your mind and that directly impacts your life. Your physical wellbeing is largely dependent on your mental health. Carrying these grudges from the past or having a wardrobe of negative thoughts in your mind does a lot of damage to your personality. 

I really liked one of the forwards shared by a friend of mine recently. It says, “You can’t reach for anything new if your hands are still full of yesterday’s junk”. This sort of summarizes the thought. Learn to free up your mind off the junk from the past. Create palaces with radiating beauty by getting rid of the thoughts that pull you down. Make it a habit to do a regular clearance of both your home as well as your mind and that’s when you truly live in a palace! 

May you have the ability to find and clear the junk in your life so as to embrace the radiating peace of mind! 

God bless!

Decided! But…

Article for Bethlehem Matrimonial - May 2016

Wish I had waited for the latest model!

Oh! I should’ve got the other dress!

This pair of shoes isn’t really that good, is it?!

How often have you heard yourself or your dear ones make statements such as these after spending your hard earned money on an item? Many a times we get afterthoughts about a decision we have made. While it is quite natural to get these afterthoughts, what we should really be worried is if these afterthoughts begin to affect your happiness.

Many of us spent a considerable amount of time before deciding to invest on an item of interest. The more expensive the item is, the more time it takes to decide on the product. After all the considerations about the cost, design, usability and various other aspects of an item, we finally purchase the product and bring it home.

For a few of us, the moment we step into our home our brain starts playing weird games. It makes you think about the decision you just made. Various complex thought processes pass through your mind about the pros and cons of the decision. Many often the final outcome of all these thought processes will be similar to one of the expressions mentioned in the beginning of this article.

If you are one such human being who has experienced this behavior in your lives, here is a quick thought of how it affects your dear ones. Questioning your decision after investing a considerable time before taking the decision has a two-fold impact. First, you are showing disrespect to one of the most valuable resources in the world – Time! Second you are insulting both yourself and your companion who was with you while making the decision by not giving any value for the effort spent while you reached the decision.

There is another equally important impact of having an indecisive personality such as above. Your indecisiveness makes you forget to live and appreciate the present. You perennially live in the past and are judgmental about the decisions you made. This is an extremely dangerous condition since you’ll never be able to appreciate the beauty of a possession you have. You’ll always want to have something better than what you have currently obtained. The fall side of this is the fact that you fail to observe the beauty that surrounds you and instead you keep searching for the momentary happiness that is yet to be found.

Though what is mentioned here sounds more materialistic this is applicable for any aspect of life. It is not just about products or items, but can be applied about people as well. There are quite a few folks around us leading a very unhappy life citing the partners they’ve got or the troubles they have to face in life due to some members in their families. Such people as in constant pain and they will never be able to find any sort of happiness around them. These people will never be satisfied with whatever they possess and it is extremely difficult for them to appreciate the little joys of life.

Next time when you are unhappy about a decision you’ve made, ask yourself if it is really worth being not happy about the decision or is it the brain that is making you think this way. If so, take a break and make a conscious effort to find a tiny bit of happiness in the same decision. You’ll really be surprise to see that the first reason of happiness you find will lead to more and more of happiness about the same decision. The irony will be, after a while you’ll be ridiculing yourself for questioning the happiness of the same decision a while ago.

Our brain is as powerful as what we teach it. If you want to remain happy, teach your brain to be happy! God bless you with an abundant amount of opportunity to remain happy throughout your life! 

Family on the Rock!

Article for Bethlehem Matrimonial - Apr 2016

I was having a casual chat with a friend of mine a decade back while I was still a bachelor. He listened to me for a while and made quite a meaningful observation then. His statement was, “Wait till you get married, you’ll know how life will present a set of different challenges for you”. 

A couple of years later I was with my boss who recently became a dad and life came up as a topic of discussion then as well. I was at the verge of my bachelorhood and shared with him the above statement made by my friend earlier. My boss sighed and he made a very pensive statement. “Jerry, getting married is nothing! The moment you become a dad or mom; that is what I’ll call a game changer! Rest everything is pretty simple!” 

Fast forward six years and soon after I announced the arrival of our second child, promptly came a response from another friend of mine. “This will be the true test of your marriage!” And sure it was, since both my sweetheart and I felt that we’re going through a completely new set of challenge which we’d never faced before! 

Three instances, three different situations and one big lesson about life came out of them! It does not really matter what your situation really is. What matters the most is having a strong foundation built on a rock so that any number of mounting challenges can be faced together with the glue called family. This is a realization that needs to be developed during our earlier days of married life. 

For a couple, every new challenge they face in their married life is a test they undertake together. With each new challenge you face you are bound to experience tightening of a grip from an invisible hand on your life. The tighter the grip, the bigger the challenge! You won’t even realize that you’ll start feeling so uneasy for even those silly things at which you’d laughed earlier together as a loving couple. Such is the power of these unforeseen challenges! There is only one way to overcome these. Build your families on a rock, the very rock on which St Peter was given the command by God Himself to build the Church! 

Trust me; it isn’t easy to think that you’ll resolve the issues when they strike you. Many of us prepare ourselves with certain amount of financial backing to be used in the event of a monetary crisis. Very similarly we need to have an emotional backing when there are crisis times that come right out of the blue. All of a sudden you may be faced with a completely new challenge! It can be a totally new experience in your married life, something about your kids or your health or anything whatsoever. What’s important for you is to be prepared for such an eventuality if and when it decides to surprise you. 

Here is a question that you may want to ask yourself right from the time you step into the world of families and keep repeating the question once a while. Is my family built on a rock so that it can withstand even the mightiest of the tremor that it will experience in future? 

If you think your foundation is set on shaky pebbles, ensure that you and your partner accept this fact and quickly get into the action of cementing a strong foundation for your family. Among the multiple ingredients you could add to make a strong foundation, prayer stands out to be the finest of the lot. Ensure that you have a healthy mix of love and prayer to have a very strong base on which you build your relationship one day after the other. 

May the good God bless you withstand all the challenges you may face in future together as a family on the rock solid foundation you create on your love for each other and prayer, which is a communication with God Himself! 

All the best!