Stuff I Learned and Discovered Last Year (2014 Edition)

Last year, I shared with us a few things I had learned from 2013. I may not be all that cool in studying stuff yeah, but I am really good at noting things down. (Yes, I know I am, haha.)

You can read that post here.

So after last year's post, I thought, "Why can't we be doing this annually?" Then the reply came back: not bad, not bad at all.

Herein, I am unleashing a few lessons from 2014, aligned in no order at all...

1. I discovered that the best thing a person can do to themselves is to either be fully involved in something or not to be involved in anything at all. The truth is this: playing middle ground is both unhealthy and dissatisfying. It elevates indecision, and indecisive minds build no real castles.

2. If and when something (or stuff) is wrong, stop and fix it. Playing passive won't help a thing. I have discovered that people who complain about things without making effort to make them right are worse than those who don't care about whatever is happening.

3. Failure creates masterpieces out of men if they use it well. I believe that those who have failed before are better teachers than those who only believe in success.

4. Stuff comes and stuff goes; nothing lasts forever. Nothing except things that concern the Heaven of God.

5. We ride on different levels of integrity, intelligence, origin, ability and self-drive. This means that it is useless and demeaning to your awesome self to compare yourself to others. It is better if you compared your new self to who you were yesterday or a few minutes ago; there, you'll be growing.

6. Our social media platforms (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp) are full of people and families wanting to make you feel that your life is so boring, less advanced, eventless and you ain't all that blessed as they are. But it is not always that way. There are so many of us that pretend almost about everything. It is an art we have perfected.

7. You can't fully satisfy everyone. (The key word here is FULLY.) Playing God to people in/and their lives/needs will only leave you drained, burnt out and extremely exhausted for nothing. That's why there is God, then there is man. Stick to being a human being and you'll be safe.

8. One of the worst habits to pick is that of doing something (whether good or bad) because everyone else is doing it. This is called "being a junk cabinet". You always end up junky.

9. God is not my servant, nor is He yours. We shouldn't therefore try to dictate how He works in or through us on any given day.

10. Serve the LORD. If He blesses you, well and good; if He doesn't, serve Him. He'll bless you anyway. Oh, and He knows why you serve Him anyway. You can't fool Him.

11. My spiritual life is not dependent on my leader or pastor. Blaming either or both of them for what goes wrong with it is like Judas Iscariot blaming Christ for falling out.

12. If I boast of what I do or what I am able to do, I boast foolishly.

13. People (including myself) will want you to do stuff for them like accomplish a project, meet a target, go somewhere on their/our behalf but they will never appreciate the sacrifices you made along the way to meet their demands. In short, most of us are really ungrateful, so put that in mind before offering us a helping hand.

14. Work with what you have. Stay contented. What you don't have is not yours, so don't plan your life using it. (This I learned when my employer transitioned from one small organization to a bigger one. People expected promotions and a salary increment. Both have not appeared.)

15. I've discovered that every moment a parent treats an 18 year old the same way they treat a 10 year old, they lose them by 2%. That means, it will only take 50 times of lack of confidence in a teenager to lose them completely. It also means that if a parent does it consecutively for a whole year, the child they'll be seeing in the next year will be totally different from the one they knew in the past year.

16. You are more awestruck (either positively or negatively) when you see yourself as you really are than when you look at others with an eye intending them to be the way you expect them to be. Try it one time.

17. Don’t peg your life on people. Because; they come and go, they change everyday, and because even the government subsides in meekness and uselessness. Pegging yourself on how people see you and think you are will bring you down. Brands/people are not liked passé, but brands are made to be loved with time.

18. Don’t think that you know it all. Sometimes silence is the best option. In 2014, I begun learning how to just say nothing at all. (I seem to be that guy who’s always talking about stuff so this has been bit of a challenge to me.)

19. Also, I realized that our relationships are affected by how much we speak – people abhor proud people who always think they know it all... So it is good to be aware that the so-called fools know some stuff about silence that the wise don’t.

