But You Didn’t Ask

 Sounds familiar? It could be a plot of land that you wanted to sell. Then, you meet someone you know well. In passing, you mention it. And you hear back that a relative was looking for just such a piece of land and just committed to another seller.

It is quaint; the timing of it.  If only you had met your friend a week earlier, you would be sitting pretty with a handsome bank balance to commit to a trip abroad, pay off a debt, or invest in an instrument guaranteed to yield a huge return.  

And this repeats itself quite often at critical junctures of our life. It could be a medical emergency. We reach out to our closest friend or a relative, but that one person who could really help completely slips our mind. That lapse sets off a chain of events with no end in sight.

Sometimes the parameters we choose to make a decision seem logical and right; it turns out horribly wrong with a litany of woes that follow, leaving us completely distraught and on slippery ground, leading to more such errors of judgement. 

Why does this happen?

We are full of ourselves. There is not a sliver of a chance that we give ourselves to entertain another point of view. Especially those closest to us – of whom we think the least. Over time, we develop an attitude that pigeonholes certain people as not worth listening to. They don’t rise to our intellectual standards. All wisdom is enshrined in us.

What is lacking in us? Humility and openness to hear each one out. Give due respect to even those with whom we are generally in disagreement. This one time, they may be the shell carrying the kernel of truth.

You would have been exposed to such a situation too. That advice, direction, and caution could have saved you a lot of grief. On the other hand, poor you, you did not take the suggestion and plodded on, only to discover how right the person was. But your pride did not allow you to admit it. The person watched and pitied you. Your unrelenting nature would not admit you could be wrong. A missed opportunity to repair a relationship that has been on the rocks because of your crustiness. Possibly forever losing the loved one because of your unwillingness to change. I have been there, and I know how difficult it is to change our fossilised behaviour toward those we hold in low esteem. That in itself is an error. We have no such right to cast someone in a diminished light. But we do it. Our prejudices, biases, and bigotry make us do exactly that.

Is there a way out of all this?

Yes. Prayer. Only prayer. No physical callisthenics or intellectual achievements can make us become a better version of ourselves. It is possible only through prayer and daily reflection. How have we conducted ourselves with our loved ones, an acquaintance, and with a stranger? Did we leave them feeling better or worse for the interaction and encounter? Did we feel remorse, or did we gloat that we let them have it good and proper? Did we even think it matters how we conduct ourselves, or have we become so dyed in the wool that nothing can change us?

This is a bondage that needs deliverance. To be saved from a train wreck of our life. Finding ourselves deathly alone. Everyone we know has fled from our presence. That should be a relief for someone who does not take advice well. Really?  

We will not know, for no one is in touch with such a person.

Is all lost? No. There will always be someone – perhaps the one most hurt by this person. Because of who dwells in that person – will still reach out unafraid of the rebuke that may come their way – in hope, faith, and love – just so that the person is not lost to perdition because no one cared. Our incentive, if that is at all needed, is our salvation.

Why us? Because we are not that person. We do not want to be that person. But tragically we have also become that person. We too do not care, as that person never did, about our counsel and advice.

Who is the person who dwells in us? It is Christ. He has shown us it is doable. He did it. Christ suffered humiliation. He was taken to the brink to be thrown off the cliff because the synagogue officials did not like what he said or what he claimed to be. They would not listen.

What did Christ do? He willingly went to the Cross. He did what they wanted. He not only gave but also forgave. Christ is the treasure for which we should be willing to sell everything we have – just to have Christ – Mt 13:44-45.

It is like the story of the king who announced to his people that they could come to the palace and take away anything that they were the first to touch. Pandemonium prevailed. The king sat on his throne and watched. He spied a little girl coming toward him. She touched him. She said, “If I have you, I have everything”.

If we have Christ, we have everything. The decisions we make will be the right ones. We may suffer, but his “strength will be with us in our weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). We will reach out, and we will not discriminate. We will be able to distinguish between good and bad advice. We will know who to ask to set us on the right path.

We will not fall for the tricks of the evil spirit like Eve did. Nor will we hide from our nakedness as Adam and Eve did, not taking responsibility for what they did but pinning it on someone else. The moment they gave in to temptation, they had fallen. But there is time between being tempted and falling into temptation - (Gen 3:4-11)

That is the moment we must seek, and we do so in the Our Lord’s Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from all evil”.

Amen.

P.S I am reminded of a poem by Rudyard Kipling: If— The first two stanzas read:

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you; But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting; Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating; And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster; And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken; Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken; And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

-        Mathew Anthony

Do you make these mistakes in your thinking when you’re in a bind? Part I

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, …”

The phrase is taken from the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. The passage suggests an age of radical opposites taking place across the English Channel, in France and the United Kingdom respectively. It tells a story of contrasts and comparisons between London and Paris during the French revolution.

