Dear Jesus,
You call me the perfect brew,
You bring out the best in me, my golden hue,
And when I am down, You wipe out every blue,
Your mercies, every morning they are new,
Your love, beautiful like morning dew,
And the best part is that I belong to You.
Your child,
Me
Footnotes
I love my hot chai (tea). Some hot ‘pazhampori’ (banana fritters) along with it—the perfect evening treat! I have had some of the best conversations over a cup of tea. So, I came up with this plan to have chai with Jesus once a week. How did it go, you may ask—not exactly how I planned it. In the first week, just when I was about to head to my rooftop dining area with my cup of tea and Bible, my neighbour walked in. She wanted to know what I was doing. “How nosy!” I thought, but I decided to tell her anyway. She said, “Let’s go then!” I drew a blank but the Holy Spirit nudged me— “Take her for tea; you are going to learn something new.”
The weather was perfect; it was drizzling and the smell of wet soil filled the air. As we sipped our tea in silence for a while, I could sense that she was waiting for me to start the conversation. “Lord, I don’t know how this works; You take over,” I prayed in my head. A sigh was all it took to get her talking.
“I’ll be never free from my past,” she said.
I was surprised by the vagueness of that statement but I didn’t say anything.
“I am never free from the haunting accusations surrounding yesterday’s mistakes that may ambush me today. I keep getting flashes of my past regularly—they sneak into my thoughts with crafty subtlety. When I feel like I can have a deeper connect with people, the thought inevitably traipses through my head—what if they knew my past? Whenever I beam with a sense of accomplishment, I begin to remember my failures. It sounds hypocritical to say I believe Jesus has forgiven my past. I do believe. But I just want to know if Iwould ever be free from it?” she said.
The verse that came into my mind was John 8:36— “If the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.” I told this to her and sensed that she dismissed it—probably too familiar with it. I did not stop though because I knew it wasn’t me that spoke. What came out was a sermon to myself.
And this is the script:
Sometimes you feel like you’re the only one with something to hide. The sense of isolation magnifies your feeling of guilt. Satan wants you to feel alone and crippled by all those lies. The truth is—every person on earth has a “past”—even the kind who seemingly never did anything wrong. Adam and Eve instilled a sinful nature into the entire human race. However, we need to understand and accept that we are free from the penalty of our past because we trust Christ’s sacrifice as the ultimate and final payment for sin. Even so, sometimes the pain of our past comes calling. And sometimes we tend to pick up those familiar old chains—our guilt feels so comfortable that we revert to it out of habit. But thrust this in your head—Christ has set us free. Every wrong thought, word or action—all paid for. How amazing is that. Don’t believe the lies of the pit. “YOU ARE WORTH THE PRICE JESUS PAID ON THE CROSS—NOTHING LESS!”—Keep that in mind.
This was the message that God spoke to me and through me that evening.
We spoke for about an hour and prayed. As she left, I thought to myself how much I needed that conversation. “Wow Lord! This is not how I planned it.” But again, things don’t work according to my plan, does it?
So, here is the takeaway from this ‘chai conversation’: “Stop going back and checking on things you already left in God’s hands”