After the rain!

A beautiful morning here in Kochi. After four days of continuous rain, the sky cleared very well and I could go to church and offer mass today

Feast

Retreat Prior to Mary's feast at Vallarpadam

Beautiful Gateway to Our Lady of Ransom Church

Evening Sun lighting up the Vallarpadam Sky

The new building near the highway lit by the evening's golden sun

With the annual retreat and the Marian pilgrimage this year's feast is just about starting at Vallarpadam. I was lucky to be there on a Monday evening.

Good luck

Eventually, the opportunity I was sharing in my last post materialised. They called me for the training with a few others which was infact open test of public display of skills.
I survived.
That was in the week before Onam, which took me with a happy mind to the festival week. 

Judgement

Every day My Lord Jesus we go through different situations. The influence of these situations influence our emotions and the judgement of the persons & circumstances involved, they can be sometimes positive, some other times negative. Negative influence lead us to fear, hatred, anger, revenge, jealousy. It crowds our mind and blind our eyes making us do wrong things, obstructing us from dealing with the situation and persons the right way.

Jesus, You taught us to be non - judgemental in our attitude. But I understand that it is not humanly possible always. Help us My Lord not to be carried away by situations and persons. Help us Jesus from emotions choking us and defeating us in understanding the persons and the situations.

In the work I do there are certain projects which are not only very lucrative but prestigious to be associated with. These are projects offered by certain specialised companies and they invite applications every year to train the ones they hire. Since I was relatively new to the industry I did not know about this and the colleagues who knew never shared the information. The opportunity stayed with a select few. This year, I came across the information and applied. Unfortunately, the company official who was very encouraging over the phone misplaced my application and proceeded to publish the list of the selected, naturally my name was not there. I was disappointed, not because I was not selected but because I didn't made the grade inspite of my hard work to be among the best.

An elderly colleague who came to know about my plight called up the official and enquired about the status of my application to which she  sheepishly admitted that she has misplaced my application and asked me to resend it.

Ofcourse the elderly colleague was a God sent Angel, but my judgement of the situation and the persons influenced were so negative that it blinded me completely to see things right and react well for a some time.

Jesus, My Lord, for ordinary people like me, to survive we need a good mind to work our way through the day, I Pray and ask in your name Jesus,  let me not judge and fill my heart with wrong thoughts. 

Thank you.

Contemplations

The gift

Jesus.
To know you is the blessing of my life.
The mind To search for You is the gift you gave me.

16th July

There was a death in the parish and the funeral was in the new church while the 11.30am mass was going on. In all these years I haven't seen many funerals at midday.

May the soul rest in peace. The flowers I took to church I offered to him, as a celebration of a life I didn't know about. It seems he had lead a good life.