20. God is here, God is there and… God is everywhere; but what counts in our relationship with Him is our consciousness of His omnipresence. He rarely moves unless we do. He loves me even at the very moments I think I don’t deserve it. He cares, and would love us to appreciate Him for who He is and what He does and also have a deep understanding of Him through a constant relationship with Him. He desires, above all, that we learn and grow in Him. He cares about our relationship with others around us too.

21. Hurry is the devil. Hurry changes nothing for the better. Actually, hurry fuels anxiety/fear, complaints and impatience which are the three things that are very much against the character that the LORD seeks to build in us. There is therefore no need to hurry in life. At all.

22. Entirely, nobody cares. This is the safest point of knowledge you can ever have, so use it for your own good.

23. Mostly, people want to be part of something great – something big – but they mostly have no idea of how to bring it about. Also, mostly, people only get involved in something that will eventually directly benefit them. Of these two kinds of people, I learned that leadership is about knowing how to meet the needs of both without necessarily satisfying them.

24. When you do nothing, you achieve nothing. Even God does something, why do we think that we shouldn’t? Riches and prosperity are outcomes of hard work. It is impossible to nurture success without hard work and commitment.

25. There is no limit to creativity and becoming better. Each one of us has the potential of becoming better. You can become better if you choose to and work hard on it. But remember that although copying the status quo may make you adopt easily, it will soon throw you out of business.

26. Creativity requires that you stretch your limits a little. It is tough, but is it always the father of invention.

27. When you use you as your own mirror and while using the Word of God as a reflection, then you can grow healthily amongst many of your type.

28. We die slowly in so many places without knowing. Gradual spiritual death to a Christian is maybe one of the most underrated things.

29. Every believer needs to learn and become equipped in Christian apologetics. Neither for "awesomeness" nor for their leader(s) sake, but for this very reason: it is a good thing and a mark of sanity to know and become sure of what someone believes in and to be able to defend that very course.

That's all for now.

Until next time,



Bonface Morris.

Musings And Observations Part 2 (Church Edition)

If you have not yet read part one of this series of blog posts, read it here.

In the recent past, I have had spontaneous "micro-debates" with random people about the Church, sound doctrine and the universality of religion. These discussions may not have been conclusive enough - to the point of deriving meaningful inferences - but I have (at least) come to understand a few things about how people interpret and understand religion and matters of Faith.
There is a certain conclusion though we all came to: that the Church is diverse in its approach to both evangelism and mode of worship; and although we are all this diverse, unity is not so much lacking as far as doctrine and sound Christian teaching is concerned.
Here below are some of my observations on the Church - of which I am part of;

We mutually wear a certain disguise called "pettiness"
A few weeks ago, we were presented with a controversial discussion on “the Church and Morality” - so to say - as was depicted in a certain poster outside a mega church in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

The poster is here below (courtesy of UlizaLinks);

"Blurred Lines" - A sermon series courtesy of Mavuno Church

Many claimed that the poster was very controversial (put "very" in CAPS) (and of course it was controversial) as far as Christian values are/were concerned, condemned it and blatantly claimed that that church’s leadership (Mavuno Church) was misguiding our young people (and of course talking of young people, I should be one of them), and that they should apologize for doing so.

The discussion emanated into 2 weeks of funny internet memes and GIFs, and I am very sure that you either retweeted, commented on, or laughed at all those twerkusifu jokes.

But this was not funny, my friend. It was not.
 
These were serious issues in our society - issues affecting ALL young people - being tackled by the church... Just in a different way altogether...
Okay, I gave my two pence on what I felt (and still feel) about the Mavuno Poster (as it came to be known) and moved on. Some people hated me (“caught feelings”), some supported me, and it went on the way it did... And if you were to tell me right then - and even right now - that Mavuno Church was/is not addressing current challenges amongst young people, (saved or unsaved), I would/ I will drag you to the ground with it...

See, today, I have had a few Christians (including myself) complain about things they see in other Christians - things they think are just wrong. You know it, right? It is a common thing. It mostly has been due to “not liking how the other person is serving God” by claiming that they are not capitalizing on the “basic, major and fundamental parts of the Christian Faith”, or on how bad they are as compared to us.

