Yearning like Miraclin?

“Ammaaa…” were the familiar cries that I heard this morning coming from my neighbour’s house who live opposite to ours. Immediately I recognized the voice to be that of the sweet little girl whose life resounds her name – Miraclin!

Her mother was leaving for school, leaving little Miraclin home with her father and brother and that was the reason for her cry. From my home I could see her, standing behind the mesh door, her hands on the door, occasionally tapping it and crying for her mother. As her father calls her, she would go back, only to return in a moment to stand at the door trying to see if her mother was back.

In a while I could hear her cry again and I could hear her father leaving the house with instructions to his son to take care of Miraclin. As in every home, offering of different toys and amusement could only satisfy her for sometime. Though her cries subdued in a while, her occasional cries stopped only when her parents returned back.

As I came back and sat in my room I was thinking about every man’s inner cry like that of Miraclin. Even as nothing could satisfy Miraclin except being with her parents and being loved by them, nothing else can satisfy us, except from being in a relationship with God. All that we seek to satisfy us – movies, relationships, books, travelling places, nothing can give us complete satisfaction. We would still be living with that vacuum in our hearts.

Often we try to pacify those “cries” by offering it with variety of things to get pleasure, some legitimate and others illegitimate. Ironically, when I check the virtual dictionary in my computer, WordWeb, for the definition of ‘pleasure’ it says, “A fundamental feeling that is hard to define but that people desire to experience”! Only a relationship with God can satisfy our inner yearnings and give meaning and purpose to our life.

After I think about this I return to continue reading Ravi Zacharias’ book “Has Christianity Failed You?” and I turn to the Authors Interview at the end of the book and amazingly I find Ravi talking in these lines answering a question,

You’re speaking of religion in terms of an inviting and intimate relationship with God rather than a performance. The relationship is essential in this question, is it not?

Ravi: ….The older I get, the more I learn by observing children—and they don’t even have to be your own children in order to make these observations. I may be sitting in a restaurant watching a parent-child interaction and notice the child taking advantage of the parent. Or I may go to a graduation ceremony. When a student is speaking, you can easily identify the parents. They are wearing the biggest smiles in the room. We see ourselves in children and in observing parent-child relationships. When I was struggling with my studies as a boy, my mother’s delight when I did well was part of my own reward. The thrill of doing well was not just in receiving a good mark but in going home and showing my grade to my mom. Her pleasure in my achievement was the affirmation I needed. So I think my relationship with God is not by any stretch of the imagination a performance for him. (Courtesy: HAS CHRISTIANITY FAILED YOU?)

It is not only that only a relationship with the living God matters, it is not a call to perform, but to please. It is a relationship of love that we enjoy with God.

“We love Him because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19 NKJV)

“God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8 NKJV)

Draw me nearer, nearer blessed Lord,
To the cross where Thou hast died;
Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer blessed Lord,
To Thy precious, bleeding side.

Oh, the pure delight of a single hour
That before Thy throne I spend,
When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God
I commune as friend with friend!

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Technorati Tags: Inner Cry,Heart Cry,Inner Vaccuum,Emptiness,Relationship with God

When I am Alone

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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Technorati Tags: alone,lonely,fearful,solitary,solitude,memoirs,prayer,alone with God