Do we truly appreciate our temple presidents?
Are we overly critical or at best think they do very little, or appear to do very little?
Do we appreciate the sacrifice that these devotee’s make in running our centre’s and temples?
It is nice that as I live in a secluded part of Wales that it is generally peaceful surrounded by wonderful wildlife and nature, unlike the towns and cities our centres are based.
So it was an honour that one of our temple presidents took the opportunity to visit and to take a much-needed rest and to recoup after some illness, this is best done in the country rather than a city.
I have had several realisations over this time:
The need to look after our health, poor health affects our service but this is more difficult for our temple managers who can have many projects to coordinate along with the day to day dealings with the problems of each individual who demands or feels that it must be dealt with NOW.
This takes a toll on the heath can be easily neglected putting the needs of others above our own, this is more true when applied to our senior devotee’s looking after and running our centres. So the need for taking time to rest is important and as devotee’s we should understand this simple fact.
But also the need for the temple president to have someone close to confide a shoulder to lean on, who when needed can assist this leads to a more vibrant and stable management structure.
We see also that in some cases the management of centres is done by those in the grehastra’s ashram, and were the couple are being for real with each other and supporting each other in service to Krishna, and then this is true real strength. No artificial battle of the sexes, which we see in society and are greatly destructive, but a unity of each other’s strengths in order to best serve Krishna and his devotees in running the centres nicely.
As the temple president needed rest it was his loving partner who arranged travel and accommodation, alerting the congregation that he would be away for a few days and making sure that things were in place nicely, lessening the burden whilst recovery from illness took place.
But then we see the positive response of the congregation, who appreciates the hard work, put in by and sent many messages of support. The health and welfare of our management team is a shared responsibility this way our centres will run nicely, grow and continue to inspire each individual person.