Pick (The) One

     

     Not everyone has it hard.

     Life on earth made him susceptible to disease and diseased he was, bound to a bed. Life placed him in the company of friends of faith. Nature bestowed these friends with the strength to lift the man and his bed to the roof. Divine Will placed Divinity under that roof. All the man had to do was lay still. Choosing the wedding theme is the most difficult decisions for some (believe it or not) while for a few it is the choice between an expensive treatment escalation or certain death. Not everyone has it hard.

     Not everyone has it easy.

     A woman hid in a toilet for ninety days trying to flee the machete destined to chop her. When she eventually emerged, she realised that though she had escaped death her family didn’t. After a conflict that claimed the lives of millions including their loved ones, they hoped for liberation. But little did they expect that it would come from the Reds. But it did. And after decades of oppression when a Catholic Mass was conducted in the communist country, three million souls came to participate. Despite a mountain of reason to act otherwise, the woman forgave her family's killer and an entire nation refused to abandon hope. Not everyone has it easy.

      Nature, life and God. Pick the odd one out. Worshiping nature is blasphemy, cursing life is natural and God is the giver of life. Odd. Each one. Snakes are as much a part of nature as an innocent blade of grass covered with dew going about its business being green yet giving one immense pleasure at its sight. Rain on the righteous occurs the same time as rain on the wicked with a hundred percent precision. Hard work made you a Master of Economics and the highest educated member of a family with limited means. But life (nature?) gave you cancer in the colon. Being perpetually prone to fall under a WHO classification is the diadem of human existence. Nature is impartial.

     Life made your mother take you two thousand kilometers away for a surgery that drained your life’s savings. But before that life made you the only earning member of the family. Life gave a family a small house to live. But life ensured that the house was in rural Vietnam in the sixties. Life is impartial.

     The labourer who works the entire day gets the same wage as the one who worked for just an hour. A cripple waiting for three decades and a lady with a fever receive the same healing. Dismas goes to paradise and so does Paul. God is impartial.

     They waited for four hundred years for the land flowing with milk and honey. What awaited them was wilderness, hunger, thirst and snakes. Milk and honey were no illusion. The serpents were no dream either. They received heavenly food as they stood on an unforgiving terrain. Manna and the wilderness were independent of each other, intersected only by the breath of God in flesh, also known as a mere human, a mumbling one at that. He has to endure one without mumbling and receive the other with gratitude. How pleased then would heaven be!

     Curse nature all you can. That flood will still wreck your village. Boast about your life all you can. The chance of you falling prey to a mortality statistic will not diminish. Rebel all you can. The possibility of you entering Paradise however will still be at a record high, provided you have, with some celestial help, replaced curses with blessings, boasts with thanks and rebellion with penance. Remember, the flood may not change course and the speeding truck may not slow down. Nature and life don’t give a damn.

     An impartial nature and an impartial life. Then we have God sitting on the porch for the last ten years. He waits, independent of life and nature. He knows yet He is still. Calming a storm, granting a barren mother's prayer, pass-percentage in a difficult exam, He has proven his authority both over nature and life. Yet only a miracle here and a favour there. His moves are erratic and His silence confusing. What is definitely not confusing, His lawyer might argue, is what is expected of the Viet girl who lost her hut, the twenty-four-year-old who would die in two days and the migrant with an insurmountable debt. Repentance, gratitude and praise. God’s lawyer will never win in an earthly court.

     God is undeniably the odd one out. Unfortunately, one cannot pick and choose nature and life. God on the other hand needs to be picked and chosen. This choice sometimes is heavily influenced by how life orchestrates one’s circumstances or where nature decides to place the eye of the storm or what God reckons is a suitable weight for the wood on your shoulders. One may spend a considerable amount of time blaming either life or nature or God or another human for having to make such a choice in the middle of life’s darkest circumstances. A widower listening to a doctor spelling out the bad prognosis of his daughter’s fatal condition while hundreds of miles away his unattended-crop is eaten away by pests, sure will find it difficult to still choose God.

     After his daughter gets admitted for the fifth time with no change in the prognosis, he abstains from choosing at all. Nature has taken its course. Life has done its job well.

     And God continues to sit on the porch.

-Sam