Happy Birthday David!!

Today is David’s birthday, a very special day in our family; I am grateful to God for the gift of David in my life and for all that he does for me and our family.  Being the eldest son of his family, there were always high expectations to meet and he did his very best to take care of his mother, brother and also sister, and at other times even extended families.

He take cares of his mother, who is old and has difficulty in walking. He ensures that she is comfortable, meets all her medical needs, and visits her almost every alternate day and spends time with her and prays for her, without expecting anything in return.

It almost 17 years that we are married and our journey together was not a easy one; we did have a lot of challenges and despite all the setbacks, David has always stood by me in every decision I took; be it choice of buying a flat, finding school for our kids; sometimes even changing school for my son Emmanuel, continuing my education, change of career, attending all the training programmes and being involved in whatever activities I am interested.

It has not been easy for him to balance as his mother is very attached and so are his family members, we lived in the joint set up and took responsibility of settling his younger siblings and it took quite some time to adjust and understand each other. I thank God for every experience and am happy for the lovely moments we have created together; also grateful for not so good memories which has become a learning experience for me.

As both of us are very different from each other; and over the years we have now learnt to complement and support each other. David is very kind, generous, compassionate, full of faith in God, jovial and service oriented, and will go out of his way to reach out to people, because of which he is also taken for granted and sometimes misinterpreted and exploited.

It takes all kinds of experiences in life to understand that there are no perfect people, neither perfect couples nor perfect families. So I am happy for the past and I appreciate all the times David took initiative to cook and even keep the house neat and tidy, entertained my friends and never stopped me from being Myself.

Today I want to affirm and pray that the Lord bless David abundantly and grant him strength to continue the good work in serving our community.

 “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” Thomas Merton.