Pains and aches, why do we have them?

Pains and aches are not desired but we do have in this earthly body we have.

Three elements

Do we carry about with us the thought of God wherever we go? If not, we have missed the greatest part of life. Do we have a conviction of God’s abiding presence wherever we are? There is nothing more needed in this generation than a larger and more scriptural idea of God.

I copied this from Henry Drummond. He talked about  the three great elements which go to make up a perfectly rounded Christian life, which he described from a painting.

1. The first element in a symmetrical life is WORK.

2. Another element in life, which of course is first in importance, is GOD.

3, The third element in life about which I wish to speak is LOVE.

And at the end of his article he gave an advice on praying for the one we are lacking of. 

These three things go far toward forming a well-rounded life. Some of us may not have these ingredients in their right proportion, but if you are lacking in one or the other of them, then pray for it and work for it that your life may be rounded and complete as God intended it should be.

A beautiful and necessary advice in our life.

Little people

Children are people! Yes! I love them, I work with them, I teach them, I also learn a lot from them everyday. These last two months I have been teaching the less fortunate full time. I used to engage in full time teaching the children for many years. The passion of teaching in me never dies. I take every opportunity daily to smile and interact with children. I can't remember there is a time where I smile at a kid, she/he never smiles back. Except one time, that surprised me. But most of the time they want to be acknowledge and they are, they are the friendliest creature in my opinion.
By now I know each of the child in my class. Each of them is so precious with their own unique character. One particular girl, she really wants to test me. She would do exactly the opposite and wait and see what I would do. One painting day I was doing the painting with them. I put some paint on one of their hands and let them do the printing. I told her specifically to print once on the card, but she quickly did it twice and looked at me with a mischievousness smile. I looked at her with a stern look this time instead of getting upset because she was testing me. Then I reminded her again to do once for the next color. With the understanding that I really meant what I said and without getting all aggravated with her disobedience, she was testing me for sure, she obeyed this time.

A strong grip

Again God is with me in a little thing such as pointing me to get the fresh paneer (Indian cheese). One afternoon I went into a shop that sold sweets and asked if they had paneer. They had the last piece as the shopkeeper was showing me where it was kept. As he took it out from the glass shelf, another shopkeeper was washing his fingers in the liquid of the tray where the paneer was. I started to think this was not good, as it was being the last piece, then the guy washed his fingers in it as it was the thing to do before they sold it to me. I followed the man who was taking the tray somewhere. He went to wash the paneer  in a sink as I watched him do it. Then all of a sudden I felt a strong grip on my arm, from a lady who told me where I could get the fresh paneer from instead. I was so thankful, and cancelled buying it from the guy, and went to the other shop instead.

To me it was like God was watching me, keeping me from dishonest people and making sure that I got the good and right things. He is really in control if we believe and include Him in every thing we do and say, every moment of our life. He is not too busy, or too big to care for us in little things. In fact little things are important to Him as He told us in His book, "Let the little children come unto Me, If you have care for these little ones, you have cared for Me, Be faithful in little things, I will put you in charge in bigger things, and I am sure there are many more about little things He mentioned in His book that I would try to find out. God is so real in the physical ways, I can sure testify that over and over again. And if we are aware of these things we would not just think it was just a luck or it was a coincidence that good things happen to us, or we are protected from dangerous situations. He wants to be included in our lives planning, little or big. 

Is this life a waste?

No, of course. God has put each of us here for a purpose. Otherwise He would have taken us back to Him as soon as we were born. Or why would He made us in the first place?
A friend said, "I hope the end of the world will come soon, we are just wasting our lives here". I hinted that he could always do something useful for others. That would be up to him what he would want to do with his life that it's given to him.
As a friend I feel sorry for him that he would think his life is so. There are so many opportunities in life everyday that comes our way which we can do, help to make some life's better, easier, happier, in different circumstances. I think you will agree with me. Or we could just thinking after we have gotten all that we want, need physically, earthly things, we would be satisfied and happy. But it proves to us it is not enough, and yes you would think life is a waste. It is only with sharing your riches, materially and spiritually you will  find your time is not wasted.
Yes, we will die eventually, each of us. But that is not our destination. The journey is what important, what you do, see and learn on the way, that is what makes it count. So when you get to your destination, you will feel so good that you have traveled well, using your time in your travel well.

Shepherd's job

A big job, recognized, a high post and on and on it goes with this worldly concept of success. And if we don't reach any of those we feel we haven't achieved much in this life.
This mindset has been with me these last few days and days, months and years before. So I decided to sit down and ask my answer Man, Jesus, about it.
He encouraged me by showing me the example of David's life in the Bible. He was a shepherd boy, but he was faithful in what he was doing, before he was chosen to be the king.
God only requires us to be faithful in what He has placed us to be, asked us to do, and He will do the increase, that's how I conclude the matter from His answer to me.

Whew, so encouraged, will be the strength of my day today, and days to come whenever I get tempted to feel that I haven't done anything big or so called successful. 

