My old life

Highlights - Nithin broke off with his girlfriend this morning. Anu had called up and he tried to get her to agree to reconsider the relationship but when she wasn't forthcoming, he decided wisely to sign off on the relationship. I am glad he did that.

The other highlight is that we had a evening of prayer at Ashraya. Mike has decided to have prayer meetings every alternate week at Ashraya. We all sat in different corners and prayed.

I have been thinking on the topic of repentance a lot today - I have been studying Nehemiah 1 and 2 chapters and it occured to me that I have never sought forgiveness from some of the people I have hurt. I have been feeling terrible about that.

I was wondering if God was asking me to apologize to those people. I still am not sure.

In this context, I started reading up on repentance and what I see is that repentance is turning away from sin towards God. That is not to say that repentance is freeing oneself from sin and approaching God, but rather that one turns his mind away from sin to focus on God. When we do that, God is able to clean us off this sin for good.

Repentance is closely tied to abiding in God - we can abide in God or turn towards God for various reasons; when we repent off our sins, when we are thankful for something which has happenned to us etc.

It appears that when we turn towards God and set our faith that we abide in Christ and that we are part of His body, then we abide in God. When we doubt this fact and take it upon ourselves to work out our salvation by our own effort, then we stop abiding in God and slide back into sin.

posted by Prem @ 10:03 AM

I have been reading and studying Nehemiah since yesterday. Making it a point to spend a majority of my morning reading and studying the bible and also documenting what I understand. I have woken up to the fact that documenting everything - my Bible study, my walk with the Lord, the learning that God has given me, and also my life itself can be a very enlightening exercise.

I was going through my older blog entries - especially ones where Santhosh Achachan is mentioned; I made the blog entries when I was there at his house as well. Those are painful, but it is good to relive his memory.

Santhosh Chachan will continue to be one of my most loved people. I still really miss Achachan. I am sorry to his wife for the way I treated her after Achachan passed away; she was treated badly by the entire house and I am very sorry to her for that. I hope she can forgive us sometime.

I was also thinking about Indumathy - I hurt her as well. I feel bad about that. I sent an apology a long time back but I never received a response. I hope she is doing well.

Other things - yesterday Nithin came to the office; we have been meeting once every week. He was telling me that he has been depressed since morning after his conversation with Anu (his girl friend) in NZ. Anu has been telling him that the relationship is over but Nithin has been holding on in the hope that it will revive.

I told him that he must consider dropping the relationship completely. I told him that his ministry as a worship leader will be affected if he continues to do something which God is asking him to stop doing. So this morning, he got a call from Anu - and today, he told her that the relationship is over.

I am thankful to God for making this happen. I think this will free up Nithin to truly flower in the knowledge of God and in doing His work. I look forward to some exciting times in his life.

This morning I had a chat with Virendra Vase from Equip over Skype. I explained my reasons for not wanting to commit too much into Equip because of my existing commitments with church. I told him that there is a lot of tension now in my time - the church, my business, my family and now Equip are all competing for my time. I feel that it shouldn't be this way.

I told him that I feel that there should be no competition between the church and Equip for my time and asked him to consider having Equip function within the context of a church - that is, that Equip will go to a church and tell them that they want to empower their business people and could we have some people that we can train as consultants from your church and could we have a few clients sign up as well.

And from that point on, conduct the sessions in church and have the church commit its people to helping Equip with the training, the venture etc.

This requires quite a lot of changes in the way Equip operates and it seems to me, from my conversation with Virendra, that they won't be willing to make that change.

That will effectively stop my work with Equip because I do feel that I am called to work in my church.

posted by Prem @ 11:34 PM

I am blogging after a long time.

A lot has happenned since the last time I blogged - I have moved Songbird into a new office here in Anna Nagar near Blue star. We moved in May 2006. We have taken two floors (about 3000 sq feet).

We are now about 16 people. These are the people:

Prem
Sathish
Saura
Geegee Mon
Ratheesh
Rajeswari
Boopathi
Gomathi
Sumathi
Lawson
Balamurugan (temporary trainee)
Arun (From Austin - temporary)
Ganesh
Ashok
Dhamodharan
Saravana Prakash (He has just resigned)

God has been wonderful. We have grown, our business is getting stronger and I am thinking of hiring some managerial varieties - Biz dev manager, QA / Process Coordinator etc.

Alwyn has started Songbird USA too.

So all in all things have been going well.

Yesterday, Preetha had her baby! November 14th 2006 is Daya Mathew's birthday! She was very cute. Preetha delivered Daya at 11:40 AM at Sundaram Medical Foundation Hospital here in Shanthi Colony, Chennai.

We (Appa, Amma, Gracy Aunty, George Uncle, Mathew and I) were shown the baby by the nurse at around 12:04 PM. She weighed in at 3.19 Kgs - very pink and she cried sweetly. She had a head of curly hair and looked adorable! :)

I was very happy to see the baby. Shalina was too. I know she misses not having one of her own and she said as much.

posted by Prem @ 3:29 AM