If God is the omniscient power…. then why…..???

Slight capture of Heaven and Hell

 

Sometimes I wonder why God makes us go through a life full of sufferings or pain. Let’s just keep aside the day-to-day troubles that every person goes through. There are other serious cases of extremities. I don’t think I have to tell you the number of people of people who are subject to tougher times or hardships. For some it maybe extreme poverty, sometimes starvation, maybe a disability or either a suffering from immense pain, and this list is just endless. There are people out there who struggle every second of their lives for a moment’s peace. They wake up each day knowing it’s a bloody battle they have to fight and there is no escape from that. There are people out there who have never experienced how it feels to be happy. They yearn for a moment when their suffering would end.

Ever thought why they’d have to go through this in the first place? Everybody knows and has been taught from childhood that God is all-knowing (omniscient). We all were made to believe that God knows everything that will happen to us even before we were born. Seriously, if He knew all the extremities of hardships people would suffer, couldn’t He have just stopped this from happening?

When I was a child and sometimes even now, a question still keeps me pondering. Let me first give you an idea of the situation. Talking in terms of Christianity, it is believed that sin came into existence through an act of a woman who, tempted by a snake, ate an apple from the Forbidden Tree, thereby obtaining us a reward for a lifetime, by being thrown out of the ever Heavenly Paradise. Through that one woman came the entire existence of wrong and evil doings.  So my question here is, “If God already knew what was about to happen and the evils that would enter the universe through that one woman, why did He create her?”

Mmmm…. That’s not so much of a solution to the problem is it? He had to create the other half for the man, which means the existence of a woman was necessary. So that rules out God’s plan to not create a woman. (Hey!!! How can He even thing of not creating such wonderful creatures. In the end we sure are the ultimate source of the next generation. Frankly speaking the world couldn’t do without us.)

Now since that idea rules out, here’s another question, “Why didn’t the all-knowing God prevent the woman, in spite of knowing she’d eat the apple and the consequence that would follow?” The answer to this is very simple. He gave us humans a thing called “Free Will”.

There actually does exist something called Free will, which means the freedom of making choices. True enough God has given each one of us a choice in every aspect of our lives. I would like to mention a ideology I happen to come across about the view the Catechism of the Catholic Church have on free will:

“God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions .God willed that man should be ‘left in the hand of his own counsel,’ so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.”

So no doubt there is something as free will. And it’s all in our control to use it either for good or for worse.

Now we have got the answers to two questions. Fair enough! But my basic question still remains unanswered. “Why does God, despite of knowing how much we’d have to suffer, make us go through the hardships of life?” Or if I rephrase it I would be asking, “If God was omniscient then why can’t He stop tough times?”

Most of you would satisfy in an answer which would be “God gives tough times to remember Him.” Well how many of us who would be going through one of the above mentioned hardships will act like Job (from the Bible) and still keep on praising God? Maybe we might initially but for how long? Even Job after a while did complaint to God for the situation he had to go through.

That is the point.  We’ve got two ways to take it. Either we can thank God or we can curse Him. (The funny aspect is either way the above answer that everyone satisfies in prove true: we remember Him).

Let me just tell you about two people I’ve come across in my life.

One of them is a person very special to me, going through a severe stage of Hemophilia A (bleeding disorder). He was diagnosed at age 2. He was a person who saw the best years of his childhood and teens pass by sitting behind the four walls of the house. He always used to say “To kill me, all it takes is one prick from a needle”. That intense was the level of his condition. Due to some personal reasons, I don’t have further updates on his health conditions. Just glad enough to know he’s alive.

So having sacrificed the good years of one’s life to go through a hell lot of excruciating pain didn’t actually get him to build a good rapport with God. But still he knows there is a Supreme power.

Another person I know, quite close to be a sister of mine, was diagnosed with Leukemia one and half years back (2012). The doctors gave hope to us as well as her that she will be free from all this. And true to their word she got her freedom just 7 months back (2013); as she bid us all farewell to join her family (her parents and brother passed away earlier). I still wonder to this day how the last moments of my little angel was.

Well during the period of 11 months, she suffered agonizing pain from medications and more than that as her parents had passed away earlier there were mental pressure from her relatives eating her head all the way not even giving the slightest consideration of her being unwell.

Believe me when I say this, regardless of all this, during the 11 months time I’ve hardly heard her complaint to God. Instead, for every day of less pain she suffered and the moments that made her tremendously happy my phone beeped with an “I love God so much” message.

So basically what I am trying to prove here is that, it’s all in how you take it. In these lives both of them had to go through almost the equal severity of pain in their illness yet both their perspective towards life and most of all towards God is highly contrasting. This is where the matter of Free Will comes into the picture. You can either thank Him or curse Him. It’s your choice in the end. Either way He’s not going take you suffering back. You have to go through the entire thing yourself, till the day He has planned for you to do so.

And also according to many religious studies and beliefs God being omniscient and man given free will are paradoxical. There is a contradiction between the two that is beyond our understanding, which means we must stick to making our own free choices in favor of God so as not to misuse the freedom he has given us.

So in my personal opinion, even if you don’t thank Him at least stop questioning/complaining/cursing Him when you’re on a hard road. It doesn’t make your path easier to travel. And it definitely doesn’t change anything either.

So when God plays, you play along with Him and enjoy the game. Coz one day, when you stand before Him, with all the love he has He’ll hold you tight and say, “I laid, you played and you did play well, my child.” Make sure you live your life to hear that. It’s worth more a happiness that anything else you achieve in this world can bring.

