Today I met a young colleague, who is going through a personal crisis.  Her father is seriously unwell and bed ridden at home.  Her father in law is hospitalised and is in a serious condition.  She and her husband have been going through this crisis for the last two years.  She was heart broken and was not sure how to handle such a situation.  “Why me ? ” is a question she asked and I had no answer.

I listened to her patiently and shared some of the crisis I have gone through in life.  We can neither share the pain nor give her any advise in this situation.  Many of us have grown through such situations in life. Each of us may have faced a different type of crisis in life.  When we are going through a crisis, we have no tears to shed and no advice to follow.  In most situations, you have to face it alone and the journey is ardous.

Most of us wonder why me ?  Why is God so cruel to us ?  What did I do wrong to face such a situation ?  We have no answers and may be many more questions ?  While we may ask many of our friends and well wishers, we have no solutions.  It is in these situations, you can really know the genuine people in your life.  Your own relatives may behave differently and your so called friends may move away from you.

One may almost lose hope in life.  There could be days where you may like to talk to God and tell him that he is being unfair.  You even lose faith in God.  It is at this time, it may useful for us to keep faith in ourselves and our good deeds in life.  May be God is testing our patience and He is expecting us to lose our faith in Him.  But, we should never lose faith in ourselves and hope in life.

Hope is like water.  It will always quench our thirst.  It is in this phase of our life, we tend to recognise the authentic people in our lives.  Some of them who we thought were close to us may lose significance in our lives by their displayed behaviour during this crisis.  But, we have to keep our faith in ourselves.  We have to be grateful to the people who helped us during this crisis for the rest of our lives.

God bestows us with the courage to face this crisis.  She will support us with the resources we need to overcome this phase of our life.  Such incidents make us stronger and wiser in life.  The people who listen to us and help us wade through such crises are God in human form.  We have to respect them, love them and be grateful to them.

It may also be useful to realise that there are millions of people in the world, who may be facing much tougher crisis than us.  They may have much lesser resources to deal with their issues.  We may consider ourselves lucky to be able to face the crisis and deal with it by ourselves.  If married, we may be grateful to our spouse for being with us and enabling each other to be brave and helpful during this phase of our life.

Life is journey and we may have good days and bad days and ultimately we do fulfill our goals by our own means and that gives us happiness.

Let us live life as it comes. We need to remember that there is sunrise after every sunset.

S Ramesh Shankar