An Attempt to Define True Love

            The word love is about the most misunderstood word the world over today.    From the perspective of Hollywood, love is presented to the world in movies as a sexual relationship between a male and a female.  They do not have the perception that these movies project the female gender as basically a sex symbol and that the real motive of the male in these movies portend an exploitative attitude.  Most of the story lines present run contrary to the concept of what true love is.  This is a skewed presentation of what love is.  Hollywood therefore presents sex to the world and calls it love.

            Many of us today have accepted this narrow-minded definition of love and the mere mention of this four-letter word immediately evokes sexual thoughts and inclinations in our minds.  Generally, we have allowed a lot of things to be explained and defined for us from the wrong source and perspective.  In the same manner, we have consigned the understanding of a concept as deep as love to the warped and immoral mind-set of Hollywood movie-makers.

            You may not be among those with the kind of tunnel-vision understanding of love and might even be a Christian with a good standing in the Church and with God.  What difference does that really make?  Many Church folks are as guilty as those who have the understanding of love from corrupt-minded movie-makers.  Once you talk about love in the midst of the believers, they immediately raise their holy antennas and question the rationale for love relationship between the brethren especially if they are of the opposite sex!  They have also bought into the Hollywood concept that consign love to mean immorality and sex!  “God is love”, we affirm.  But what is the result of this belief and affirmation if the people for which Christ died are alienated and not shown the love in practice?  They attest to love in mere words and deny the power that it brings when put into action.

            The object of God’s love is people.  If people cease to matter when love is concerned, even if God’s name were to be dragged in, it will amount to nothing.  Today’s religious people have erroneously overshadowed the purpose of God’s love for mankind with so many meaningless activities that only feeds our over-bloated egos.  We are more willing to testify of being on our kneels praying for ten hours rather than seek for opportunities to be able to testify that we spent a whole day with a friend who needed our company to overcome a serious fear or emotional stress in his or her life.

            The question we should ask ourselves often is:  what is the result of our prayers in the lives of people?  Does God delight in activities that just satisfy our half-alive consciences on what we believe to be God’s heartbeat?  I have heard a lot of well meaning Christians say that God’s heartbeat is to be shut up with Him in prayers.  Prayers, yes!  We possibly cannot do anything without it.  But what does prayer mean when it is not focused on what lines up with God’s ultimate purpose for mankind?  Prayers as God’s heartbeat must be carried out in conjunction with actions that results in the fulfillment of the overall objective of God on earth.  This objective is basically reconciliation of mankind to God.  Imagine a scenario where our Lord Jesus Christ came and performed all the miracles and wonders we see in recorded scriptures and yet never went to the cross to die for us?  As a friend once said, that would have been “half-bread being worse than none”.

            In defining true love, I do not intend to take you through some new or strange path or to propound a new theory, but I believe that as you come along again in the unveiling of this subject with another author, your understanding will be enlightened and God’s Grace will cause you to live a meaningful life according to His purpose for mankind.

... to be continued.

Living Free

          I want to address you here on a personal level.  It is from my heart to yours.  There is such a thing as Personal Liberty.  That is my own coinage of how you can live free on the basis of your personal convictions.

          Many of us do not have personal convictions.  We do what we do not because we understand it but because of so many other considerations.  Friends, if you are not living your life based on personal liberty, you are not really living.

          This personal liberty stems from your personal knowledge.  It derives energy from the totality of who you are as a person.  This is the combination of what you know and understand and believe.  What you believe most times also stems from your background as a person and the various experiences you have garnered while growing up.  After becoming a grown up, what other things have formed your current set of values?

          Just in case you do not have any values that determine how you live, then you need an overhaul as a person.  You need to seat down, get an understanding of the characteristics of the purpose driven life and what it is specifically you are supposed to be doing.  Are you already getting confused?  A lot of people reading this right now will understand what I mean but perhaps you are not getting the idea of what I am saying.  Check out my mailing address (goba_ogwuche@yahoo.com) and phone number (+234 (0) 816 573 5746) and I can engage you in a coaching time that will enable you understand purpose for living in a matter of days.  It will be right for you to get Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life from any bookstore in your city to help you get started as well.

