Kedo Peseyie
With due respect and apology to Arundhati Roy, I would like to borrow the title of her book. I have read only few pages of this book. And in those pages I saw how she captures every minute detail of things she sees around her. In some parts she is so thorough that the impatient reader may even skip some sentences or words without the qualms of an avid reader. I would like to emulate the attention she gives to details and infinitesimal things, though I have a feeling that the subject matter of this article will be very different from hers.
Like the impatient reader who skims through a book skipping paragraphs and chapters, people often tend to rush through life ignoring the small things in life that gives a lot of pleasure, and yes, also bring a lot of displeasure and dryness in the spirit. We seem to have created certain categories of SIN calling it small sins, big sins, acceptable sins, condemnable sins, and so forth. But these categories don’t matter to God because he says “there is no difference, all have sinned and fallen short…” The important thing is that we avoid sinning and not come up with excuses by creating some categories of sin of our own to feed our surreptitious little pleasures.
Many people in our society seem to be so concerned about “big” things. There are a lot of angry voices from all corners. People are angry because of corruption, because someone is growing rich and someone is getting poor, because someone has a Scorpio and the other only a scooter, because someone is ruling and the other is not, because there is no electricity, and so on. Then there is this guy who wants to ban a newspaper in the name of Democracy. Then there is this other guy who thinks that correcting the English in the newspapers in an attack on the “stability, peace, truth and justice” of the Naga society. Then again there are those who think that less people on the streets on Sundays can create an appropriate atmosphere for worship.
Sure, God is concerned about all these things (only because He doesn’t want to abandon us to insanity). And bigger things than these. And He is concerned about much smaller things too. And it is these smaller things that I want to write about today.
The fact is that these smaller things (or “smaller” sins) which we so deliberately overlook are vital to the health of our individual spiritual life as well as of the society. Our Christianity seems to have failed to penetrate into our consciences making us immune to guilty feelings when we commit “small, acceptable sins”. Let me try and give you some examples.
The best time of the year for majority of our students is during the disbursement of the scholarships. One student even wrote a poem in one newspaper last year. I don’t exactly remember the poem but the first line was like, “Oh! My scholarship…” You can imagine the excitement, like the longing of a lover lost in love, “Oh! My…” But you see, the problem is this: majority of the students who apply for scholarships do so by declaring that their parents are farmers (with the consent of their parents who are not farmers). Someone joked, 60% of them declare that their parents are farmers, and the other 40% write cultivators. But this practise has become an acceptable thing just because everyone else is doing it. And these same students cry foul against the government if the scholarship is not released on time. Shame on us. I have personally seen a lot of forms where students, whose parents both serve in respectable and well-paid government jobs, declare that both of them are farmers. With the year 2006 being the “Year of Farmers”, I won’t be surprised if they are fishing for benefits in other places masquerading as farmers and cultivators. Small things? But it echoes in eternity.
Many people cannot feel even a tiny prick of the conscience even when they tell a lie. One day I was walking home after work in Kohima. The person in front of me was talking to someone on his mobile phone. I wasn’t listening until this guy almost shouted in a loud, clear voice, “Hey, I can’t make it today. I am in Guwahati right now”. Ooink?! Maybe it is was a bad situation. But if his relationship with God and with people was in the right place, that won’t have been necessary, I thought. Now if he meets his friend on the road, he’ll have to come up with another lie to cover up the first. This kind of a situation happens everyday in our workplaces and government offices.
You have to “lie” your way through that line of officials, they say. These days you cannot get anything done without telling a lie, they say. But they don’t realise that that itself is the biggest lie. We can easily recognise a lie when we see and hear one. But in order to prove that it is a lie, we say we need a lie-detector test to tell us. And again, they say, a lie-detector test is not 100% reliable. So by the time the results of the test come out, we are so confused which to believe, and what is a lie. That is exactly what sin does to us—it blurs our vision of truth and reality and clutters our minds with a lot of unnecessary details. No wonder we don’t see greater changes happening and we don’t rise to higher levels of truth, integrity and honesty. A single lie is dangerous because it entangles us in more lies. A single truth matters because it points us to more truths and higher levels of wisdom.
Or, how about the small leftover rupees or coins from a public account you’ve been handling. I often buy small things for my office from my college fund. Sometimes some shopkeepers decide to do me a favour by receiving a few rupees less than the amount written in the receipt. In such situations, I always request them to rewrite the receipt and enter the exact amount I paid them for the item I bought. I know my college will not run into bankruptcy even if I pocket more than a hundred rupees. But I will surely run into spiritual bankruptcy and will never prosper in my work if I am dishonest even with the little responsibility of buying a small light bulb. There are those in our society who have taken on the bigger test without passing the smaller test. And they have failed miserably. The result echoes in our town, and in our drainage, water pipelines, management of public property, etc. If only we could realise that God is sovereign over small things as much as He is sovereign over big things.
Our spirituality seems to have failed in these small things. We are concerned about big seminars and conferences, but we willingly give the smaller things over to the Devil. These smaller things are wonderful foundational materials the Devil can use to build his empire in our lives. We don’t want the Devil to do that. And so we ought to live our lives always cautiously aware of the small things because it is in the small things that we come to know how faithful and trustworthy a person really is.
And remember Jesus said that if we cannot be trusted with little things, we will never be trusted with big things. Luke 16: 10-12, “If a person can be trusted with small things, then he can also be trusted with big things. If a person is dishonest in little things, then he will be dishonest in big things too. If you cannot be trusted with worldly riches, then you will not be trusted with the true (heavenly) riches. And if you cannot be trusted with the things that belong to someone else, then you will not be given things of your own”. (from the Easy-to-Read version)