The Cockles of My Heart

As a first posing in this new space I still wonder on what to write about.  I don’t have a clue as to why I chose to start a blog. Writing has always been a passion until a few couple of years (almost 4 years to be exact). Maybe some unpleasant incidents did lead me to transform myself so much that it did destroy my ability to translate my thoughts into words. A God- given gift to a very few.

This is a story on how I nurtured with tender care, the Cockle Shells in my garden of Rhyme and Rhythm.To be literary speaking some of you might wonder how Cockle Shells can relate to a garden. Well for those who have no idea about it, that relation can be explained from a well known nursery rhyme which goes like this:

 “Mary Mary quite contrary

         How does your garden grow?

                 With silver bells and cockle shells

           And pretty maids all in a row. “

The history behind this nursery rhyme does emit a negative vibe as far as I have researched on it. But the header of this article was picked up from a very famous idiom “to warm the cockles of someone’s heart”. This is nothing more than an association to “the chambers of one’s heart”. So here I am to tell you some things that warmed the cockles of my heart.

Like I mentioned in the beginning, I began writing when I was a kid, say at age 10. But that was just a couple of lines of poetry about “The Sun”. I still remember my parents appreciating me for that. My dad, he made sure it was typed out and printed so as to keep it as a piece of my very first work. Well as they say the more you keep things safe, the harder it gets to find. ‘Cause I had no idea where that piece of work was for almost 15 years. Until just recently, my Mom caught hold of it stored away in a file. To tell the truth I was dumbfounded at my level of vocabulary at that very young age, that I just couldn’t accept the fact that I had written it.

As time flew by, just like all the other kids, so did my mind fluctuate on things I like to do. I quit writing and black leads, colored leads and crayons turned out to be my passion. If I can remember I must have been 11 years old when pictures (mostly of Disney characters) fascinated me and caught me thinking “Why don’t I try to draw”. I still remember the first picture that I drew. I happen to have a lunch box in the shape of the famous cartoon character Minnie Mouse (most probably gifted, not sure though). The lid was embossed with a smiling Minnie Mouse. Well after the picture was done; believe me I’ve never seen a Minnie Mouse so disfigured as the one I drewJ. Initially all of my pictures had a distorted look, but gradually my hands just curved its way to carbon copy (I don’t mean tracing, but actually drawing) some of my favorite pictures. After which, I used to stick those pictures in my drawing book which I still treasure to date. Sometimes when I take a look at those, it just astonishes me that I ever did do such a thing. I know that copying an image the way you see it is not talent. But still I would appreciate people who can, coz there are plenty of people out there who can’t even draw a perfect circle or a line. Lucky are the people who can carbon copy an image and luckier are the people who can sketch from pure imagination. The journey of that talent was from cartoons characters to school records. Very short I must say, because by the time I reached the 11^th grade there were no records to draw, (as I had took to learning Commerce), neither was there any passion left in me towards the black lead. It all ended in four years time.

Over years I stuck to only writing academic stuff (reports, letters, compositions etc for the exams), as far as I can remember from grade 6, I have tried my level best to excel in the smallest space permitted which would be the answer sheets. The passion for writing, I realize as I write this, never left me through my journey from that little kid to the teen I grew in to. And again poetry came knocking at my doorsteps. I must say during the age of 14, my old self that was asleep for a long time seemed to provoke a part of me I lost somewhere along the way. Words started igniting my mind. Some force unknown kindled in me a power to pen down my strong feelings and emotions. Black leads were once again replaced by the mighty pen.

But this time when I wrote I happen to notice something different from the way I had written till then. For a long time I could not figure out what seemed so different. Was it the fact that I was writing after quite a long gap? I didn’t know.  After much thinking I realized that every word that my pen scribbled were the notes directly from my heart. Everything I wrote were from real life experiences, either of mine or somebody else whose experiences inspired me. I always wrote with empathy. Standing in the particular shoes that I want t o write about. Every time I’ve written I believe I have been able to capture and convey the true content of what I meant to express.

At age 14 I had written three poems. Can’t say they are up to the mark, but that’s the best I could do at that time. Then due to a personal reason I had to bring my talent to a standstill position. Because of which I decided to quit writing and labeled it as,”…not my piece of the cake…” When getting blamed for writing from your heart, you have no other option other than to put your pen down for once. Because words don’t just fall from heaven or hang in the air to just pick what you like. It really does take some efforts to pick up the right words to convey what lies within you. I don’t have to explain this, be it any task only people who have worked through it will understand the difficulties and pains they have undergone in getting it completed.

With a gap of another year I picked up from where I had left off. This time there were more people than I expected to catch my hand and pull me up to mold the heavenly gift. On this new path I met a lot of people who had encouraged me to keep writing, criticized my works, helped me improve and transformed me in to a person who could express herself though the power of words. This expression I believe is divine as choosing the right words to pen down what your heart says is just awe-inspiring and out of this world feeling.  Within six years my garden of Rhyme and Rhythm has reached up to thirty Cockle Shells grown with the tender care from my heart.

 

But today I don’t write poetry. I have tried more than a zillion times and I even wish the Cockle Shells would bloom once again. But every time I try, the words don’t seem right or they just don’t harmonize with each other anymore. Someday I hope my garden will bloom again. Until then I shall always wait with a tear welled up in the corner of my eye with a pain that will never fade away because that is a heart’s ache of not being able to talk again….

This is my first writing after a gap of three years of which I know there are to be a hell lot of mistakes and probably those of you reading this might feel I am not good at this writing stuff. Well if this turns out to be a bad piece of work I’d like to consider that “a talent kept unused tends to worsen eventually”. All the more I would like to appreciate all of you who took your time to read through my first piece of work (for the blog). If I’d wasted your time, I would like to apologize for doing so.