Editorial

Oh what a night!

By Gerard Pereira (Editor, Inspiritu)

Dear Friends,

We come to an end of another year. A year that has been filled with joys and challenges. For me personally there has been tremendous joy of coming to experience God as Creator and Father. I recall the night my daughter was born. What seemed like something uneventful apart from the joy of having our second child, turned out to be a faith filled experience.

Unlike my son whom I held in my arms half an hour after he was born, there was no sign of the baby for an hour. The doctor attending to my wife came out for a split second, told me that my wife had delivered and rushed back into the labour room. What anxieties filled my being. The recollection of the sight of my wife being whisked into the labour room as baby was due to be born, only deepened the fear that something was wrong when I saw the doctor rush back into the labour room. O what a night! With all kinds of thoughts running through my mind, my heart cried out, “My God, you know my strengths and weaknesses, you know what I can do and cannot do, I surrender myself to you knowing that you know what's best for me”.

As I walked out of the waiting room I heard a voice within me say , “ You have a Father”. Without hesitation I responded, “Who is my Lord and Saviour too”. Without realis ing I had verbalised it aloud. The events that followed the next few days removed all doubts that the “voice and my response were the figment of my imagination, but that I had encountered a faith experience.

Baby Clare was admitted because she had gone into stress during her birth. The doctor at the gyn a ecology ward could not tell me what was wrong and wanted me to speak to the doctors at the Special Care Nursery. When I finally got to see Clare, she was in an incubator with an oxygen tube at her nostrils. In response to my question “What's wrong with her ?” I got a reply, “don't know we are still observing her”. “Why the Oxygen Tube?”, “she might stop breathing”, “why” , “don't know until we see the x-ray”. I left the ward sad, frightened and yet with a sense of peace deep within.

When I saw her 12 hours later she had an intravenous tube attached to her hand. I shed tears seeing her in that state. The following day my wife was discharged but not Clare. Coupled with my fears, there was a very heavy storm that night and I wanted to be with Clare but fathers were not allowed to stay overnight in the ward. I made a prayer asking God the Father to hold her in His arms that night.

When my wife visited Clare the next morning she enquired from a mother who was taking care of her child in the ward whether the babies were disturbed the night before by the storm. The mother replied that none of the children woke up that night unlike the other nights. Clare stayed on another day at the SCN and was discharged. She was medically fit.

O what a night it was to the shepherds when they heard the angel say, “ to you is born a Saviour , the Messiah, the Lord” . Jesus continues to offer to all the splendour of the truth which saves .

What will our Christmas message to our families, neighbourhood , our parish and our country be this year? .

Legislators and politicians have refused to respect and love their brothers and sisters of a different race or faith; they have denied fundamental rights to individuals and nations. The political order is disordered because the order of the soul is disordered (Plato)

Will we confess, that each of us has sought the truth elsewhere, invented false certainties, and chased after deceptive ideologies, thus allowing secular and religious features of Christ's birth to be interwoven? The challenge for us is to ensure that Christmas is not emptied of its PROMISES.

It is clear that materialism does not and cannot meet the deepest needs of the human heart and spirit. Only God's spirit can.

Let us this advent, spend time in repentance and reparation; through fast, prayer and intercession as individuals, families and community.

Let us with late Pope John Paul II confess :

“ You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. The Church greets you, who have come into the world to triumph over death. You have come to illuminate human life through the Gospel. You are our hope. You alone have words of eternal life”.

(extracted from 1999 Christmas message by Pope John Paul II).

Serving you,

Gerry Pereira

From ALL DST And PMST Members:

We wish you A BLESSED AND JOY FILLED CHRISTMAS.