How do we get to decide whether a person is good or bad? Is it a divine talent from Mars or a self proclaimed judgement? Either ways its not legal or biblical!
To know whether a person is valuable or not we need to understand their context.
Let me tell you a detail from my life which really changed my outlook on people and things.
There was this girl in my college who happened to be in my batch and in the same hostel I lived in. We Were Not Friends! And with the air I had being the topper, in the coolest gang and also the Miss Fresher that year. My Head weight was much more than my actual weight (ohh! that’s such a modest comparison or maybe as much as HULK).
So this girl, whom I won’t name was next level annoying and literally irritating, loud, super slow, and magnificently pathetic. For her introduction at college, she brings an achaar ka (pickle) bottle which has a child’s picture, WHICH SHE SAYS IS HER!
I clearly did not like her because when asked “Who is your favorite batchmate?” she said “ Sabse baast toh Mehima Jahn hai she is my baast frand.” This took a hype and people started teasing me. I sure had lot of head weight then but I used to help people when needed and once I had helped this achaar girl, she declared this statement publicly.
Now, you know the feels, passed out of high school and we never grew up and the teasing and all began sporadically. I stopped seeing her and even IGNORED her for no reason. My friends were in majority meaning there could be only few who were not in our group so it was like some kind of boycotting her.
I felt guilty but chose to do nothing about it. I had passed my judgement.
This achaar girl, 24 years old, comes from a very small town, who due to financial reasons joined med school pretty late. She was the oldest among us. Her family was broke and she was studying on loan. She had done her schooling in Hindi medium and had struggled which I chose to not care about!
The subjects in med school are next level hard and the terms are obnoxious. It’s difficult even for brilliant students. We would burn our brains to mug up, but biochemistry was a subject you could not mug up.
Final exams arrived, and the achaar girl was missing for the past 3 months. Apparently she never came out of her room, she was busy studying, and we gave no heed. Just 2 weeks before the exam she came to my room started crying terribly. I freaked out, gave her some water and asked her to take a seat. I asked her what had happened ( totally distracted by the syllabus I still had to cover).
She wept and confessed that this was very hard for her as she had trouble in understanding anything. She showed me her Human Anatomy textbook and as I flipped through the pages I was shocked! Every word was translated in Hindi with a pencil in the worst handwriting on planet EARTH!
All this while she was buried with a dictionary and google underlining hard words (or all words) and writing them down and learning. I love people who work hard because I myself believe there is no shortcut to success. She asked for help and I helped her. She was a good learner. I used to explain her a topic and she used to by heart it word by word.
Weeks passed, the exams got over and she was super tensed but never came to me again. By then I had began to have a soft corner for her but I still did not care enough to talk to her.
As the results came in, we got the news that the marking was too tough and many students had failed. Only 35 of us had passed and the rest had failed in one or the other subjects.
Mahima John 1st Prof. BDS : Status All Clear. It was a relief. Next I checked for all my best friends. They had cleared too. But most of my batch-mates had flunked and it was like a doomsday in hostel that day. Everyone looked at me as though I had done some crime by passing!
It felt as if all the joy of clearing first year was over, but something even more strange happened. The achar girl had cleared all her papers. She came with a box of sweets and the now famous achar to thank me. I was touched.
I left hostel by the mid of the next year, shifted with my buddies to a good locality to be a day scholar. By then I had lost all touch from my hostel friends.
I used to see my achar friend during the lectures. One year flew by and 2nd prof exams came. I entered the exam hall, heard the gossips “Achaar girl is missing, suna hai she wont write the exam.” I was worried but more tensed for the exam so I waited till the exam got over.
I walked into our Administrative building to ask the administrator about the whereabouts of the achar girl. His response shook my inner being. This girl was detained from writing her exams because her loan for 2nd year was not sanctioned. Now she could only write her exams the following year.
I never helped her. I could have. In fact all of us together could have, but we choose rather to be too proud to stoop down and ask “is everything okay?”
This incident changed me. I never left any chance since then to be humble and to help. Maybe it was the guilt but it helped me to influence everyone around me.
Jesus came down to see the context of the World and then save the World.
Do we see the context of a person before judging him/her?
What happened to achaar girl is a happy ending. She joined back college in months she was allowed to write her exams and now she is practicing doctor in some part of India.
Some people impact your lives and change the way we see the world. It’s us who need to decide whether we are humble enough to accept the change.
If Jesus would have judged us sitting right up in heaven, dear friends we would have been doomed to hell.
Let us be better and not bitter…more like Jesus and less like us and make our world a better place to be!
Dr.Mahima John
Inspired by Pastor Arul Thomas
#Collegediaries