Note: Differentiate between pettiness and differences in doctrine as in cases when we attack, speak against and refute false teachers, heresies and teachings. In this case, I am talking about our petty reactions towards other normal Christians.

I have been a victim of such accusations. People claim that because I am a leader in many capacities, there are things I should not talk about, and that there are things I should be silent about. Some of these things include; love relationships, politics, humor, commenting on certain TV Shows, current news, affairs and on secular music (although I don’t listen to secular music or have any of it on any of my gadgets).

All these critics claim that I should base my christian influence on teaching Scripture and being the blunt and stoic Christian they are. But in retaliation, I have always asked, “Are we here to only reach out to the saints or also to the unsaved? Is my service to God (including this blog) only meant for the "cherched" or also to the "uncherched”? Why do we like to spiritualize everything? Huh?


If I have to reach out to anyone at all, the tools I may use need to make sense both to the believer (in line with Scripture) and to the unbeliever (for them to gain an understanding of what Christianity is all about.)

People have different needs as far as general life is concerned; some just need encouragement, some need Scripture full time, some need humor, others need music; some seek for news while others are attracted to weirdness. End point? Christ should be preached. Christ should revealed. To all people.
Anyway, am I sinning by doing this, by using all tools available to me to reach out to as many people as possible? No. Okay, does Jesus Christ, my Lord, feel offended when I do it? No. So what? Why do we have to make the Gospel so unreachable and so hard to pursue and love? I love being saved. I love it. I cannot imagine myself without salvation. I want other people to love it through seeing me as I enjoy it. That is all I want - for all people to know the Jesus I know, relate with Him and thereafter come to love Him.
The Mavuno poster unveiled our pettiness - how we choose to react to issues without basing our view on Scripture but on how we feel. When did the Gospel become subject to how we feel and what we think (our opinions)?

******************
Jesus, in His time, used examples the people around him could relate with so that He would drive his message home. He wanted them to understand Him - to understand the message of the Kingdom in the easiest way possible. The Pharisees called it crazy, but God called it awesome. They called unorthodox, but the Father called it obedience. Note the difference.

The Apostle Paul had “a fight” with the Apostle Peter on this same issue in Galatians Chapter 2 (please read the whole chapter to get what I am saying) when Peter claimed that the Gospel was only to be preached in a certain way and only to the Jews. Paul on the other hand felt that the Gospel was to be preached by all means possible to both Jews and Gentiles. End point? God intervenes in Acts 10 by showing Peter that the Gospel was not limited to the Jews alone but that it was for the Gentiles too, thus justifying what Paul had earlier preached in Romans 9:15 (and what Peter had been knowing all along because it was written in the very Torah he ardently followed - Exodus 33:19 (ESV) “And he said, 'I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.'”and in Hosea 2:23 (ESV) “...and I will sow her for myself in the land. And I will have mercy on No Mercy, and I will say to Not My People, ‘You are my people’; and he shall say, ‘You are my God.’”)

The argument between Paul and Peter presents to us what the modern church has become: petty. We have become like the Corinthian church which Paul wrangled with asking them in 1 Corinthians 3:4 (ESV), “For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not being merely human /petty?” (the word 'petty' is my own addition).

My observation is that the greatest opposition the church is facing today is not from the world but from within. We are fighting amongst ourselves more than we are fighting against sin and the many atrocities in the world. Our pettiness - not based on the Holy Scripture - is our spiritual backlog.
We are acting like the fella below that Jesus once talked about

You got a speck in your eye!!

This is how I think we should act around a fellow Christian when they are not doing things the same way we do them (putting in mind that our way of doing things is not law as far as the Spirit of God is concerned.)
We should ask ourselves;

1. Are they sinning? If not, why criticize them?
2. Is what they are doing positively changing someone's life- both in the Church and in the world? If yes, why oppose them?
3. Are they being guided by God in what they are doing? Are they glorifying God? Is the Spirit of God and His Word being involved?  If yes, then why stand against ourselves?

If we were to read and understand the message in Romans Chapter 14, and read it over and over again with an open mind and allow God's Spirit to speak to us, our pettiness would become less and less by the day.