          Having located your vision and goal for living, and armed with a road-map to lead you down the road, you must be determined to stay on track until you hit your target.  While you are at it, you will be visited with a lot of distractions.  This is where your personal convictions will be tested and come into the fore.  People, I mean, well-meaning individuals, friends and family members will question your rationale for settling for a particular way of life; they will question your vision.  Those probing and questions are meant to test your convictions as you stay connected to your life-goal.  On many occasions, they may even think you have gone crazy, which is a normal reaction.

          Let me tell you why you must remain focused.  You are totally responsible for your destiny in life.  No one will stand guard on your behalf if you don’t hit target.  Never allow another man’s convictions to sidetrack you.  They may mean well for you, but they can never be you.  They may be older than you are, but they do not have your convictions.  They may have more than enough experience but they are not surely seeing what you see.

          Many times, it bothers me why people want me to behave like them.  Some others want me to think the way they do.  It’s practically impossible.  That is too limiting.  I was created to be unique and different and something more.  That is why my thumb print is different from yours and is not identical with any other single person on the face of the earth peopled by over 6 billion people.  If by God’s divine design and mandate, I am supposed to be different, who is man to think I am wrong?

          We owe ourselves individual responsibilities to respect the uniqueness of one another as a people created by God.  Do all that is in your power to accept people the way they are – I am not advocating a radical position where you accept people’s unwarranted morale misdemeanor.  For those of us in leadership positions, it’s always difficult to accept people for who they are especially if they are different from our own perceived “correct” way of doing certain things.  With all our good intentions, we fail when we want people to think like us, act like us, dress the way we dress and even talk the way we talk.  God through nature has decided people should be different, unique and yet able to agree on common grounds of principle and this should be done in such a way that no one is seen to be forced to agree but by total personal convictions.  Disagreement is legitimate and opinion is free.

          In my personal experience over the years, both in my capacity as a leader in the Church and as a Church growth student, I have discovered that the Church and its leaders are occasionally guilty of not appreciating or accepting people who are different from their cultural mainstream.  This results from a number of things including people’s style of worship, the way they dress, their specific doctrines and theological beliefs, etc.  I heard of someone who was asked to leave a church service because he raised his hands in worship.  In another Church, everyone dressed very nicely for church service and those who didn’t weren’t welcome.  We must learn to understand that we cannot all be the same.

          

... to be continued...

Fight For Your Freedom (II)

There was yet another man who stood up to fight for freedom.  In the sixties, Martin Luther King Jr. bestrode the American landscape like a colossus as he led the Civil Rights Movement which campaigned for the abrogation of laws in the US that relegated the blacks (Negroes) to the status of second class citizens.  King was born in Atlanta, Georgia.  His father was pastor of a Baptist Church, his mother a school teacher.  Originally named Michael, he was renamed Martin when he was about six years old.

          He entered Morehouse College in 1944 and there he met Dr. Benjamin Mays, a scholar who encouraged him to enter the ministry.  After graduating in 1948, King went to Crozer Religious Seminary to undertake post-graduate study.  He received his doctorate in 1955.  Returning to the South of the US, he became a pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.  King first achieved national renown when he helped mobilize the black boycott of the Montgomery bus system in 1955.  The boycott was organized after Rosa Parks, who passed away in 2006 at over 85 years old, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, as local custom dictated – in the segregated South, black people were only permitted to sit at the back of the bus.  The 382-day boycott led the bus company to change its regulations, and the Supreme Court of the United States declared such segregation unconstitutional.

          In 1957, King was active in the organization of the Southern Leadership Christian Conference (SCLC), formed to coordinate civil rights protests against discrimination, and he was elected President.  He advocated non-violent direct action modeled on the methods of Mahatma Gandhi, who led the protests against British rule in India that culminated in India’s independence in 1947.

          In 1963, King led mass protests against discriminatory practices in Birmingham, Alabama, a city with a dubious reputation because of the violent resistance of its white population to desegregation.  The city was dubbed “Bombingham” as attacks against civil rights protesters increased, and King was arrested and jailed for his part in the protests.  Upon his release, he participated in the enormous civil rights march in Washington of August 1963.

          It was here, at this huge demonstration, that King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech, where he foresaw a day that the promise of freedom and equality for all would become a reality in America.  In 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  In 1965, he led a campaign to register blacks to vote, which culminated in a march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama, the state capital.  In 1965, the US Congress passed the Voting Rights Act that outlawed the discriminatory practices that had barred blacks from voting in the South.