Preparations

We all  heard that so often in our daily activities. For me it is preparation for the nursery class that I am teaching. If I have prepared the materials for the next day, the day runs smoother with 17 kids I have in the class. It makes sense, ha! Yet, finding time to prepare is a challenge for me, as I am also teaching other classes in our center. If I want my time with the nursery kids to be fun then I have to prepare, it goes with the older children too. It would be chaos, and I get frazzled of what to do next. I can see it is the same thing with my spiritual and faith life. I also need to prepare, so whatever circumstances come my way, I am prepared.

I find it is an effort to do that daily. I read and hear God's Word daily in one form or another. I pray with my partner. I feel good and feel prepared for the day. I think it goes with any work that we do, when we prepare ahead of time, we are ready for the show.

Desk arrangement

You know how it is with your desk. It is very convenient place to just drop things on top of it, in fact all things that you think you would get to put away, used, needed to be reminded later, etc. It is very useful. It is with my desk. So I normally organize it and put things away when I get to it, when it fills up with all kinds of stuff. As I finished tidying it this time, it turned out to be a different set up than before. I didn't plan it, it just happened. Well, the parallel of it is that with the way God shows us His plan. He didn't just reveal to us at once, everything that we ought to know about the plan. Instead He leads us step by step as we take the first step He shows us. Then He will show us the next, the next and the next, til we reach His plan, and we realize wow, it's really neat. Trust and obey for there is no other way but to trust and obey, I am reminded of this old hymn. Beautiful words and music. 

God speaks through a three year old

A volunteer came to our center after reading the ad that we sent out in our neighborhood area. She is 65, yet very fit in her later years. She told us what made her to come and decide to volunteer in teaching the children in our center. She has a three year old grand daughter. She is super smart, she can use the computer and other electronic gadgets. The same morning we put out the ad for volunteers, the grand daughter brought her the yellow paper with the ad on it and said, 'grandma please read this', without knowing what it was because she can't read yet.. She just wanted her grand mother to read it. And that was our ad. So she knew that that was something she ought to do. The grand daughter also had said to her mother that she would have a baby in her stomach, even before she got pregnant. And sure enough she got pregnant. So our volunteer lady took it as a sign for her to join us.
God speaks through a child. God speaks to us throughout the day, throughout our life if we listen. He uses different ways to convey His will to us, to convey His love to us, to convey His plans for us.

And if we listen, we will hear Him speaking to us so clearly. 

Our influence

Our teacher left for her pregnancy leave after being with us for 11 months. Of course we are going to miss her, she was with the kids with her whole heart and doing her part sincerely and sacrificially in the center. There are good people in this world who are still doing it for others with not much appreciation. We do appreciate her so much.
I'm sure her influence in the kids' lives will be remained with them always as ours with her. She wrote to us a heart touching comment on her final day.

This is how it goes:
Thank you so much for everything you believe in me. You are like my parents. In today's world nobody is going to believe in me so much but mam and sir do. Thank you for guiding me. You are my teacher, friend. Right now I don't have the words to explain. Mam you told me to learn to be honest, simple, polite, be faithful and be yourself. I love you mam and sir, I am going to miss you a lot. Rinky Singh.

I am touched and encouraged that our effort in giving her the chance to teach the kids, she didn't have any experience, and having faith in her, has made an impact in her life.
Continue in your good works, in due season you shall reap if you faint not as the promise of God says in the Bible. This applies to me in this situation, it helps me to know that God's love I have shared with even one person will stay in another's person, and will also help her to want to do the same. I thank God for His wonderful love.

Dear Rinky, you will be missed.

What's the point?

What's the point? It's an article I read, and it stays with me. I have shared it with two people. The interesting thing is that one person I shared it with was feeling the same way, what's the purpose in life, just before I talked about it with him.
I will share the article with you here, so you could also benefit from it. What stands for me the most is that the purpose in this life is to respect and obey God.

It is written by Philip Lynch:

When I turned 60 last year, I did some soul searching. I clearly hadn’t achieved all I could or should have in my life so far. Was I therefore a failure? Give me a minute before I answer that.

I’d gone through some changes recently and was now at a place both geographically and career-wise that was not what I had had in mind. I wasn’t unhappy, but I wasn’t entirely pleased with my circumstances either. I felt like I was becalmed at sea, no wind in my sails, monotonous stretches of ocean in all directions. The horizon was in sight, but that didn’t help. I couldn’t decide which point on the horizon to aim for, and even if I could, I had no means to propel myself towards it. What and where was my purpose in life?

For all my adult life, I had dedicated myself to varying degrees to achieving what I understood to be God’s purpose for me. I had thought I had a fairly good idea of what this was, but now all bets were off. I had primed myself for great things, but now great things seemed a pipe dream.