People make mistakes. People sin. You also sin and make mistakes. They need a break. We should give them some breathing space - because we expect the same of ourselves when we err.

Note: These two articles reveal and describe how good we are at being petty: “Why People Really Like Jesus More Than Christians” and “Why I Quit Church (and the Surprise That Brought Me Back)”

Baseless blame games
Then in some other contexts, I have met numerous people (both believers and unbelievers) complaining about Church leadership and how they are falling away from the Church because of leader so-and-so or pastor-so-and-so.
Wait. So people are refusing to be faithful to God on the account of others? Is one's life tagged within another's life? Is spirituality a matter of an individual of a society or of a group? Will I go to heaven because my pastor (or another person's pastor) or leader is going to heaven or on the account of my own life and commitment to God? Why do people blame pastors and/or church leaders for fallen saints or any other sins within a congregation or a given denomination? Are pastors or leaders supposed to be gods so that they may jump like saving angels at some sort of an alarm and save church members from willful sinning?
Okay. Would we blame Jesus Christ for Judas Iscariot’s eloping, greed and love for money? Or blame the apostle Paul for Giaus’s leaving or the apostle John for Deotrephes’s weird mannerisms? Were all these leaders “unspiritual”? that some few people around them fell back and went back into the world? Why then do we call our pastors and leaders "unspiritual" because of some other person's sinful life? Isn't obedience to God's Word an individual's responsibility?

Whenever we blame others and make them responsible for our failures (or other people's failures), we are just being self-righteous, mean, judgmental and self-ish. Leaders and pastors are part of the body of Christ just as we are. They are no better than us. They have just been given a higher office of responsibility as compared to us, but that does not make them immune to sin or to the devil's temptation(s). They experience burn-out and feel weak, exhausted, betrayed and run down just as we often do. We should stop blaming them for all the things we see happening in our congregation(s) and instead pray for/with them. There, we will be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem.
I don't deny that some of them deliberately sin and that others advocate for evil and wicked deeds amongst their followers, but why not pray for them instead? Yeah, we should rebuke them and correct them, but why not pray for them after doing so?
The body of Christ should be able to heal itself through forgiveness, love and prayer; and not tear itself apart through ridicule, factions and slurring...
That's my opinion.


I close my case.

Wait for Part 3 in the near future.


Bonface Morris.

Musings And Observations - Part 1

No one can deny that the world we live in today is a very weird world. (Or you may want to, anyway. It is none of our business, right?) In such a world, there is no denying (again) that it is, to a certain extend of things, very weird that some things happen the way they DO happen or that some people behave the way they do.
This world, therefore, because it is weird, will always fascinate us. (And fascination in this case will be Jedi-ic). Mostly, this eventually becomes our "wonder-zone" - which each one of us is in possession of - a place in one's mind where they tend to stagger between wonder and disgust, or both. To some it may be positive, while to others it may be negative, but we all have one. This is because we are all able to see the world in our own different ways and are able to cook our own mind-meals and feed on them...
With the basics on mind-works above - which are actually mere blubbery - I want to share a few things that my mind has been brooding over in the past few days of my idleness. (Yeah guys, we were chased away from school, and what do old men life myself do when they're deliberately chased from school? They study. And they write. They do this affectionately. But they also hang around and study people - thanks to my introverted-extrovert temperament.)
So while I have been seated on some podium and wittily gazing and analysing the trends in the world below, and as my mind has been excusing me to do whatever I want with whatever passes through it, I present to you the first part of its collection of moments (mostly with a group of young people in an age bracket of 16 and 35 involved). This is what I have come to conclude;

1. People, especially young Christians, are extremists that mostly take life for granted
I have realized the following during my interaction with young people my age:
We joke more than we should, talk more than we should (me included), dump more junk into our minds and bodies than we are allowed to (by any law in Heaven or on earth), hate more than we are allowed to, judge and condemn more than we are supposed to, pray less, worship less, read less of God's Word (but more of useless things), skip church more, skip all stuff to do with God and give more excuses than are necessary, fall in love deeper than we should, chat more than we should, listen to, read and watch funny stuff more than we are allowed to...
We are mere extremists that never take life seriously, and more-so, the things that involve God. We take most things for granted including our jobs and education) and expect rewards for our pettiness. It doesn't work that way.
How will anyone believe that we have any chance of changing this world, leave alone our own lives/selves if this is the approach we have to life?

