He takes care of all the challenged

Before starting this article, let me tell you the inspiration for me to write it. It is the atmosphere I experienced during the Karkala feast at their Konkani mass on 26^th Jan 2012 at 2.30 pm. The experience I had there is quite a common one and not new to most of us who have been there in the past.

What I saw was a massive flock of people asking God for his mercy and praying to Him to bless them with gifts and miracles. It is not rare to see in our very own homes, we would have reserved an offering often called “angovnim” for this feast and to pray to St. Lawrence for our heartfelt needs and desires. There is no need to mention that the view was sad. Anybody could literally read their eyes and feel the pain each one of them had been through. I can doubtlessly say that I have never seen such a display of Faith in God in such big numbers in my life. It was like every face I saw had a different story to tell. Every story I heard had a need and for the every need that I felt, they had come here from places far - far off to pray for it. But what my attention went to was something more specific. We all have seen and heard that during this feast, there is a presence of a large amount of praying men and women who have not been blessed enough in the constitution of the body or the mind. To put it bluntly, I am referring to the physically and mentally challenged. This feast was no different. Those people had come specifically for the reason for their health and that the priest would bless them individually by placing his hand on their head. I feel for them because they cannot even have a decent health to think and pray for the blessings, that the people like me who are blessed with it care so much about.

This time when I looked at them at the mass and during their prayers, I felt exactly the same again. I felt pity for them but then just for a moment there was a sense of pride with it that God has been kind to me in that regard. Soon it was replaced by the feeling of thankfulness to God for having been so kind. And this is where I started to think.

I was being thankful for something I have and they do not. But I have learnt in my catechism that He creates all things for good. That implies that there should be something good in the process of that creation of His where He does not bless some with required health. If I told these lines to my catechism teacher and asked what the good in being crippled is, he/she would have replied me that due to that creation of his we learn to appreciate the gifts He has bestowed upon me. I do not agree with that explanation because that explanation would not have been given to me if I was crippled. There has got to be something more. I went back. If He created all things for good, it also implies that the crippled man praying for his health and I stand on equal grounds. This means we are both equally good and equally bad in our creation. That leads me to think that the gift he has not received in his health is equivalent to some blessing I haven’t received and he has. Now things start making sense to me. I can think of a lot of blessings God has not given me or I failed to develop. It can be any quality I lack. It can also be any bad quality I have. And I definitely have lots of them. My ill behavior, unpunctuality, laziness and the list goes on and on. Surprisingly, the list includes faith itself. There is also a very important conclusion to be drawn here. I also have to learn from a challenged man who must have come from far-far away with such a tremendous faith on God that if he gets God’s blessings when the priest blesses him with his hand on his head, on that day, he will surely be healed. It means that the faith in which he prays for the gifts he has not received, I need to pray with the same faith for my shortcomings and the miracles I need in me to transform into a better person. And surely as He always has, God takes care of all the challenged.