The first day of the rest of your life ...

These are the lyrics from Matt Maher's song "Hold us together", one of my current favorites. It has been a while since I posted anything on this blog, so a drug induced post on the last day of one of the biggest years of my life seemed appropriate.

2011 has been a year of great change in my life. I celebrated my first anniversary a few days ago and am officially out of the honeymoon period. Over the years I have heard various married couple tell me that marriage truly shows you have selfish you are/have been and 2011 showed me how true that adage was. But here we are at the end of 2011 without killing each other and surprisingly more in love with each other - a fact that still continues to amaze me.

This was also the year that my body emphatically told me that I am old, and even though my spirit is willing the flesh is weak. I have spent the last 6 weeks mostly stuck to the couch with a banged up knee and will possibly be spending the next 30 weeks in rehab. The silver lining has been that I have been able to spend a lot more time with the better half while being waited on hand and foot. I am hoping that this rehab period would give me enough time to be reconciled to the fact that my body is middle aged even though my mind refuses to get over the 20s.

As I sit here feeling like I can fly (These pain killers rock), I can only think of how wonderful and blessed my life has been and how Jesus has been with me every step of the way, through the ups and downs, the victories and defeats, the terminal cancer and the marriage, the debilitative shy formative years and the gregarious 'crazy redneck' 20s. I cannot imagine a life without him being a integral part of me.

When I look back on the last three decades of my life, there is so much that I need to be thankful for. The only reason I did not turn out to be a maniacal psychopathic serial killer was the love filled family environment that I grew up in and I am not just talking about my parents and siblings but the wonderful extended family that would be the envy of the world. And inspite of all the fights and tears, I know they have my back and that they have and will always be the foundation on which God built my life. I am proud of them as they have been of me all these years. My parents have been God's guiding light in all my paths and the main reason for being on the straight and narrow, while my sisters have been God's support for my life.

I know that it might sound conceited and a cliche but I probably have some of the best and craziest friends in the world. And even though some of them are weird according to the world's standards, they have been the perfect tools in the hands of my maker who is working on making me a masterpiece. Some of them have been in my life for decades and some for only a short time; some are not there anymore but God put them all in my life at the right time. Friends have been one of the biggest blessings of my life and the cause of the richness of my life.

As I look forward to this new year and the rest of my life be it a day or 50 years, I can only think of each day per the title of this post. God has finally found and put into play his most important tool in my shaping and oh what a tool it is. God has found my perfect counterpoint and I can only imagine the great things that he has in store for us and how amazing the masterpiece is going to look like when He is done with it.

I wish everyone reading this a joyful and blessed new year 2012. May God make His face shine on you and may all his promises be fulfilled in your life and if you haven't tasted His grace may this be the year you do.

The Answer

Well I am back once again after one more long hiatus and some boring excuse. So I will get right to the post instead of justifying my absence which in all probability went unnoticed.

So what is the answer that I am talking about? Well the answer to most questions when it is all boiled down to the core. Risking being labeled a fanatical, fundamentalistic, lunatic blowhard, I would like to categorically state that the answer is JESUS! Whether you are brown, white, red, black or yellow; whether you are pro-life or pro-choice; whether you are right-wing or left-wing; capitalist or communist; saint or sinner; theist or atheist; monotheist or polytheist; rich or poor; foward, backward, OBC, MBC, scheduled caste or scheduled tribe; jew or gentile; Hindu, Chrisitan, Muslim or Buddist.

The reasons for me to come to this conclusion are varied both from sources claiming to know HIM and abhor HIM. It is a fairly simple inference from the fact that nothing or noone else promises you the answer without expecting something else in return. Only Jesus claimed that He first loved us even when we didn't care and dared to proclaim Himself as the only way to God, making Himself exclusive. He claimed to be the Truth and truth is exclusive by definition. And the best part is that I didn't have to pay for my sins, beat that!

This post is the boiled down core of all the posts I wanted to write and wrote in my mind these past few months!

God bless!

Jesus did not come to make bad people good but He came to make dead people live!

What I have learned from Palm Sunday

This is not another religiously pompous and theologically thought provoking post on the significance of Palm Sunday, atleast not in the conventional sense. There are probably tons of them floating around. This is all about one lesson that I stumbled upon at a very epiphanic moment: Do not put your trust in people or other things temporal! Why you ask? Because one week they would be riding you triumphantly on an ass into the city waving palm branches and proclaiming you the king while the very next week they are baying for your blood and leading you out the city on foot with a freaking wooden cross on your back. To add insult to injury they kill you in the most excruciating way possible.

People's mind are as fickle as they come and I still wonder why HE took this crap from people who don't really care!

The shaky moorings of an ideological centerist

I had a more cooler title for the post but I can't remember it for the life of me! The title could be misleading in many ways, because the definition of a centrist varies depending on who you ask; from a spineless rat to a highly practical deal breaker. I am personally not very comfortable with the tag of a centrist seeing that there are too many pseudo centrist out there, which brings us to the question of the definition of a centrist.

The reason I find the moorings shaky is because they do not have the adamantine morality of the right or the freewheeling social boundaries of the left. This is further compounded by the fact that they hate both extremes but are equally poised to embrace either on most issues.

On the topic of definitions, I have seen - all the more frequently now-a-days - that conservatism and right-wing are used interchangeably. I beg to differ on that synonym as all right-wingers are social conservatives but not the other way around. A simple point of reference is that the right-wing in the US generally tends to be the Christian right while in India they would be the Hindu right. Conservatives on the other hand tend to be hard to define along religious views. Same applies for the left too, while the serious left have no religious underpinnings, the liberals are from all religious and non-religious persuasions.

That being said, I am ready to prod on with my rambling. So how does a left of the right of the center conservative liberal find myself at the crossroads? that question hides the answer!

There are times when I wish that things were simple and right and wrong was black and white like the conservatives want us to believe. The very idea seems Utopian and gives you the familiar longings of a simple life. Then there are times when I wish people would understand that traditions were made for men and not the other way around. Growing up in an ultra-conservative society with very rule based and sometimes hypocritical values I have come to recognize and value the solid comfort that conservative ideas provide. There is not much of a grey area when it comes to conservative ideals while across the spectrum its a lot more grey with no idea of the were the black and white start.

I have often wondered how this ultra-conservative boy could move to the non-conformistic and shifting sands of the center? It was probably the cultural shock of the contradictory characteristics of conservatism in different cultures. More importantly though, it was the realisation that the conservations "WWJD" Jesus I was raised to believe was more a non-conformist liberal who challenged the prevalent traditions and cultures. I never thought to question the fact that Jesus ate with "sinners" while I would not be allowed to talk to "morally bad" people.

Does this make me want to be a hippie? (A lot of people in South America really think that all Indians are Ganja smoking hippies). Far from it, I could never truly be a snob (Inspite of various attempts). And why would I not be able to call myself a liberal? The fact that I would have to care more about animals than humans, the perpetrators than victims and assign all responsibility of evil to the society rather than the individual.

Starting on this blog I really didn't know where I was going with it, neither has then position changed in the last couple of days that I have been trying to finish it. It started out more as a attempt at putting down my frustration in finding people with exactly similar views. I do realise now that by my definition I am not going to find somebody else with the same exact views on all topics. I have also come to realise the fact that inspite of the shaky moorings, I would not want to be self righteous, condemning right-winger nor a snobbish, superficial left-winger.

I also did realise that I needed to finish this post!