          As the black movement for civil rights became increasingly radicalized, King found that the message of peaceful protest was not shared by the younger generation, particularly in northern and West Coast cities.  King began to protest against American involvement in the Vietnam War and the depth of poverty in the US, as well as black civil rights.  However, his crusade on behalf of the poor had only begun when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

          In 1969, his wife, Corretta Scott King, opened the Martin Luther King Jr Center for non-violent Social Change.  Despite being investigated and bugged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during his career as a civil rights leader, King is now acknowledged as an American hero, and in 1983, Congress made his birthday, January 15, a national holiday in his honour.  He paid the price for freedom for the blacks in the US and became a beacon of hope for all blacks and freedom fighters around the world.

          You must pay a price to be free.  That is why freedom is not cheap.  Those who got political independence on a platter of gold are wont to squander their golden chances.  Because they never fought to get it, they take it for granted.  Adam and Eve were never children and therefore never grew up through the normal process.  They didn’t understand what it meant to have experiences and challenges of growing up, therefore, someone reasoned that was why they took the glory of God they had for granted and then easily disobeyed him!  That may not be far from the truth.

          Nigeria as a nation never really fought the British to gain political independence.  Any wonder then that today, we are still struggling to find our bearing in all spheres of our national life.  South Africa is different.  They are today very stable and have transited from one government to the other without any incident.  Namibia (formerly Rhodesia) fought for independence.  I still remember the struggles led by their foremost nationalist leader and later first President, Sam Nujoma and his fellow comrades in SWAPO who fought the Boars to a standstill.  In 1990, their courage was saluted as they joined the rest of Africa as an independent nation.

          For nearly half a century, South Sudan were in conflict with their Arab northern countrymen.  The late John Garang led the South black Sudanese to resist the repression of the Arab north.  As I write this chapter, the Republic of South Sudan was born on July 9, 2011 as thousands gathered in the Southern Capital of Juba to receive Africa’s 55^th nation.  John Garang was not on ground to experience the freedom his fought and died for, his countrymen will never forget his sacrifice for their independence.

          When you fight for freedom, you face challenges and these challenges releases your potentials that you thought never existed.  You discover you could plan, strategize and the realities of your organizational abilities come into the full glare of the world.  In adversity, your best becomes obvious.  Therefore, be thankful for every adversity you face in your march towards freedom because if well utilized, they can stand you in good stead to manage your life well.

          What are your dreams and aspirations in life?  Where do you see yourself headed in life?  Those are your visions and they are a part of the freedom your soul longs for.  What are you ready to give up to get there?  There is going to be a fight and you must fight it.  The truth of the matter is this:  you will have few choices in the future if you do not make the necessary sacrifices and pay the needed price today.  Are you looking forward to financial freedom?  What are you doing to increase your streams of income in the nearest future?  Do you want to rest and be at peace as a parent in the future seeing your children established and standing firm in their various vocations?  Then you must brace up to purposeful parenting.  Do you want a virtual queen for a wife?  Then you are not going to just look well but be a king in your character and attitude.  Besides knowledge and understanding in the issue of marriage, you must prepare yourself from within and be a real man.

          I am appalled by the rate of purposelessness in today’s young men.  Many young men at 26 – 30 years of age do not have a single clue as to where they are headed in life.  Without a purpose, you are a finished person.  What are you called to accomplish in life?  You are not just here to complete the number of over 6.6 billion people on this planet.  You are significant and important.  You were crafted for a reason and a cause.  Have you located it?  Time ticks away every second and every day.

          It is very easy to blame the government, institutions and others.  But, let me assure you today that what you become is what you make of your life by yourself!  What do you think about?  Until your thoughts line up to a particular purpose, there will never be any accomplishment in your life.  James Allen says “a man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it”.  You are supposed to be a creative force.  You are supposed to be somebody higher than where you are now; stronger than a bundle of wavering thoughts and fluctuating sensations.

          You may just be realizing this enormous potential that lies dormant within you which has not been tapped all the while and may be asking “Please help me!”  I have a word for you.  A strong man cannot help a weaker unless the weaker one is willing to be helped.  You must by your own deliberate and conscious efforts develop the strength which you admire in others.  Only you can alter your condition and navigate your way through life for great accomplishments.  That is where Barack Obama emerged from as the first Black President of the United States, overcoming personal obstacles and institutional barriers.  You too can overcome your challenges and get to the topmost place in your life.

