Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: Leadership (03/14/05)
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TITLE: The leader in a simple man | Previous Challenge Entry
By Aziel Karthak
03/21/05 -
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I knew a man who was a legend to anyone who experienced him personally. My first memory of him even now is that of a rotund and lumbering individual, with a bible tucked in his right armpit, his old tweed coat, a personal favorite, swinging with the fickleness of the monsoon in that part of the world.
The man was moderately educated, a misfortune borne of a lack of good schools and his father’s shallow pockets. He voice was soft, almost melodic that people perhaps mistook it for weakness. There was nothing to suggest, at first meeting, that he was a leader or a man of authority. The fluency of tongue was missing. But everytime he took the pulpit his persona changed. There when he spoke, nothing was masked; nothing was lost to translation. God’s word through him was like a rushing brook, clean and purging, where drowning was no struggle, rather delightful submission.
It wasn’t surprising that a man lacking worldly gifts should be a harbinger of the Good Word. David, the most celebrated king in the Bible, was prone to committing mistakes; Moses was reluctant to take God’s for him; Elijah struggled with his responsibility. But they always delivered when the hour came. Likewise, this man from Kalimpong personified the enormity of the mystery of God’s design. His weapon was not the sword or the rapier, and he did not conquer countries on horseback. He used the infinitely powerful Bible as his tool and he rode on God’s timeless grace.
This divine grace was none more so evident in his life than the period after one gall stone operation, when an incompetence of a small town surgeon turned a simple case into a proliferation of complications that was to plague him for the rest of his life. He struggled with his health, the frequency of his house visits went down and he spent most of his time lying on his back, breathing irregularly, enduring attacks of fever, but constantly reading the bible.
On 19th May 2004, the Lord called this leader home. I was there on the day of the funeral. Through misty eyes I saw the magnitude of what God had done through him. Hordes of people flocked in to pay their final homage; most of them were from the rural confines, illiterate people with an uncomplicated approach to life. The rains that had hitherto bucketed down for the previous three days took a sabbatical for that day, as orchids and the rest of the rich flora exploded into sunlit life. That was God’s miracle, not nature’s aberration.
For fifty years – he had received the Lord at twelve – the man served his Master. His ministry, which started at a steady pace, grew with such rapidity that there is a number of capable young people now ready to take the baton from him. The man was slow to anger, made mistakes as is the human wont, but stuck to God like an adhesive. His excursions to the pastoral regions of the town to spread God’s Word are now a part of folklore there. He was a man of God, a true leader. I know it. I am his son.
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