True Love

Love as a concept in Christian parlance is not a new fad.  The love which our Lord Jesus Christ has for the world motivated Him to be subjected to all the indignities He suffered on the cross and died.   John 3:16 is about the most popular scripture known to all Christians.  It is a verse of the Bible that summarizes the mission of Christ to the earth and its accomplishment. 

            It is against this backdrop that a critical look at the way love is perceived and practiced today is worrisome to me and many other concerned observers.  The idea of love is either completely misunderstood by majority of Christians or when understood, is not practiced possibly because of the selflessness and sacrifices that characterizes its true expression.

            The advent of the information revolution has also done a great damage to a balanced understanding of love.  A vast majority of today’s youths see love from the perspectives expressed on TV screens and fictional love books.

            This book is born out of a sincere desire to bring sanity to bear on the varied and skewed understand people have about love and its true expression in line with the purpose of God.  True love possesses the greatest potential to bless humanity when expressed in its true form because the entire purpose and plan of God is hinged directly on it.

            On Saturday, September 2, 2006, I honoured an invitation from the Youths of The Open Christian Assembly (TOCA) in Kano to speak to them during a breakfast Seminar during their 2006 Youth Week.  I am yet to forget one crucial statement I made that also surprised me.  I said “I have a strong desire to affect people in ways that may not be conventional.  You may not like it and you don’t need to like it.  It is my passion and I can’t be stopped but even if you want to stop me, then you need to kill me!”

            At the end of the programme, the Executive team of the Youth Fellowship gave me a gift.  As expected, it was a book (I wonder why I rarely get other kinds of gifts besides books!).  The title of the book si Romancing the Divine by Don Nori and it is a story about True Love.  Before then, I had completed the manuscript of this book.  The thoughts shared by Don Nori in his book is as radical as the life of love that I have always desired to live out both with people around me and with God.  It has caused more conflict than I had bargained but I have stuck to it because I believe in it and I see results.  I want to share a few of such thoughts as I gleaned from the first few pages of Don Nori’s Romancing the Divine:

How noble true love is!  How invincible!  How pure!  How innocent!  Love simply comes, often undetected even by the one overtaken by its mysterious powers.  True love.  The lonely covet its reality.  The arrogant flaunt its presence.  The ignorant snub its wonder.  It is as illogical as anything can be.  It is hopeless to describe it and folly to shun it.  The greatest philosophers have sought to define it.  Religion has tried to buy it.  Many have tried to elude it.

Love is as hopeless to understand as it is impossible to deny.  Yet reason and logic are helpless against love, for it is a most formidable foe of the mundane and the average.  True love, you see, dares to go places where reason cannot thread.  Love sees realities about which philosophy can only hope to dimly speculate.  True love knows what tradition can only distantly remember.

            True love draws the least lovable.  It can make anything a hero.  True love is the sustaining power of the universe itself, yet is so lovely that it abides fully in the hearts of those foolish enough to respond to its rapturous invitation to come.

            Love without legalism; commitment without control; fullness without fear; relationship without religion – the very mention of such possibilities brings feelings of exhilaration and hope, for they are the deepest yearnings of our souls.  They are the essence of true love.

            Love practiced like stated above frees you to reach out to the best in God and reach the deepest soul of any man or woman you interact and relate with.  That is the aspiration I desire to fulfill in my life; what about you?

            As you read the thoughts expressed in this book, I implore you to open your heart and dedicate your life to the Love of God and Love for fellow human beings.  Real life revolves around this and desiring to live otherwise will leave you with many regrets.

            I desire to see lives changed as a result of this message.  Do not read only for gathering more information because the driving force behind this inspiration is beyond that.  Read for a revolution of love in your life and you will never regret doing so.

What Can You See?