          Your way of thinking must change.  If you have to become free, you must first of all be free in your mind.  Your mind is the clearing house where thoughts (both base and high in nature) fight to take residence.  Do you remember the statement that says “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he?”  When you look at your life, who do you see?  As you stand before a full length mirror, who do you see reflected back to you?  Do you see a weak and a discouraged person?  Do you see someone worth nothing and who will not amount to anything in life?  Is that who you see?  If these represent who you see, then you must change your mind-set.  You must change your thought patterns.

          Do you really love yourself?  If you do, then you will fight to be a free man in the real sense of the word.  You must have what Reverend Martin Luther King Jr called rationale and healthy self-interest.  A great Jewish Rabbi, the late Joshua Leibman, wrote a book some years ago entitled Peace of Mind.  In that book, there is a chapter that had a title called “Love Thyself Properly”.  What he says in that chapter, in substance, is that before you can love other people adequately, you have to love your own self properly.  You do not need to go through life with a deep and haunting emotional conflict.  Part of loving yourself very well is accepting yourself and that will set you really free.

          Your rationale and healthy self-interest will drive you to focus on something in life and look forward to a period of freedom in your life when you can chose where to live, where to go for holidays with your family without restrictions placed on you for lack of finance and the means.  You must not be bound to a shylock of a landlord five to ten years from today.  You should be a landlord yourself.  You shouldn’t be hopping from one bus or taxi to the other in five years’ time.  If you are driving a sloppy, swaging and staggering car now, you should aspire for a sleek car in two to three years from today.  That is possible when you set your face like a flint and do the needful to earn enough money to acquire that pleasure toy you seek.

          I am not suggesting that material acquisition is the definition of success and freedom but they are legitimate and should be a necessary part of your life for comfort.  It should be part of your freedom package but not the ultimate.  There are lots of people today who ride in the best of cars and live in mansions but have turmoil in and around their lives.  You must understand that your life must have the necessary balance between the spiritual, emotional, physical and material realms.  Aspire to be a free person in all ramifications and these do not come cheap.  There are things you must do to get that balance.  If you keep doing what you have been doing, you will remain where you are.  Do you want to get what you’ve never got?  Then you must do what you’ve never done.  Remember the song in Sister Act:

If you want to go somewhere

If you want to be somebody

You better wake up

And pay attention

Fight For Your Freedom

       Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, (the South Africans call him Madiba, meaning “Saviour”) remains an icon of freedom around the world today because of the price he paid for his countrymen and women to be liberated from Apartheid.  For 27 grueling years, this man remained behind bars and refused to be released on conditions by the white Boars who ruled South Africa for many decades and desecrated and dehumanized the blacks.

          Mandela along with other black freedom fighters like William Nkomo, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo stood their grounds until they gained freedom for their people.  During the whole of the 1950s, Mandela was the victim of various forms of repression.  He was banned, arrested and imprisoned.  For much of the latter half of the decade, he was one of the accused in the mammoth Treason Trial, at great cost to his legal practice and his political work.  After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the African National Congress (ANC) with Mandela as one of the leaders was outlawed, and Mandela, still on trial, was detained.

          This man was forced to live apart from his family, moving from place to place to evade detection by the government’s ubiquitous informers and police spies.  He had to adopt a number of disguises, sometimes dressed as a common labourer, at other times as a chauffeur.

          During one of his trials, specifically in the Rivonia Trial for sabotage, Mandela’s statements in court during these trials are classics in the history of the resistance to apartheid, and they have been an inspiration to all who have opposed it.  His statement from the dock in the Rivonia Trial ends with these words:

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.  I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.  It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve.  But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

          Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment and started his prison years in the notorious Robben Island Prison, a maximum security prison on a small island 7 kilometers off the coast of Cape Town.  In April 1984, he was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town and in December 1988, he was moved to the Victor Verster Prison near Paarl from where he was eventually released.  While in prison, Mandela flatly rejected offers made by his jailers for remission of sentence in exchange for accepting the Bantustan policy by recognizing the independence of the Transkei and agreeing to settle there.  Again in the 1980s, he rejected an offer of release on condition that he renounces violence.  “Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.  Only free men can negotiate”, he said.

          In a life that symbolizes the triumph of the human spirit over man’s inhumanity to man, Nelson Mandela accepted the 1993 Nobel Prize for Peace on behalf of all South Africans who suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to that land.

        In the next write-up, I will pick on another freedom fighter that is worthy of emulation.  Keep your fight for freedom on.  Freedom is never free!