This one solitary figure …

. By T.V. Antony Raj

This man was born in a little-known village to a peasant woman and was brought up in another out-of-the-way village. His father was a carpenter and he too worked as a carpenter until he was thirty.

For the next three years he wandered as a vagabond in the villages and towns surrounding his native place proclaiming a message. He gathered around him a small group of friends who were just as poor like him.

In those three years, he never owned a home; he never had a family of his own; he never had a business or a job; he never held an office; he never wrote anything; he never did any thing that usually go with greatness. In short, he had no credentials.

He did wonders but the tide of popular feeling turned against him, even in his own village.

Later, one of his friends denied him; another betrayed him by turning him over to his enemies. He was subjected to a mockery of a trial, nailed to a cross between two criminals, and when he died was laid in a borrowed grave.

But he rose from the dead.

Now, twenty centuries later, he is a central figure of the human race. All the kings that ever reigned, all the armies that ever marched, all the parliaments that ever assembled, are absolutely insignificant in their influence on mankind compared with that of this one solitary figure ….