As I reflected on my own life and the lives of others, I realized that there are some people who most of us can agree were great—not necessarily because we approve of everything they said and did, but because they had an impact; in some objective way their lives and achievements were great. But were these relative few the only ones who had fulfilled their destinies? For that matter, is there any such thing as destiny? Are our lives supposed to be fulfilling in themselves? Are we supposed to be satisfied at the end of it all? Is that the point? Or is there something else at work here?

Saint Paul wrote, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”¹ When I meditated on this verse in the past, I had looked at it from Paul’s first-century perspective. We all know that there were copious amounts of persecution directed at the first Christians, to whom Paul was writing. He meant to encourage them that their brief lives here were not the final word or the whole story.

Life is often compared with school. I can remember grumbling along with many of my classmates about being stuck in school when we wanted nothing more than to get on with our lives. It seemed as though we would be stuck there forever, while teachers kept trying to cram more lessons into us. But school wasn’t meant to be the culmination of our lives. It wasn’t our destiny. It was merely a training ground, an opportunity to garner knowledge and skills that we could apply later.

I now believe that we are not supposed to peak in this school we call life. This life is only a stage. Yes, we are to gain all we can from it, but we don’t have to worry that we have somehow missed our destiny if all we have to show are some scars and hard-won wisdom.

What, then, are we supposed to accomplish here? What does God want or expect from us in this life? What is our purpose? This is how Solomon stated it: “Everything you were taught can be put into a few words: Respect and obey God! This is what life is all about.”²

We are works in progress, but if we can look at ourselves in the mirror and honestly say that we are trying to live our lives that way, then we are doing what we are supposed to be doing. Fulfilling this is our destiny. That is the point.

Nice to be back

I haven't been so regular on updating my blog, it's been so much happening. There is always an excuse of skipping to keep up with the blog, but there is also a genuine reason. And all that to say is that I do have both reasons. It seems there is a blockage or something whenever I start to write, that I feel like I don't know what to write and at the same time I do have a lot to write about. It does take an effort to write. So I am just being particular when I write because I want it to sound good and meaningful, and it ends up for me not writing. So there it goes for one reason that I haven't been keeping up with posting anything for so long.

This one that I am about to write it's so awesome and something that I won't forget forever, and it happened in this modern age about three weeks ago. It shows you that God is alive and kicking, and He is not God of the past, He still does miracles as He has always been for long time.

I returned to Stockholm after my visit to my dear friends in Italy. My flight got cancelled so the airline changed the flight to the later time. That made me to arrive in Stockholm almost at mid night. I was so certain that I could get on the train I was on a week earlier on when I came to the airport. So I walked to the airport train to Stockholm city. I checked the vending machine for the ticket, and it was 260 krona. It was expensive. So I found a little button for help. I asked them if I could use my blue card to get on the train. They said just to work it out on the train with the person who would come to me. The train came, I got on and noticed that it wasn't the same train I got on to come to the airport, it was a lot fancier. And I was still thinking maybe having the blue card would be cheaper. The lady of the ticket asked me for my ticket, so I showed my blue card. She decided that I had to pay, maybe youth price, then she said, I didn't have to pay because it was the information desk fault for not guiding me right. Whew, it was a relief, even though I would've paid it because it was late at night, but it was a big help when you didn't have to pay 260 krona. I got off the train in central station. Lo, and behold, no trains were running at that hour, past mid night. The entrances of train station were closed. It was cold and snowing, no one was around to ask where to go and what transport to take. Of course there was always taxis if one really had to take it. But in my situation, it never occurred on my mind that I would be taking taxi and it would too much in this part of the world. A thought came to me that I might have to wait til five o'clock for the first train to start running. I was following some people where they were going, but all of sudden they're gone, I didn't see them anymore. Then a girl was walking toward the entrance of the train station I'd just been in, I told her it was closed. I asked about the schedules of the trains, but none was running at that hour. She told there were buses still running but I had to walk to the other side of the station, and up the road. So I did, walking in the snow, dragging my suitcase, climbing up the stairs, at the age of 52, ha! I reached to the top of the stairs, I didn't want to go on walking without knowing where to, so I stopped. I tried to wave at the road guards about 30 meters away and motion them to come to me. They didn't think I was waving at them, so they kept walking towards the road til I saw them no more. And at the same a taxi drive thought I was waving at him, so he drove up to near where I was standing. Again I asked a young man who was passing by at that time if he knew the bus to Skogas. He didn't know and left. The taxi drive came to me and started to ask where I wanted to go, and he would take me there for free. At 2 am, a taxi driver offered to take me Nat's place for free, that's where I stayed. You could imagine all kinds of thoughts came to my mind, what would you do? I felt good about it so I did take the offer, since he was a nice guy, and he convinced by his story when he needed help, two ladies helped him and asked him to pass on the good deed. So he took this opportunity to pass it on. I couldn't help but marveled at God's goodness and how details He was in caring for me that night. Miracles do still happen, you just have to believe and they come in unexpected way and beyond your imaginations.