‘London’ and ‘Paris’ can be replaced by ‘Pre-Covid-19’ and ‘Post-Covid-19’ narratives of an ongoing revolution of our beliefs on how to live out the pandemic which shows no sign of slowing down as of this writing.

A good place to start is in our own thinking. How do we model it for these times? Perhaps looking at mistakes we make based on Aesop Fables kind of stories is perhaps one way. So here goes …

1.    Are we tethered to an old belief?

Ø  Like the baby elephant tethered by a rope of a certain tensile strength which it does not outgrow even in full-grown adulthood; or for that matter, the shark who crashes against the glass case holding a bait umpteen times and then ceases to approach the bait even the glass case is lifted

2.    Do we side step taking the hard course and miss our chest of gold?

Ø  Many side-stepped the boulder the king of the land had placed on a busy highway, except for a peasant who kept his load from his back down and moved the stone to the side for other’s convenience and found a chest of gold

3.    Are these trying times making us angry and restless leading to poorly conceived decisions?

Ø  Father of a young boy who had a bad temper gave him a box of nails and told him to nail it to the wooden fence whenever he got angry; when he had overcome his anger issues, the father asked him to pry out the embedded nails one by one; the moral of the story: you can get over your anger but the damage is done and left a mark – so nail it before you make a display it.

4.    Am I stuck on a problem and allowing it to consume my day and night?

Ø  A wiseman’s cure of a complaining disciple who would not stop complaining was to tell him a joke again and again and again … the same joke until the disciple found that it wasn’t funny anymore; he stopped his incessant complaining that very moment.

5.    In these times are you developing an empathetic side to your thinking?

Ø  A boy insisted in paying the full price for a crippled dog in a pet store when the owner was willing to give it to the boy for free; the owner understood why when the boy’s trousers lifted at the ankle when trying to pay the storekeeper; he was crippled himself and thought the dog could do with some empathy and understanding that only the boy could give

6.    Are we resisting reinventing / pivoting because it is difficult to do, not realizing difficulties give us wings to fly?

Ø  A man spotted a butterfly attempting to emerge from a cocoon but appeared not to be succeeding, so the man cut the cocoon at the bottom to help the butterfly emerge only to give birth to a bloated butterfly which could not fly; the cocoon was exerting the pressure on the emerging butterfly so that the mass of the butterfly will move from the body to its wings to give it strength; nature’s natural scheme of creating survival mechanisms scuppered by a man trying to do good by equating difficulty with failure; a parallel anecdote is the transformation boiling water does to each item cooked in it: the hard potato becomes soft to consume; a fragile egg in its shell becomes strong and delectable; and indigestible coffee becomes an aromatic drink that wakes up many a sleepy head

7.    Do we denigrate what we cannot have when we don’t get it?

Ø  Like the fox who could not reach the bunch of grapes, gave up trying saying they are in any case ‘sour’ grapes

8.    Do we have it in us to be generous in these days when many are in want?

Ø  A boy wanting to get away from the sweltering heat entered an ice-cream parlour and asked the waitress how much was an ice-cream sundae? She replied, ‘50 cents’. The boy looked at the change pulled out of his pocket and asked how much was a plain ice-cream. The impatient waitress with many to attend said, ’35 cents’. The boy said he will have a plain ice-cream. The waitress marched off and came back with his order. When she came back to clear the table after the boy had left, she found the boy had tipped her, ’15 cents’ from his 50 cents by foregoing the ‘sundae’ and having a plain ice-cream

9.    Do we have it in us to pull the plug on the bad news to stay positive and focused on what we need to do?

Ø  Two frogs fell into a well while on a trek with a group in the forest, and made several attempts to jump out, encouraged by fellow trekkers, until the trekkers got tired of egging them to try and started telling them to give up. One of the frogs gave up and died, while the other kept trying despite the naysayers saying give up, give up! Finally, the frog leaped out of the well and thanked the trekkers for supporting his attempt. The fellow trekkers looked at him ashamedly since they were in fact doing the opposite; the mystery was resolved when one close to the frog who jumped out of the well said that the survivor frog was deaf

10. Do we feel beaten by the pandemic because all the efforts we have been making since the last three months is not fetching us any relief in business or studies or personal health?

Ø  A motivational speaker held up a $20 bill to his audience and asked who wants it. All 200 hands went up. He crushed the bill in his hands and asked again who would want it. All 200 hands went up again. He dropped the bill the floor and stamped on it and soiled it the best he could. Again, he asked who would want it. All 200 hands went up again. Then he declared that however beaten we may feel in these times, like the $20 bill, our value had not diminished in anyway. So chin up and keep the fight on.