THE SECRET IN THE POT

If I were carrying a burden I will be thrilled if someone offered me an option to lay down my load and be free. That will in fact be welcome news and water for my thirst. While that is really welcome often times in human situations such news either comes at a high cost or is just a fantasy yet that is what we as Christians profess to have, this rest. A gift so great we are eager to share it with others.

A couple of weeks ago I witnessed something on my ride on the train to school. I saw a young Asian looking man who to me appeared to be very harmless standing close to one of th doors of the train minding his own business. The next thing I saw was this Asian man responding to taunts by another gentleman who had happened to have found a way to annoy this seemingly peaceful man to the point where he responded in frustration. The poor guy looked so out of character being angry and he looked so angry that I felt his pain. In the moment his demeanor suggested that of someone who would never respond like this ha it not been for this man provoking this behavior out of him. I looked at him and wondered, "does he know Jesus, bet if he knew Jesus he wouldn't be so upset and perhaps wouldn't allow that mans behavior rouse such a response from him. Almost immediately after pondering this question I almost immediately answered the question for my own self, yes I know Jesus but I am not always at peace and my response is sometimes more violent than what I was witnessing so what did I have to offer this man by wondering if he knew Christ. In a moment I stopped to think and wonder what we as people who claim to know the way often speak of this way to others, painting a glorious perfect picture of what other peoples lives could be with the knowledge we have without wondering if we are experiencing the fantasy we are imagining for them.

As I was wondering whether this gentleman knew Christ I was imagining this perfect scene in my head where even if the other gentleman kept pushing his buttons the worst case possible that if he knew Jesus that he would be so filled with joy that he wouldn't be bothered at all. I imagine this immediately without imagining or thinking about it being a process instead of it being an automatic and immediate transformation. The reason I think people sometimes don't take on Christianity or lose interest quickly is because of the seemingly unrealistic automatic transformations people Market when they themselves haven't lived the experience they are market. This especially so when the bible speak of the christian walk as a continuing process. I believe people will respond to the message we carry more pleasantly if we approach them not in a holier than thou attitude but instead humbly asking them to look at your wretchedness and that you are loved in spite of your wretchedness but Christ through a continuous process is making you more loving than the year before, more patient than the day before and just a better person than the day before; that he doesn't get tired or frustrated when we make mistakes and doesn't give up on us when we fail and that this process with it's continuing joy is what you desire for their lives and that it's only possible with christ.

Perfection, How boring

This is a continuation of the last entry where I was shattered to the core to find out the group of people that I erstwhile imagined were perfect proved otherwise.

I arrived at the conclusion that pastors and religious men are human after all, just like me. Now you may wonder how I came to this conclusion and the answer is, that I didn’t come to this conclusion in one sitting. Many things explicitly and implicitly contributed to this end. Things that helped me come to this conclusion ranged from hearing firsthand leaders explicitly declaring their humanity verbally on the pulpit to hearing the very human and sometimes criminal things for which some leaders have been capable and responsible. In short I couldn’t have come to this conclusion if I hadn’t chosen to live. As I mentioned in the entry on Death and Dying, sometimes we come up against many and multiple things that seem to make death a better alternative than life but choosing life as foolish as it may seem always becomes the wiser thing to do. I have come up against many of such instances but choosing to live was in realizing that Perfection no matter how desirable is really boring.

When people say, “I’m not perfect, but I’m striving to be” I crack a smile inside and wonder, will you ever be or better still, do you ever want to be? Of course the idea of being perfect is desirable but I imagine it would be so boring because you would know the outcome of every endeavor and what is the fun in that, what is the thrill in knowing that it will all turn out perfect. I may seem weird saying this, but failure is sometimes necessary I think. Disagree with me if you may but even though I don’t think of failure is a good motivation, I can’t honestly count the number of people who have vehemently declared it as what they fear the most. The perfect man is a lonely man who no one will have to worry about. I have had a taste of the lonely pill and it’s not a sweet one. When you are left alone because everyone automatically assumes you will be all right without knowing how, your weight becomes many times heavier. And even though things have always kind of worked out in the end, the process and burden of grinding out the details on your own can leave a bitter taste in your mouth if you are not careful. The taste can have an effect of heightening your desire to be perfect but then the only way is to live and that is to know that perfection no matter how desirable is really boring.