2. Many young Christians feel that secularism today is "normal" and "cool"
In the past few days of my idleness, I have opted to make tiny spontaneous surveys on what people think about certain trends in the present world. They mostly involved young saved people like me. My observations have yielded the following;

(a) Observation: Most young Christians trash almost 80% of all the advice given to them by the elderly concerning matters of service to God, employment, finances, love, commitment, romance and sexuality. Reason? They think they are smart, or rather, "we think we are smarter than they are" and that the secular way of looking at all of the issues mentioned above is "more exciting" than the Christian way taught to us by our leaders and parents/guardians. But, are we really smart? Smart enough to put to dust all the advice they give us?
Possible solution: We need to learn that we are not always right - in fact, it almost always. Older people have seen more than we have and have been in the same places and situations we are facing. Taking into consideration whatever they are telling us is not only wise, but valuable in raising us up as rational young adults and reasonable citizens.

(b) Observation: Most young Christians prefer "to play cool" with matters about broadcasting (or telling others) about what they believe - and worse still, their friends. My research reveals that around 70% of young saved people don't love to share (or don't ever dare to share) their faith with their friends. A whopping 80% never talk about God or religion on social media i.e. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Google+ for fear of being tagged "cherchy", or it may be because we are entirely ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or that we don't even know who we believe in and why; if not, they may only share such things on Sunday morning and that is all. This is tragic, right? We are more to the cold side of Christianity than we are to the hot side. Tragic indeed.
Possible solution: We need to get ourselves together and observe our inclinations and priorities as far as our spirituality is concerned: If we wannabes be Christians, then let's be Christians all the way; and if we wanna be secular, then let's go secular all the way. There ain't no middle ground yo! Why keep tarnishing the brand and faith that is Christianity with petty behaviour and foolishness? Why not just remain on one side and spare the rest of us the grins and grinds of being lukewarm?

(c) Observation: A good number of young saved people hate controversy, and they therefore prefer to only talk about the "light or less important issues of society" and leave out the more intricate ones. Talk about real issues in society and you are likely to receive no comment(s) at all from such guys. They are average people who'd rather die in agony and suffering than shout out that something is wrong somewhere with our government, systems or management.
Possible solution: For a very long time, Christians have been marked as "mild, stupid, unintelligent, frail and wimpy". Yes, for a very long time. That needs to change. We need to become more aggressive, bolder, more demanding as far as our rights and the rights of others are concerned and more passionate as far as what is right/good is concerned. Christ was neither wimpy nor a sycophant, but He was humble. There is a difference between the two: humility and sycophancy. We need to mark that difference and work on it.

(d) Observation: 60% of young saved people with phones, tablets, laptops, desktops and media-capable gadgets have secular music and pornographic material in/on those gadgets, and they don't feel guilty about it. We have been watered-down by a creepy Gospel that says, "Jesus walked among them and ate with them... so let us do the same..." But did Jesus really indulge in the sins of those around Him in order to win them to Himself? No. So why all this secularism in order to fit in? Huh?
Possible solution: Stop hiding in false interpretations of Scripture on dressing code/style, food (alcohol, drugs and smoking), music, entertainment and general Christian behavior. We should also stop formulating our own laws to justify our sins! Sin is just sin; nothing less, and nothing more.

(e) Observation: 50% of the young people I interviewed (in an underground manner) preferred "fitting in" to "standing out" while tackling various life issues requiring a bold Christian stand. They insisted on following what they are told by friends, parents, guardians, teachers but never laying down their own path that defines who they truly are. They prefer following what people think they are and lose all identity of who they truly are. They rant most about things that go wrong but never offer help or advice. They correct and/or rebuke no-one (everything seems to be okay to/with them), and would rather have their friends fall away than correct them in the fear of losing them.
Possible solution: We change nothing by "fitting in" and "being cool". It only loses us into a charade of what others think we should be and lose the whole identity of who we truly are. We should stand-out and become the definition of our own brands: the people we would love others to point at and say, "Yeah, that is him/her! That is how they do their thang!"

