Ask and you shall receive

I grew up in a convent school, two actually but that’s beside the point. Now the thing about being constantly around nuns is that you get to hear strange religious quotes from them. ‘Singing is praying twice’; ‘Elvis is the devil’; ‘God is watching you’… well these are just a few of them. Over time you learn to filter them out. For some reason though, one line has always stayed with me… ‘God works in mysterious ways’
At first I used to wonder bout this whole mystery. I mean what’s with all the mystery? Why won’t he just make a straight forward move and be done with it already? One of the nuns once tried to explain to us how God works. Apparently he doesn’t answer all our prayers right to the T! Well we all already knew that now, didn’t we? I mean how many of us asked for chocolate houses, winning the lottery, yummilicious arm candy and ended up with zilch? Now according to the nun, God answers our prayers but not how we expect them to be. He gives us what we want but we only realize it later.

It’s Ganesh Visarjhan festival this week. Last year during Ganesh Visarjhan I was more or less a mess. Actually I was more of a mess than anything else. So I did what any desperate person would do in my situation. I plead my case to each and every God I could think of. Being an Indian there were far too many God’s. This was a good thing for me. I turned to every idol and begged and begged hoping that some of my prayers would make its way above to the powers that be. The prayers were more or less the same; Make me happy again. I thought for me to be happy I would have to get back what I lost. So it was a little disconcerting when I realized that I was getting happier but I still hadn’t got back what I had lost. I went through all the feelings that a girl has when she gets her first period! Confusion. Fear. Guilt. Et Cetra, Et cetra. It was a weird phase but thankfully I had friends to take care of me… last year as well as when I had my first period. It’s only now that I realize that for me to get happy I had to let go of the ‘then’ and make room for ‘now.’

Strange isn’t it how things work out. The Catholic in me wants to say ‘Strange how God works things out.’