Apart from our time with our friends and families, at our schools and workplaces, in professional and social circles, we have our times alone. I remember a few of them which I am going to narrate here and I am sure you would have had such similar experiences.
I was very new to the campus where I was working as a teacher at the English School and as a warden at the school’s boys hostel. That was my first summer in Bihar and since it had been only a few months of my joining at the organization, I did not have the provision for annual vacation and so had to spend the vacation at the campus. Those were days, to my surprise, when the campus had become empty and I was the sole soul at one end of the campus and was all alone in that big hostel surrounded by empty rooms and deserted floors.
Being alone brought with it this very strange fear within me that I barely slept through the entire vacation, peacefully. The strange stories and rumours of demons strangling the staff and the students, added fuel to the fire of my fear, that I startled at every slight sound that came from the creaking doors and the croaking frogs. I became more prayerful that summer than ever before! If you would ask me to describe this whole episode of being alone I would sum it up as “fearsome”.
This happened when I was very small, when I was in 4th or 5th std. I had gone with my parents and younger sister to a pilgrimage centre and were returning back. We alighted from the bus at the Trichy bus stand and we had to take an auto to go home. It had crossed midnight. I was very sleepy. We all went to answer the nature’s call in the bus terminus’ wash room. I had come out before others and came to the spot where we alighted from the bus and to my surprise found no one. Until now I do not know how this thought had come into my mind; I felt either I had missed the spot or that my parents & sister had left! I felt so lonely in that bus terminus. Not wanting to stay there, immediately I started finding my way to home, which was around 10 kms away. In the middle of the night tracing the path in my mind, I started walking out of the terminus, came to the junction near Hotel Aristo, took the road to the bridge-over-railway line and crossing Railway Colony, Crawford and the railway crossing, I reached my home in Bharathipuram.
Though I was fearful walking alone in the middle of the night, all the more I was haunted by the thoughts of why would my parents leave me and go! Only after I reached home, did I find it locked and came to know later that my parents had searched for me everywhere, informed the bus terminus police, announced over the P.A. System and came back fearing that I might have been kidnapped!
I would call the experience that night walking all alone finding my way home as “dubious”.
I had gone to my hometown owing to my sickness. I was discharged from the hospital after four months and I was back home. Though still I had occasional bouts of pain in my abdomen, the pain that that night caused was unbearable. The peace-treaty between my parents had come to an end and they quarrelled with each other and all my efforts to pacify them fell into deaf ears and unheeding hearts. And I was left heart-broken. I started the motorcycle and left the house and drove through the city’s highway in that late night and as it was raining parked the bike outside a closed shop and sat on the pavement. Though the rain waters were concealing my tears, the pain in my heart could neither be concealed nor consoled. I sat through that entire night, alone, in the rain, thinking that all my efforts and prayers to bring peace in my family, between my parents had come to a hopeless end.
If I were asked to brief this incident of being alone in one word I would call it “painful”.
Let me share an interesting moment that I spent alone. I still remember the day when I as a kid I was alone at home and I started experimenting making mixed fruit juice in the mixer grinder. Except for a few drops of juice nothing came out of the nozzle, as the bananas that I dropped first jammed the mixer! It was “alone & experimenting”.
At certain situations, being alone brings in along with it shame, guilt, cornered and lot more negatives too.
Though I have also had a few other happier, interesting, intriguing, moments alone, the best of all my lone times, were and are when I am with God, in prayer. The time that I spend in worshipping my Creator, Comforter, the Christ. It is through these times that I spend alone with God that strengthens me to face my fears, to live happily through seemingly hopeless situations, gaining strength from His grace.
Being alone with God, in prayer and in reading & meditating the Bible, gives the strength to stand strong in the storms of life, the grace to go ahead in life, the confidence to cheer up amidst collapses, to hope in spite of hopelessness, to come out of causeless concerns, and produces Christ-like character in us!
I remembering someone saying this, “You are who you are when you are alone”. If we want our times alone to be meaningful, purposeful, grace-full, we need to be alone with God! And when you are alone with God you know that you are never alone!!
“The Lord God has given Me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him who is weary. He awakens Me morning by morning, He awakens My ear to hear as the learned.” (Isaiah 50:4 NKJV)
No, never alone,
No, never alone,
He promised never to leave me,
Never to leave me alone;
The world’s fierce winds are blowing,
Temptations are sharp and keen;
I feel a peace in knowing
My Savior stands between;
He stands to shield me from danger,
When earthly friends are gone,
He promised never to leave me,
Never to leave me alone.
(Source: No Never Alone)
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