(f) Observation: 40% of the young people I interacted with have never committed themselves to any task nor have they ever been held responsible for any activity right from birth up to the age of 18 (and some beyond). They stated that they've not been believed to be able to handle any small tasks in their homes or schools (either by their parents or friends) and have altogether come to fear commitment and responsibility as far as life and church matters are concerned.
Possible solution: We become lazier and less productive when we only follow others and what they do. We need to rise up and be followed! We need to start asking ourselves, "When will someone follow me? When will people start believing that I am now reliable and can handle certain tasks?" Yes, we should ask ourselves such questions! Paul once said to Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:12 (NASB) "Let no one look down on your youthfulness, but rather in speech, conduct, love, faith and purity, show yourself an example to those who believe" and in Titus 2:7 (NASB) "In all things show yourself to be an example of good deeds, with purity in doctrine, dignified, sound in speech which is beyond reproach, so that the opponent will be put to shame, having nothing bad to say about us..." Strive to show yourself worthy to be followed!

(g) Observation: Most of the young people I met are never forgiving when they see their own weaknesses in others, but can judge and step on others on the account of the very wrongs that are very familiar in their own worlds.
Possible solution: No one is perfect. We are not perfect. So stop whining about someone's wrongs as if you don't have your own. Stop thinking that you are God. Stop judging others the only way God can. That is how the secular world behaves: an eye for an eye, a wrong for a wrong and a judgement for a judgement. Scripture says this; Luke 6:42 (ESV) "How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye", then John 8:7 (ESV) says, "And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her...'"

3. Mommy's kids and daddy's dolls are the most difficult people to deal with.
I did not only make/do Christian-based research and observations. No. I dug deeper. And after digging deeper, I realized that it requires more and more grace to sit around and deal with daddy's or mommy's kids and tolerate their behaviour.
You know them: spoilt kids with tottering manners, money guzzling tendencies and funny appetites. Woe to you if you get into a relationship, into a deal or happen to get married to one (I am one of them anyway, but not all that spoilt  - or so I think. :-))
There is only one possible way of dealing with us: avoid us or get used to us. (Some of us are not that difficult to handle anyway... :-))

4. Most young saved people (around 80%) lose their faith either in their second semester of joining college/campus or in  the first semester of their sophomore year.
This is mostly influenced by secular trends and a fall into partying, drugs and sexual sin - accelerated by a hip-and-bone closeness to the wrong kind of friends. Deny it or not, campus changes people: for better or for worse. Most lose their values, dignity and virginity during this phase, while others pass through this stage miraculously unharmed.
My research followed through several cases under my leadership and premised that the most affected and most vulnerable are those who once-upon-a-time belonged to single sex High Schools. Campus somehow just derails them (not all of them, but some): all the freedom, the cross-cultural hyperbola brought in by a new environment, the excitement to try out on the "new unknown stuff" campus freely offers, the exposure to contradicting worldviews about God, the idea of wanting to fit in and not "being/becoming the odd one out", the lack of godliness in about 90% of the people they meet on campus - all these cause a weak mind and heart to change ground as far as God is concerned, for say, 2 years, until they regain consciousness in the last part of their third year or the first part of their fourth year in campus.
I am still trying to find answers to this dilemma and may come up with a few possible solutions after getting a reliable conclusion and workable recommendations.

