Back in 1991, Singapore sisters, Renu and Preetha, were lively, fun loving tiny tots who often went on tour with the Amma\u2019s group.\u00a0 At the Mauritius airport that year, I noticed the girls in tears.\u00a0 Swami Ramakrishna asked them what the matter was. They said that someone had called them \u201clittle devils.\u201d They tearfully asked, \u201cSwami, are we devils?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cNo, no,\u201d he reassured them, \u201cyou are ANGELS!\u201d The woebegone faces brightened and the girls went skipping through the airport shouting, \u201cWe are angels, we are angels!\u201d<\/p>\n
Eighteen years have passed the girls have grown up into beautiful and successful young women. This year when Amma came to Singapore for her program, the girls were present as usual.\u00a0 They worked nonstop in various capacities.\u00a0 The Singapore devotees are particularly hard working and hardly see Amma at all during the program.\u00a0 Amma likes to be sure that the local sevites have some time with her and calls them all to put the prasad that she gives to the devotees into her hand as she gives darshan.<\/p>\n
However, someone must round them up these sevites and get them to Amma.\u00a0 One of the girls, Preetha, seemed always to need to run to search for the people who Amma had called to give prasad to her during darshan.\u00a0 As she knew everyone, and where they would be doing their duty, she was the obvious one for the job.\u00a0 Her sister Renu also took turns helping her.\u00a0 For hours, the girls circled the venue, bringing the hundreds of sevites to the prasad Q.\u00a0 I was particularly impressed by this, as often I have the experience, when organizing the prasad, that no one is willing to do this job.\u00a0 Some people work for a couple of hours, or for one darshan.\u00a0 Some even promise to help, then give prasad themselves and disappear!\u00a0 But not these girls!\u00a0 They made sure that every sevite in Singapore and Malaysia gave prasad to Amma daily.<\/p>\n
Devi Bhava was festive and busy for the devotees.\u00a0 Preetha began looking for prasad givers at 10 a.m. that night and continued until 3 a.m. the next morning.\u00a0 Finally, she breathlessly heaved a sigh of relief as all the Singapore people had given prasad and it was the turn of the Malaysians who were lined up and eagerly waiting.\u00a0 Then traditionally it would be the turn of the tour staff to give prasad, so she should be able to relax for the rest of the Devi Bhava Darshan.\u00a0 After a couple of hours, the Malaysian devotees had finished and the Tour Staff had lined up to give prasad.<\/p>\n
Suddenly Amma announced that she wanted to see the hard working co-coordinators of the various departments one more time!\u00a0 The exhausted Preetha doggedly began to circle the venue ceaselessly, bringing each of 25 to the prasad Q one by one! In over fifteen years of organizing Amma\u2019s prasad, I\u2019ve never seen anyone work as hard as Preetha and Renu at bringing the devotees to Amma.<\/p>\n
Amma often compares young children to grassy ground and adults to rocky soil.\u00a0 She explains if we start shaping the youngsters at an early age, it is comparable to creating a path easily in the grass.\u00a0 Whereas, by the time we are adults, our habits are hardened, and we are like rocky soil- hard material to shape.\u00a0 Their family brought these girls and their older sister directly to Amma at an early age.\u00a0 They grew up in Amma\u2019s satsang and hearing Amma\u2019s teachings.\u00a0\u00a0 We can see the results of exposing young children to Amma, to her teachings, and to her satsang in their selfless actions.<\/p>\n
I thought back to that exchange between the girls and Swami Ramakrishna eighteen years ago.\u00a0\u00a0 Call them angels and they will become angels!<\/p>\n
– Rita<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in 1991, Singapore sisters, Renu and Preetha, were lively, fun loving tiny tots who often went on tour with the Amma\u2019s group.\u00a0 At the Mauritius airport that year, I noticed the girls in tears.\u00a0 Swami Ramakrishna asked them what the matter was. They said that someone had called them \u201clittle devils.\u201d They tearfully asked, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-with-amma"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}