joy of giving

About 10 years back I had a conversation with one of my friends about what gives happiness. She was saying that happiness is in very small everyday things, I was saying that happiness comes with understanding the purpose and meaning of life. Now after 10 years I tend to agree that happiness is indeed in the everyday small things. There is a certain joy in giving and making a difference to someone's life.

There is a certain amount of joy in knowing that you have made a difference to this world. It is a great feeling. One of the senior execs in one of the companies I worked for use to emphasize the need for providing meaningful work. Management books all over make a strong case for connecting each employees work to the mission/vision of the company. Last week I felt the joy of being part of something. I had donated some money to build a home for the under privileged kids and I was there for the opening of the building. The joy it gives to be part of something that made a difference. It made me ponder about how we spend our entire life on things that hardly make any difference to any one.

Religion is personal

Whenever I read indian news forums like rediff or sulekha the discussion invariably goes towards conversion and its ills. There seems to be an inherent hatred to people who change their religious beliefs. I have even seen people feeling betrayed when a person converts their religious beliefs. To me religion is personal. It signifies a personal relationship with God. My view of who this God is and how my relationship should be with him is determined by my experiences and my world view. I think most countries provide the freedom for the individual to choose their own religion. I do not think a lot of people have a problem with this idea.

Trouble comes when you actively seek to convert the other person into your religion. Here is where people have trouble understanding the christian motives for doing so. The most often quoted reason is that there are brownie points given for every soul you save for God and you will go to heaven based on the brownie points you earn. Even though many within christian community itself beleive this, this is not what Bible States.

The Bible does not ask people to convert others to christianity but it asks people to share the information. You might ask what is the difference between the two and what is the need to do something like that. There might be 3 different perspectives here:

 1. The prevalent jewish sentiment at that time was that Yahweh was only the God of Jews no one else should benefit from it. Paul almost lost his life for preaching to gentiles (non-jews). So the first set of christians always treated their relationship with God as special and were not willing to share it

2. When you have a loving relationship with God you automatically start caring for the people that he cares about. Since God loves all the people in the world you also love all the people in the world. When you love some one it is natural to share and in this fashion you would have to automatically share your knowledge about God.

3. Christians believe that we are all selected before we were born to be christians and to be saved. God sometimes uses christians to reach out to people whom he has already predestined.

So how does forcible conversion and conversion through coercion come into play. This is because of the corporatization of the Church. Bible talks about church being the body of christ and each person having different gifts and when everyone identifies these gifts and uses it for the glory of God the body of christ will automatically grow. This can be interpreted to mean that a person good at raising funds will raise funds for Christ and the person good at preaching or mission work will go and reach out to people who have not heard about christ. Now when you bring in corporate best practice of having metrics to measure progress. You can see some ill trained people falling victim and cook up the numbers.