 

“Eyes that look are common but eyes that see are rare…” - Myles Munroe

            In the world, there are two basic types of people.  People who look at things and others who see.  Those who look are many while those who see ae few.  The story was told of two men who traveled to China for holidays one summer many years ago.  One of them noticed that a vast majority of people who were in a particular town were without shoes.  He simply remarked “wow! What poverty! My wife must surely be surprised that 90% of an entire city were walking bare footed!”  His companion looked beyond poverty and saw riches.  He made contact with shoe manufacturing companies back home and today, he runs a shoe manufacturing plants in China, producing shoes for these people who were walking barefooted years back.  He saw an opportunity to add value and earn money while his friend saw poverty and that was all.

Your Purpose Determines How You See

            In chapter one, I dealt in detail with the subject of purpose.  What you see is about vision and that is the crux of the subject I am dealing with in this book.

            The way we see our future is diverse from person to person based on our basic wiring in terms of purpose.  However, the general principle of vision applies to everyone who must live with that orientation, irrespective of the uniqueness of that person’s purpose.  Someone with a passion for great speaking that energizes and encourages people would want to picture a future of him standing in front of thousands of people listening to him.  A man with a desire to help others through what he writes will picture in his mind many books with his name on them as an author.

            If the concept of seeing a future of our dreams is that simplistic, everyone of us would have been great visionaries and life would have been a lot easier.  Many people with clear and glaring abilities do not seem to be able to lift themselves to visualize a future they want to feature in.  As such, as they desire a great future, they are stuck in the present with all its difficulties and obstacles.  They are kind of blinded by today’s issues as their future his unfertilized with ideas, concepts, and plans.

            I have said it in many places and to many people that vision is a conception in the imagination.  Standing alone, that definition is shaky.  It is the future of your life conceived in your mind based on known purpose.  Let us imagine I run a building contracting firm and have just been commissioned by an oil and gas company to build an estate for its staff members.  That becomes the purpose of my commissioning.  An estate will not pop out of the ground just because I was contracted to build it.  No estate has ever been built by mere wishful thinking.  I must sit down with a team of architects to put on paper a blueprint for the estate.

            The client company might have specified they needed 200 units of 3 bedroom apartments with detached boys quarters of 2 rooms, a restroom and kitchen.  The blueprint sketches out the details on paper showing the quantity of land required, the road-network inside the estate, the basic facilities like electricity and water and all he other infrastructure required in a typical estate.  The plan then moves to the stage of modeling.  At that stage, a clear picture emerges where a pictorial model is submitted for the layman to view.  In the model, it is always difficult to convince a layman that the estate does not yet exist.  Why?  The picture captures every single detail.  Cars parked in front of each apartment, people walking around, kids riding bicycles and the flowers standing in front of each house.  A picture of the estate is ready before any equipment moves on site!  The contractors and the client see the estate before the building process starts.  They conceive the estate in their imagination and put it to paper.

            It is true you are born to be a man who should provide leadership to others in life.  Have you sat down to figure out what area of life you may want to serve as a leader?  There are leaders in every field of human endeavour.  What kind of leader do you want to be?  What can you see? What you see is what you become.  You can never operate beyond your capacity to see.

            A whole lot of people see nothing.  They never sit down to look beyond the present.  They are too pre-occupied with today that they are stuck.  The future belongs to those with visions.

The Power to Imagine

            Imagination is one o God’s best gifts to the human being.  The ability to think forward and conceive in your mind’s eye what you want your future to look like.  Ignorantly, a lot of religious folks tell you to forget about tomorrow and that it belongs to God.  That sounds right as long as it is within the realms of not trying to worry about what you cannot control.  When you are overwhelmed with things that you can not handle by worry, hand it over to God in prayers and take your break (Matthew 6:25-34) but no where in God’s word were we discouraged from planning or preparing for the future.  As a matter of fact, the scriptures encourage us to practice vision orientation.

            Proverbs 16:1 talks about “the preparation of the heart …”, Mark 11:24 says “… whatever things you ask …”.  Whatever you ask is a desire and “the desires of the righteous shall be granted.”  Ignorance keeps people away from using God’s best to make their lives meaningful and result oriented.

            God’s blessings are available to those who want them and attract them through the principle of desire, asking and getting.  A desire is connected to purpose and when your heart yearns for it, your mind must go to work to create a picture of what you want and the process takes root towards actualization.  What can you see?