Are you Tamil? I ask because there’s a proverb my mother used on me more times than I can count growing up: “thai peche kekadha vavvalu, thalakeela thongum.” If you don’t listen to your mother, you’ll end up like a bat, hanging upside down. It’s funny to hear. My mom still says it, half-joking, and I laugh every time. Bats are considered a bad omen almost everywhere I’ve ever lived or heard about. But sit with it for a second, and you’ll notice something. It’s not really about disobedience. It’s about what we reach for when we want to describe failure, and the picture we reach for is a bat.

Why Bats Are Seen as a Bad Omen

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I don’t know about where you’re from, but in my culture, bats are not neutral. They’re a bad sign. In the movies, when they want to show evil or a ghost is near, they show bats flying past. A few species drink blood, and somehow that’s the fact everyone remembers, even though most bats never touch it. They live in dark, abandoned places. You may walk into a house nobody’s lived in for years, and the first thing that flies at your face is usually a bat.

I remember this like it was yesterday. I was maybe ten, maybe twelve; I genuinely don’t remember the exact age, but I remember the moment. A bat got into our house. I still don’t know how it got in. My dad was running through every room trying to kill it, and this thing would not leave. It wouldn’t fly out the door even when it was open. It just clung to something inside and refused to go, and every so often it would swoop close enough to make all of us duck and scream. I don’t even remember how it ended, whether Dad got it or it finally found its way out; that part is just gone from my memory.

Who Really Decides What Something Means?

What I do remember is how seriously the people around us took it. We were renting in a community that wasn’t Christian, and in their belief, a bat entering your home is a bad omen, a warning of coming illness, financial loss, or even death. Even though we were Christian, that fear was thick enough in the air around us that my own parents were careful keeping the bat away from landing on me or my brother, just in case. But nothing happened to us, nothing at all, but the fear was real while it lasted.

While thinking over this, I kept asking this question: did God create this animal to be a bad omen? To represent shame, failure, evil? I don’t believe for one second that He did. God did not create evil; then why does evil exist at all? That’s a bigger question than I can answer here, and honestly, I’ve wrestled with it more than once myself. But I can tell you this much: whatever meaning we’ve stuck onto a bat, God never put it there. We did.

A teacher once asked me a question I’ve never forgotten. What does it mean when someone raises their middle finger at you? You know exactly what it means. But strip it all the way down. It’s just a finger. It has no meaning by itself. A human being, somewhere, decided what it would represent, and now we all just carry that decision around like it was always true. We do this constantly. We take something plain, load a verdict onto it, and then forget that we’re the ones who wrote the verdict. When God finished creating everything, He didn’t call any of it shameful. He called it good.

What Bats Actually Do for the World

Some of the crops and fruits that we consume everyday and it might surprise you: Agave, the only plant tequila can be made from; then bananas- I am sure you eat them at least once a day. I eat it every day if available; then mangoes, guavas, durian, one of the most loved fruits across Southeast Asia, like the Philippines or Thailand. Saguaro cacti and baobab trees. Without bats, these plants would struggle to reproduce at all. Half the fruit on your table exists because of a creature we’ve branded a bad omen and chase out the door on sight.

I do it too, if I’m honest. A bat gets into my house, and my first move is to get it out. But the irony here is: what if a parrot flew in instead? I’d be reaching for my phone, calling everyone over to look. Same house, same moment, and my reaction is completely different, because one of them showed up already carrying the label of a bad omen, a reputation I never gave it a chance to shake. But the truth is the bat doesn’t stop feeding five hundred species of plants just because I flinched at it. It keeps doing the work it was made to do, whether I honor it or not.

Why We Treat People Like a Bad Omen

We do the exact same thing to people, don’t we? Someone walks in carrying a past, a label, a story somebody else already decided for them, and our first instinct is to treat them like a bad omen, sometimes before we’ve even really looked. I wrote about that same ache in Connected but Alone, that particular loneliness of being physically surrounded by people while still feeling unseen. But God does not see the way we see. He does not hold your worst moment against your worth. He hates sin, but He was never talking about you when He said that. Nothing you’ve done has moved you outside His reach.

When Evil Seems to Win

I’ve sat with people and heard things that are hard to hear. Real stories. People who’ve hurt others, who’ve lived through things that put them behind actual bars for the rest of their lives. And there have been times I’ve questioned God myself, because of what I’ve seen with my own eyes and what I’ve read in the news.

I remember a case that became world news, a young trainee doctor in Kolkata, brutally attacked inside the very hospital where she worked. The country erupted in protest. Courts eventually convicted the man responsible, and prosecutors pushed for the harshest sentence the law allows. But what stayed with me wasn’t just his crime.

