The place of worship is full of beggars inside and outside. Have you noticed that? The ones outside ask for money in small quantity and sit with a small begging bowl. The ones inside have insatiable appetite and greed. Their needs are phenomenal. They have endless wants and their begging bowl is the biggest.
Those who walk out of the place of worship look at the beggars outside derisively. Calling out names and asking them why they can’t take up some gainful employment? Who are these wretched folks to give advice to them when they themselves have gone inside the temple or church like the biggest beggar?
I was reading about some rich woman doing sewa or working in the kitchen of some temple. Offering large monies and bribes to huge temples or doing service to such places is greater karma than sitting outside and begging for trinkets. Every word written about such rich poor people is adding to their karmic debts. They will have to go through greater miseries than any plain simple beggar.
The reasons are their greater demands. They can bend the temple rules for bigger and ostentatious prayer services overriding the poorer people. When these rich folks don’t stand in queues and get direct entries to places of worship, they feel too proud of their achievements. But what about those others who are sidelined whose curses these rich brats are taking on their heads? If you are the one who is watching these well healed folks get special treatment, what are you thinking then? Aren’t you cursing them to oblivion? Aren’t you jealous of their status? Don’t you envy their facilitations? Don’t you want to murder them?
I am reminded of some film star who got married to another great film actress in Tirupati and stopped the regular queue for two hours. Their entire family of superstar and the couple were cursed by thousands and millions who watched it on the television for putting the other poor worshippers to so much of hardships and troubles! Do you think they got the great Gods blessings or peoples curses? Think about it!
So what is the use of going to some place of worship with a begging bowl asking for money, fame, name, ranks, wife or husbands, success, good health, safe journeys, cures, studies, education, passages, gold and every other trivia that can be got with your own efforts? Isn’t it like going and asking for few hundred dollars at Fort Knox? Or telling the president about repairing your leaking tap? You are going to the ocean with a small tumbler or your bare hands! Whereas you are given the option of carrying away the entire ocean?
You can only be a beggar who asks for trinkets from that grand ocean. So stop being a beggar. There is no point going and asking for petty stuff from god. He is already inundated with hoards of poor people.
Why not give something to God instead? You do have that which God craves for. Don’t be a beggar in front of God. Give Him what you have. He only asks for your love and devotion and nothing else.
You offer Him your love and become His devotee then you will stop being a beggar.