5. People mostly do stuff in order to please others
If I were to ask you, how many times in a day you are self-driven, what answer would you give me? Can you positively enumerate the number of times you wake up because you want to, go to school/work because you feel that it is important, do those assignments or meet datelines because you know that that is the best thing to do? How many times do you do things willingly and without being begged, pulled, pushed or forced? Just a few, right?
Beginning with myself, I realized that I actually hate school: many hear me proclaim at the top of my lungs that I could (anytime) pay someone to attend classes on my behalf, do my assignments and sit my examinations - that is if it was not against the law. I am rarely self-motivated as far as school is concerned. But I always wonder: who am I doing it for? Who is paying my fees? Who am I trying to please by attending classes and doing all those weird practicals? (I always know that I am the weirdest scientist on all the earth. Yes, I am.) The answer is: I do it all by and for myself.
On the other hand, when it comes to ministry and personal stuff, I can sit down working out on a solution or writing things, or singing or drafting things or meeting my own datelines right until three in the morning. It scares me sometimes, but I have gotten used to it. That is just me: working late to meet personal datelines but throwing away books because they bore me...
My observations pointed out that if we only work harder in order to please our leaders, friends and family members, (or even ourselves), then we are not yet motivated enough. If we only work for the money or the fame, or for maintenance of status within society, then we still are not motivated enough. We need to work and strive for something more, something higher. We need to go to school because it is the right thing to do and go to work because we love doing it, because we are passionate about it, because we want to change the world... By doing this, we will forge less sick-sheets and pull out less lies to lecturers as to why we couldn't be in for their practicals. Yeah, you hear me now...

I'll be back with Part 2, and with an altogether new range of musings and observations...

Bonface Morris.

Stuff I Learned and Discovered Last Year (2013 Edition)

First, this is not a poem. Or let me just say that I don’t know what it is.I have wanted it to become one (a poem), but my pen has told me otherwise. And I am okay with that. Fighting with pens can be overwhelming. Really overwhelming. You can never win. Such fights. You can’t. But if you ever do, you won’t be friends at all. So I have conceded defeat. In a good way. Because I still value this friendship.

I don’t know what you’ll think this is, but again, that is one of my discoveries: that what you think of things or of what other people do is all up to you. You choose what to believe and what not to. The other person/people (or things in any case) do not rule over what you want to think about them... And they should not pester you about it. Okay, they should. Sometimes. If they so choose. But it still won’t be changing how you feel about them. Or about some things. Or anything. It won’t.

Secondly, read on... Read on and see what I’ve been seeing and the conclusions I have been making all along. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m not...

The art of "discovering things."

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I have discovered that we should all be equally insane. That I should not be just as bad (or good in some other rare case) as you are. I should be “more bad” (if that can be acceptable) or “more good” than everyone else. And that the more insane I am, the better. I have discovered that being normal is sad. Normal is too average. And being normal normally chars our world and embers it. With time. I have discovered that we should prefer remaining insane for the sake of our society. Only an abnormal society is aware of the need for change. A normal society almost always thinks that everything is alright. Well, it is not. Everything is not alright. It is not alright for all of us to score the same average mark in everything. It is not good for all of us to jump the same length or run the same distance or achieve the same results. That is what normal people do: the same old stuff in the same old way to achieve the same old results.

Being abnormal - yes, being insane - is what makes us extraordinary. It is what makes brands out of us. It is what turns our society and world around. It is what makes us invent, and invest, and rant, and heckle at issues and change the world around us. It is what ticks. Yeah. Insanity.

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I have also discovered that you should not get into the habit of eating all that you are cooking while you are still cooking it. People will go to bed hungry. Because by the time you’ll be finished eating/cooking, you’ll be having no food at all. And that is not good. It is not good for all of us that were expecting that food. Now, think about it again while replacing food with any other resource at your disposal. Got it?

The old people around here used to say (I am not so sure if they still do say it), “Do not put all your eggs in one basket...” and that “You cannot kill two birds with one stone”. We loved what they said. It was good. But I wish they had specified which eggs, which basket, which stone and which birds they were talking about. Because that can be really catastrophic if we limit ourselves to the mere stones and baskets we know.

So I have been rolling my mind through what they said and I have discovered that you can actually kill thousands of birds with one stone and that all your eggs can be safe in one basket. It just depends with your choice of the stone and the basket. What if God is the stone and the basket? What if He is our only stone and our only basket? We can kill more birds and keep more eggs, right? Oh well!

Let us move on...