It was watching the hospital’s own principal, accused by doctors of failing to protect her and of trying to cover the whole thing up, resign under pressure, only for officials to quietly reappoint him to run another medical college within hours. People were furious. And that’s the part of this story that still bothers me, not that the system failed to act, but how easily someone connected to power can step sideways out of consequence while everyone else is left holding the grief.

What Evil Teaches Us About Ourselves

There was another one, also out of India, that made world news some years before that: a young woman, attacked by a group of men on a moving bus. Courts eventually sentenced most of them to death, and executions followed years later. But one of the attackers was still a minor at the time, and the law allowed him only three years in a reform facility. When those three years ended, he walked out, and the country erupted. People stood in the streets in protest, because after everything that had happened, three years felt like nothing. I remember feeling that same anger myself, watching it unfold. Even when the system does move, it can still leave you asking, that’s it?

Around that same period, I used to watch a true-crime series called Forensic Files by FilmRise on Netflix, a few seasons of it, all the way through. And the thing that struck me case after case wasn’t the method or the mystery. It was how far a human being can go. People taking another person’s life for money, for fame, for reasons so small they don’t deserve the word “reason.” Some of it was evil enough that it shouldn’t exist even in a nightmare, let alone in someone’s actual Tuesday afternoon.

Evil exists, my friend. Evil people exist. I don’t have a neat answer for why God allows what He allows. But I do know His love for us never changes because of it. He is patient, waiting for people to know Him and waiting for hearts to be given to Him, even the ones that have done terrible things.

Why Does God Stay Silent?

But when we’re the ones connected to that kind of cruelty, or even just watching it unfold, our first instinct is often to ask why God stays silent. We think He should have struck them down. We think it’s unfair that they get to walk free, or live comfortably, or go on with their lives as nothing happened. And I understand that instinct, because I’ve felt it myself.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand. God loves everybody. He doesn’t hate the people we hate. That’s not how He works. God has a plan for every single person, even someone whose daily life is soaked in evil. He has a plan that can still change them, right up to the end. But if a person keeps resisting the Holy Spirit, that resistance is their own choice. God always gives time. He always gives another chance to turn around, to repent, to accept Him and let Him do the work of transforming a life.

I wrote more about how that timing actually works, and why it so rarely looks the way we expect, in God’s Timing Is Never Wrong. It’s hard to accept this the way God moves. I understand that completely. It goes against everything in us that wants to see justice land immediately, with our own eyes.

The Story of Auto Shankar

A man who could be as evil as anyone had become someone who was loving, forgiving, and honest about what he’d done. He accepted the verdict without resistance. I believe the time God had given him, even in a prison cell counting down to his own death, was enough for the Holy Spirit to reach him. And that reach was strong enough to change a man as notorious as he was.

You Are Not a Bad Omen

That’s the pattern I keep seeing, over and over. Life changes completely the moment we understand that Jesus alone can transform us. Maybe you carry some evil practices or habits that aren’t healthy, and they’ve put you in a struggle you can’t seem to free yourself from. Perhaps there’s an addiction you’ve been fighting to walk away from and can’t.

Maybe you’re sitting behind actual prison bars right now, or in a situation that feels just as locked. And maybe part of you is already thinking, when I get out, when things get better, I’ll go back and do worse than before. If that’s you, I wrote something that might sit with you too, called Build the Broken Walls Within, about what it actually takes to repair what’s been torn down inside a person.

Or maybe you’re not behind any kind of bars at all. Maybe you’re just sitting with the weight of everything you’ve done, full of remorse, and even the people closest to you, your own family, your own spouse, look at you like you’re something shameful. Let me tell you something. Remember the bat. Remember that creature that indirectly gives life to 500 plant species, simply by existing, simply by doing what it was made to do.

God Loves you

A creature that culture calls shameful and rejects on sight is the reason 500 kinds of plants get to reproduce and keep living. If God can build purpose into a creature that isn’t even a foot long, do you really think He won’t care for you, the very best of His creation? Do you think He closes His eyes or covers His ears while you carry the weight of shame and the grip of things you can’t shake on your own? He never stops watching over you. All you have to do is turn to Him and say it plainly. Lord, I acknowledge You. I know You are everything I need. I give myself to You.

Those words are hard to say. I know they are. But if you can say them and mean them, the transformation that follows will be so real that you’ll feel, for the first time, the plan He always had for you. You won’t be the shameful bad omen anymore. You’ll become the reason many others find their way to Him too.

He paid a price for you that you cannot fully measure. Sin is the thing that separates us from Him, but the door opens the moment you’re willing to let Him in. And when He does come in, He doesn’t just quietly fix you in a corner somewhere. He turns your life into the very reason someone else finds their way to Him too, the same way that battle you thought you’d already lost turns out to be one that was already won.

God loves you, my friend. Not the version of you the world already decided to see. You, exactly as you are, right now.