So then we should all realize this and go on and live our lives right? Wrong. Even though I may dismiss the idea of striving for perfection as somewhat stressful there is no denying that it is an innate human desire that I daresay everyone can’t live without. However, if even the pastor is not perfect then what hope is there for any of us? This is an important question every single soul and human life and mind should ponder because that desire to be perfect is not going anywhere. It is here that I draw my line for the need for something else, someone else as it were to do the perfecting. Here I see the need for salvation and the need for something beyond me. That’s when the idea of someone beyond me makes sense. So let me see if I can wrap this up. I am not perfect and will never be, I have an innate desire to be perfect and it endlessly frustrates me to see that I fail and I’m not and finally because of all of this, the idea of someone who is perfect makes sense. As selfish as it seems even though I have no clear imagination of what perfection is or what the perfect man looks like I am convinced I would rather have this other person be perfect and never me.

Oh...But I thought he was Perfect!!

During my high school years I lived with my aunt and her family. My aunt and her husband were both active in the church we attended. One of the things they often did was ensure that when a pastor or leader would visit, they would have someone give them a ride home. The greatest thing about these rides was that the person doing the driving would often not want to endure the ride back home after the drop off alone and so would ask someone, to accompany them. I didn't know how to drive then and Taifa wasn't an extremely happening place so it didn’t take much to leap at such opportunities to get out on a slow, often uneventful Sunday afternoon. It was on one of such Sunday afternoon drives that the foundation of a belief or state of mind I had cultivated as a child was shaken at its core.

En route to our destination, there was an impatient taxi driver sharing the road with us. In his haste he proceeded to overtake our vehicle in a curve, almost pushing us off the road in his illegal move. I was sitting in the back seat behind the driver on this fateful day and the pastor sat in the front seat. That moment of reckless driving was also the moment that challenged my perception in what I have come to learn and accept as necessary. As the cab driver performed his illegal maneuver making our driver turn reflexively to avoid a collision, shouts of Jesus! colored the atmosphere, however as is typical of most “almost” fatal accidents, as soon as our car recovered to stay on the road, my sentiment was shifted from fear to anger towards the taxi driver’s recklessness but because of present company I painfully resisted the temptation to make some insults happen. To my utmost shock however, words of rage erupted from the pastor’s mouth, words of which I imagined pastors were incapable. One of such proclamations made was something like"driver kwasia bEn su nye eyi?" tr: what kind of a fool is this driver? In that moment I was silenced even deeper probably more by the comment than the fear that we had almost been killed.

Pastors were infallible in my eyes. This is a perception I had developed probably as a result of my upbringing. They were men of God who could do no wrong; they were incapable of wrong that I was capable of. Nobody explicitly told me this but in a way no one ever really needed to. Whether it was my own doing or not, my perception of pastors up until that point was that they were super human and were incapable of doing the same things I was capable of, they were to a degree, higher, better and cleaner. So to hear the pastor utter those words suddenly placed a fork in the road in my thinking and perception of humanity. For lack of a better expression, this event traumatized me. What I had believed about a particular group of people was in the moment being challenged.

I had two options either to believe that this pastor was an odd ball, a rebel so to speak or to do something radical and totally destroying a lifetime school of thought that pastors are a different breed of humans; that they are after all human just like me, that this occurrence was more norm than exception. The former would have seemed safe to do a thought and would have saved me any further cerebration but even at that age I knew it wasn't that easy... To be continued.


Note: I am adopting a way of writing that will allow people who can’t commit to reading long texts to be able to enjoy the blog in parts. I will break up some of the long entries like this one into two or three coherent shorter parts so that they wont be too long.