“I was like a drowning man, clutching at every straw. It was then, one fine morning at 7.00 am that my sister-in-law along with some friends descended on my home and she said: “We have come to pray for you; there is witchcraft done on you!” They offered to pray for me though I was least inclined and had difficulty concealing my hatred.
“I had been extremely miserable in adolescence, miserable from its very onset, and as I prayed to You [God] for the gift of chastity I even pleaded, ‘Grant me chastity and self-control, but please not yet.’ I was afraid that You might hear me immediately and heal me forthwith of the morbid lust which I was more anxious to satisfy than to snuff out.”(The Confessions 1997, Book 8, paragraph 17)
I was in my final year at medical school when I decided to start following Jesus. When I told my father he was very upset. ‘Have you become a Christian now? I suppose that means you’re going to eat beef, drink whisky and live an immoral life? Rajesh, a psychiatrist.
When we are unthankful we magnify the actions, activities and circumstances produced by other people for or against us, and weigh our lives based on their responses, which inadvertently saps our faith in God! When we are God-focused we see the providential activity of God behind every circumstance, even as Joseph did when the word of the Lord tested him when his brothers sold him as a slave in Egypt.
Everybody likes ‘new beginnings’, fresh starts! Having said that, I also believe in continuity and faith-fulness to the task at hand or, in the way I sign off my letters – ‘Pressing On’. There is much value in ‘positive, forward thinking’. I understand the Greek god Janus, from whom we get the name for the month January, has two faces. One looks backward with a frown, and the other ahead with a confident smile.