I am glad I was born into this world!

If someone asked you, “Do you like your Birthday?”  You might say, “Of course, everybody likes their birthdays”.  Well, if you had asked me that question before 1985, I would have utterly denounced and cursed the day I was born.  I hated the day I was born.  “What happened in 1985?” could be your next possible question.  The thing that happened was; I met Jesus Christ.  He completely changed my life thereafter.  Yet, the idea of celebrating my birthday really didn’t make sense to me until 1993.  Again you might ask, “What happened in 1993?”  My son was born!  The birth of my son totally changed my perspective about God the father.  I began to appreciate the fact that I was born into this world so that I could become a father of such a beautiful son.  Indeed, God has given me an amazing, funny and brilliant son.  Up until that time, the concept of a father’s love had never entered into my brain.  I had read about it, heard about it, witnessed it; but neither felt it nor understood it completely.  Having a son opened up a new dimension into my cognitive as well as affective world. 

What happened at my birth is still a mystery to me in many levels.  I was the first male child to be born to my parents.  Obviously they were so happy to have a son after three daughters.  In my culture, a father would not see his son until a Hindu astrologer draws the horoscope and determines everything about that child.  The astrologer discovered a terrible planetary anomaly about my birth.  I was born in such an inauspicious moment of time that my birth meant sure death for my father.  There was one possible escape for him if he wanted to live long; he must never see his son.  The day his sight falls on his son, he will die.

Naturally my father wanted to live long and so decided never to see me.  Generally such an infant is ether starved to death or given to anyone from a distant place wanting a child for whatever reasons.  It seemed my mother could not let me die nor did they find anyone to take me away.  But it was impossible for them to keep at home.  Finally my mother decided to ask her mother to take care of me and left me there.  Her village was one full day’s walk from the place I was born.  I grew up with my grandparents until I was ten without knowing who my parents were.  But the questions about life, meaning and purpose had found their footings into my tender mind long before a child should be dealing with them. 

To make matter worse, after ten years of my birth a different astrologer, out of curiosity, examined my horoscope and found out that the first one had made a grave mistake in calculating the positions of the stars and the planets in their stupid mathematical equation in determining my fate.  Reluctantly, at the age of eleven, I was brought back to my so called home and for the first time saw my father.  It turned out that my mother used to come once a year to the place where I was and she would hold me, cry over me and so on and so forth.  But no one told me she was my mother.  To make long story short; for one whole year after I was brought home, my father never looked at me nor spoke to me.  He was very kind to his other children.  Just as my childhood was robbed, so went my teenage years until Christ found me.

I was 18 when I finally surrendered my life to Christ.  I was truly born again in every sense of the word.  Prior to that, my world had come to an end and was simply waiting for the day to end my life.  Christ gave me a new life, a new future, a new purpose.  I got married to an amazing woman who gave me a wonderful son; and who in turn changed my world for the best.

A blind religious belief nearly stole my life from me.  But today, Christ has restored all those years the locusts had eaten.  So, I say to myself a big Happy Birthday!

By the way, my wife is going to buy something very special for me and I miss my son who lives in a distant land.