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I have also discovered that life actually does change overnight. It is not a universal guarantee for it to do so on the positive side of things, but on the negative one, it does change overnight.

“Positive change,” as everyone else puts it, “is progressive.” But negative change is not. Negative change is instantaneous.

Consider this: there is a very thin line between wisdom and foolishness. Very. Why? A fool cannot become wise overnight. It doesn’t work that way. But the wise can be foolish in one minute. Yes. So we’d rather be foolish to men to save our reputation than rant to all about how wise we are and lose it all. Most wise people are the most foolish in our societies because they want to play it cool. Fools want us to recognize and know how wise they are, and as a result, we always ignore them.

Then consider this: it takes time and effort to accumulate knowledge, and experience and wealth, and skills, and artistry; but it takes no commitment and effort at all to lose them. Bad things happen overnight, while good things take time. This is the mystery of life.

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I have also been keen on wanting to understand how you - yes, you and your life - are mostly none of my business, but again that you are solely part of mine. About this one, I am still discovering. I am still wanting to know where to draw the line between being mindful of how you live your life and being skeptical of how you live it. Those are two different things. Two very different things. But again, sometimes I am tempted and would prefer to do neither.

You see, where I wonder most is why I love making you part of my business much more than I would love you to make mine part of yours. Okay. And it is an awful thing. A one sided coin actually. It is like a sun that refuses to set in the West. A sun that forcefully wants to rise from the East and go back there. Evading the laws of nature and mutuality. Yeah, that is me when dealing with you.
Anyway, I have been wondering why I should be obsessed with your life this much. Am I your God? Or your guardian angel? But again, should I stop to care that you are messing up somewhere? Or that you are doing things right?

I am still wondering. Discovering. I will come back on this one some other time.

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And there is this other thing. God. Some people are serious with/about Him. (And by serious I mean devoted.) Others are not. Some are skeptical. Others are not even sure where they are with Him. Yet others really wish, year in year out, that they would be a bit more serious with Him this time.
"This is the season and time, Lord”, they say. “This is the season and time I am going to serve and love You like never before...”

I know you can mention a few of them - these people of seasons and times. But that - they forget to put in mind - is a cycle they can’t complete on their own. They fight to please Him so much that they become miserable, and cry and mourn, and throw themselves in the dust, and pray, and fast... And after all has been said and done, they go back to where they begun. Or even worse. Why? Because they think God can be served their way. Nah, it does not work that way. Terms and conditions apply. Understand the terms and conditions first before making any move(s) or commitment(s) with/for God.

Others think that they've already pleased Him. That they have outsmarted His principles by doing all He demands. Wait until they reach heaven. There will be chaos, the politics of ownership and self-righteousness.
And maybe then they’ll discover that God is so different from men. His ways are unfathomable and that what pleases Him is far less than what men would think. Yeah, He is cool like that.

And I have discovered that when it comes to God, none of us should boast about anything. Not at all. God is mysterious. So unpredictable. We should take one day at a time with Him, but should also have before us the whole array of the galaxy that is life well placed within our view. We should be seeing the stars within the galaxy, but never boasting about knowing why they are there. Because we don’t.

James 4:13ff: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’ - yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.”

Have you ever read this verse somewhere in Romans 9:15: “For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’”? That is God speaking. We can’t judge or tell why He makes the moves He makes or why He does the things He does the way He does them, because (I have discovered) He chooses to do them like He gotta and like He wanna. He is God. Period.

If we’d prefer to take one step at a time with Him, then we’ll be less miserable. His mind is far too high for our understanding (Isaiah 55:8ff:“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.) But as the apostle Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 2:16, He has revealed his mind to us: “‘For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.” And He also has “...made everything beautiful in its time... and put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end...” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). That is interesting.

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Finally, I have also discovered that life is a paradox. That it sways between one known and several unknowns. I have a feeling that this is okay... but let’s talk about it some other time.

I know you have your own discoveries, but it is just your pen that needs some ink.

And you need some good paper. And a glass of water... Water? Yes, water. :-)

Maybe.
Until next time,

Bonface Morris.