HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

പലസ്തീനിലന്നു പാതിരാവില്‍ 

പാരിന്‍റെ  രാജാവ്  പിറന്നതിപാവമായി

പാവങ്ങളിലേറ്റം പാവമായി 

പശുത്തൊഴുത്തില്‍ കിടന്നതോര്‍പ്പിന്‍ 

പാരാകെ നേടാന്‍ നെട്ടോട്ടമോടും 

 പാരിന്‍റെ മക്കളേ ,കണ്‍തുറക്ക!

പ്രപഞ്ചമാകെ നിറയും മഹത്വമേ ,

പ്രപഞ്ചശില്പിയാം ക്രിസ്തുവേ ,തൊഴുന്നേന്‍!

Food and You!

Food and You!
You are what you eat, because what you eat makes your mind, makes your body, makes your senses, gives you qualities.If you are non-vegetarian your posture will be different, if you are vegetarian your posture will be different; .because the body is built by your food. It is not an accident. Whatsoever you are putting in the body, the body will reflect it. When you eat meat you are not only taking food, you are allowing a certain animal from which the meat has come to enter in you. The meat was part of a particular body; the meat was part of a particular instinct pattern. The meat was the animal just few hours before, and that meat carries all the impressions of the animal, all the habits of the animal. When you are eating meat your many attitudes will be affected by it. And if you are sensitive you can become aware that whenever you eat certain things, certain changes immediately come. You can take alcohol and then you are not the same. Immediately a new personality has come in. Alcohol cannot create a personality, but it changes your body pattern. The body chemistry is changed With the change of the body chemistry, the mind has to change its pattern and when the mind changes pattern a new personality has come in.One should become aware, that whatsoever one is eating must be such that it doesn’t make one’s body heavy. This heaviness is not concerned with weight: sometimes you feel that you are weightless, as if you can fly. So the food that can give you the feeling of weightlessness is the right food. The food that gives you the feeling of being burdened is not the right food. All non-vegetarian foods make you more rooted in the earth; you cannot fly. Vegetarian foods give you wings; you have an inner feeling that you can just levitate, you can just go out of gravitation. Food is right if it is non-gravitational. If you can feel non-physical in it, it is good. Really, the body is felt only when it is heavy; when you have the feeling of heaviness inside, only then you feel the body. When the body is not heavy with wrong foods, you are bodiless. That’s why when the body is diseased, when the body is ill, you feel it; when it is healthy, you don’t feel it. You feel your head only when there is a headache; when there is no headache, there is no head.

 New Wine

At the marriage in Cana, where Jesus was present, the old wine ran out. The old wine was made with human effort, over a period of many years - but it could not meet the need. This is a parable of life under the law - the old covenant. The old wine runs out; and the Lord has to wait until it runs out before He can give us the new wine. "For the Lord God says: Only in waiting for Me will you be saved. ... but you say, We will get our help from Egypt (human strength)! So you will be chased by your enemies. ... And the Lord is waiting for you (to come to an end of yourself) and to come to Him, so that He can show you His love; He will conquer you to bless you. ... Blessed are all those who wait for Him to help them'' (Isa. 30:15-18 Living Bible).

When we have tried and tried and tried to live in victory and failed repeatedly, this is the lesson that God is trying to teach us: "You cannot have victory in your own strength." As long as you are under the law, you will be ruled by sin. The chief work that God seeks to do in each of His children is to break down the strength of self totally. Jesus waited for the old wine to run out, at Cana, before He did His miracle. He is waiting now for our strength to come to an end. All our failures and defeats are meant by God to bring us to the end, for He can manifest His power perfectly only in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9)   - Bro.Sac poonen

