This morning when my sister and I asked my mom to make vegetable rolls to be cooked for the breakfast, despite disagreeing initially, our mom finally cooked them. I was so happy and felt grateful that she did exactly what we wanted. It is so easy to love someone for something they do which pleases us.

However, I was thinking, how when things go the way we want them to, it is easy to be grateful to Krishna. However, when there is some chastisement, it not only becomes difficult but impossible sometimes to thank Krishna for putting me in that troublesome situation due to my own past deeds. This world has been compared to a jail, where we come for rectification. Nevertheless, when unfavorable situations come, all the contaminations in the heart begin to float on the surface and I can easily see through them to realize how conditioned I am. When our anarthas when subtracted from our lives, we are perfect!

Srimad Bhagavatam 1.2.6 explains devotional service is unmotivated and uninterrupted: 

sa vai puṁsāṁ paro dharmo

yato bhaktir adhokṣaje

ahaituky apratihatā

yayātmā suprasīdati

Krishna explains in the Bhagavad Gita how one who is not elated in happiness and disturbed in distress is a sage of a steady mind. One who is not disturbed in mind even amidst the threefold miseries or elated when there is happiness, and who is free from attachment, fear, and anger, is called a sage of steady mind (BG 2.56).

These minute or sometimes heavy tests in our lives, help us understand how far we are from the ultimate goal of life, pure devotional service to Krishna. The tests are reminders that this material world is not  “our kind of place” and we need to get through many obstacles before we are united again in service. Until then we can remember “the way to Vraja is full of thorns” as Siddhanta Saraswati Thakur used to say, “to keep going enthusiastically, no matter what!”