What gives

I am spending my Christmas with friends.A lovely couple,and a five year old who is uncannily bright.She has been writing her letter to Santa for Christmas for quite sometime.She has a list she has made and written to Santa for.Nothing much but a fluffy rabbit,ring(any ring at all) and nintendo.She is more excited about Christmas then anything.She has been to neighbours on either side with her Christmas card and her gifts.A ninety year old lady who is spending her Christmas alone and a family on the other side. She is excited about the Christmas party tomorrow which her parents are planning to host for their friends.She has been on the karoake practising her christmas songs for the get-together tomorrow. For some reason she thought 25th was the Christmas eve.She was dissapointed to know that today was the Christmas eve because she thought she ought to have been a better girl,eaten her food early and gone to bed so that santa could come in with her gift. She has a special message fr...

  I sincerly thought having the presence and the blessings of the Lord was to be blessed in the objective sense by tangible stuff.I have seen well-meaning christians gloat about how the Lord has blessed them ...etc. I realise now that it is much more than that.Being blessed by the Lord  is much more than anything to have a clean slate before the Lord. How is that possible ? 'In those days John the baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying,'Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near .This is who was spoken through the prophet Isaiaih: 'A voice of one calling in the wilderness,Prepare the way for the Lord,make straight paths for him.'' A repentant heart of a child kneeling down before the father in submission is an attitude of life which makes way  for the kingdom to come. How important was the message John brought before the birth of Christ and how important it is for him to make straight paths for him and prepare the way for the Lord in...

This morning I received a letter from YWAM, Australia . I have been praying for their ministry for a while. It was a video of their ministry in london. It was a whisper from my God. My God who is alive. Who never fails to answer me. http://youtu.be/zcOt59y7TzI

I was working in a hospital in one of the more remote places in India.The place inspires so many things to write about but my amused memory goes back to a wooden couch I inherited   from my friends when they left the place the day after I joined in.It was intact. I am not normally a couch potato,atleast I think I am not because I remember during my post-graduate days walking up to my boss to ask him if I should get my thyroids checked.He asked me why and when I revealed my doubt about the possibility of my thyroids  hypofunctioning  ,he gave me an amused look and expressed that it might be the other way round.That was the day I shelved any thought of my being lazy.I had got a stamp from a doctor and that too an extremely competant one. However for some reason the plastic crepes which held the couch together started giving away,till one day when my friends arrived for their yearly visit there were two big holes in the seating place. I can be quite careless with these...

There is a young lady downstairs who keeps an eye on me.It so turned out that she happens to be one of the few believers in the block.She is the first one to notify me about any mails I get,very eager to be helpful. The other day while in the wards I happened to meet her and she passed on the message that I had a mail in the doctor's common room. Not what I would have expected. I ran down to the common room and surely right on the top was a mail addressed to me in a neat familiar hand-writing .It was a birthday card from Dr C and W. Dr C and W are colleagues who have worked with me in the hospital I spent the earlier ten years of my life as a doctor. He was the best student in the batch he belonged to at St Thomas' at London.He did his specialisation in surgery and chose to come to India to work as a missionary.I remember one of his batchmates putting it as -'the utmost for His highest!' He dedicated better part of forty years for the region. When we joined afre...

She was thirty five,a mother of two,an afro-european lady,would have passed off for a teenager.She was brought into the A&E with a consolidation unresponsive to antibiotics.The radiological interpretation was,could be atypical pneumonia or any other sinister diagnosis. So there was an infection control red alert. I have worked with tuberculosis patients for the better part of ten years in India and I have seen some real bad cases.Not that we have the facility for great infection control standards in India,but by God's grace I have not contracted that infection till date. However it is a new country that I am in and was not really sure of the rules. However I decided to just approach her and talk to her as I would a regular patient. She looked a little distracted and and then one of the nursing staffs entered looking like a person in the outer space with masks,aprons and with profuse apology saying that she had had instructions from her superior to be careful.She gave me a...

I cannot tell you what the most important lessons I have learnt in life is but I can definately tell you about an important lesson I learnt this week. Every day we have different consultants coming in to see the patients .I have this habit of pulling a chair and comfortably sitting down while I go about talking to my patients.It was not a consious act on my part but my cousin who has a wider experience of the west was telling me how important it was to do that so that the patients do not feel talked down to. I have had many patients expressing their gratitude for making them feel at home because at the end of the day they are frightened of coming to the hospital. This week I had the opportunity to go for a consult with two local consultants at two different times . What really struck me was the stance they took even as they talked to the patients. They went down on their haunches and talked up to the patient even as the patients looked down at them with utter trust and comfort. ...