The Truth about Relationships

    Relationship is needed only because you can’t be alone, because you are not yet capable of meditation. Hence, meditation is a MUST before you can really love. One should be capable of being alone, utterly alone, and yet tremendously blissful. Then you can love. Then your love is no more a need but a sharing, no more a necessity. You will not become dependent on the people you love. You will share — and sharing is beautiful.
    Relationship is a thing: you cling to it. Relating is a flow, a movement, a process. You meet a person, you are loving, because you have so much love to give — and the more you give, the more you have. Once you have understood this strange arithmetic of love: that the more you give, the more you have…. This is just against the economic laws that operate in the outside world. Once you have known that, if you want to have more love and more joy, you give and share, then you simply share. And whosoever allows you to share your joy with him or with her, you feel grateful to him or her. But it is not a relationship; it is a riverlike flow.
    No relationship can satisfy, because every relationship begins with great hope, and that is not possible to be fulfilled. Yes, that hope can be fulfilled, but it can be fulfilled only when you have fallen in love with the whole. No part can fulfill it. When you have fallen in love with the total, when the merger happens with the total, only then will there be contentment. There will be nobody who is contented, there will be simply contentment. And then there is no end to it.
    To be in relationship and become dependent is the sign of weakness. And to escape to the Himalayas or to some Catholic monastery because of the fear of becoming dependent is again the sign of weakness; it is cowardly. To live in relationship and yet remain independent, that is what courage is. The new man will be courageous.
    That’s what happens in every relationship. Rather than giving you contentment, it gives you a tremendous discontentment. Each relationship fails in this world — and it is good that it fails; it would have been a curse if it was not so. It is a blessing that it fails. Because each relationship fails, that’s why you start searching for the ultimate relationship with God, with existence, with the cosmos. You see the futility again and again, that it is not going to be satisfied by any man, by any woman; that each experience ends in tremendous frustration, begins in great hope and leaves you in great hopelessness. It is always so, it comes with great romance and ends in a bitter taste. When it happens again and again, one has to learn something — that each relationship is only an experimentation to prepare you for the ultimate relationship, for the ultimate love affair.
    If you move into a relationship when you are feeling lonely, then you will exploit the other. The other will become a means to satisfy you. You will use the other, and everybody resents being used because no man is here to become a means for anybody else.
    Whenever you move in any relationship out of loneliness, the relationship is already on the rocks. Even before it has started, it is already on the rocks. Even before the birth, the child is dead. It is going to create more misery for you. And remember, when you move from your loneliness you will fall in relationship with somebody who is in the same plight, because no man who is really living his aloneness will be attracted towards you. You will be too below him. He can, at the most, sympathize, but cannot love you. One who is on his peak of aloneness can only be attracted towards somebody who is also alone. So whenever you move out of loneliness, you will find a man of the same type; you will find your own reflection somewhere. Two beggars will meet, two miserable people will meet. And remember, when two miserable people meet, it is not an ordinary addition, it is a multiplication. They create much more misery for each other than they could have created in their loneliness.
    Out of your unhappiness you seek the other; then the relationship is going to be wrong. Seek the other out of happiness, and then the relationship will never be wrong. Seek out of happiness. First meditate, first feel your own being, first pray. First grow into love; otherwise what are you going to do when you have found the lover? Then you don’t know what to do.
    Whenever you are sexually related you are afraid, because sex is really not a relationship, it is an exploitation. If you are attached to a woman or man sexually, you are always afraid that this woman may go to somebody else, this man may move to somebody else. There is no relationship really, it is just mutual exploitation. You are exploiting each other, but you don’t love and you know it, so you are afraid.
    Have a sexual relationship only when you have a loving relationship, so love and sex become associated. And love is a greater centre, a higher centre. Once sex is hitched to love, it starts moving upwards. Once you feel that you are loving, then never go to pray in a temple or in a mosque or in a church — that is foolish. Then again do the same as you did in the first place: your first prayer has to happen with your beloved or with your lover. Either before you make love, let there be prayer; or, after you have made love, let there be prayer; or — and the third is the best — while you are making love, let there be prayer. -   Quoted
    
 

Are you discouraged?

Are you discouraged?
Then the people of Judah said, "The work crews are worn out, and there is too much rubble. We can't continue to rebuild the wall." Nehemiah 4:10 (GWT)
Discouragement is curable. Whenever I get discouraged, I head straight to Nehemiah. This great leader of ancient Israel understood there were four reasons for discouragement.
First, you get fatigued -- You simply get tired as the laborers did in Nehemiah 4:10. We're human beings and we wear out. You cannot burn the candle at both ends. So if you're discouraged, it may be you don't have to change anything. You just need a vacation! Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is go to bed.
Second, you get frustrated -- Nehemiah says there was rubble all around, so much that it was getting in the way of rebuilding the wall. Do you have rubble in your life? Have you noticed that anytime you start doing something new, the trash starts piling up?
If you don't clean it out periodically, it's going to stop your progress. You can't avoid it, so you need to learn to recognize it and dispose of it quickly so you don't lose focus on your original intention.
What is the rubble in your life? I think rubble is the trivial things that waste your time and energy and prevent you from accomplishing what God has called you to do.
Third, you think you've failed -- Nehemiah's people were unable to finish their task as quickly as originally planned and, as a result, their confidence collapsed. They were thinking, "We were stupid to think we could ever rebuild this wall."
But you know what I do when I don't reach a goal on time? I just set a new goal. I don't give up. Everybody fails. Everybody does foolish things. So the issue is not that you failed - it's how you respond to your failure.
Do you give in to self-pity? Do you start blaming other people? Do you start complaining that it's impossible? Or, do you refocus on God's intentions and start moving again?
Finally, when you give in to fear, you get discouraged -- Nehemiah 4 suggests the people most affected by fear are those who hang around negative people. If you're going to control the negative thoughts in your life, you've got to get away from negative people as much as you can.
Maybe you're discouraged because of fear. You're dealing with fears like, "I can't handle this. It's too much responsibility." Maybe it's the fear that you don't deserve it. It's the fear of criticism. Fear will destroy your life if you let it. But you can choose to resist the discouragement. Say, "God help me get my eyes off the problem - off the circumstance - and keep my eyes on you."