Of predatory men of the cloth, friends, and trusting yourself before others...

My friend Sihle and I were discussing how people are overly dependent on others. We sometimes have an astounding lack of faith in ourselves and end up placing our life decisions in the hands of friends, relatives or even total strangers instead of being responsible for our own lives. Whenever we encounter crises, we want to go around consulting friends, relatives, and strangers and take their advice.These are just people who probably know bits and pieces of our lives, not the full story. When you get advice from all and sundry, you get really confused about what to use and wind up in a worse situation than before you went shopping for the advice. And these people won’t be there when we have to live with the consequences of the decisions they helped us make. They have their own lives to live, you know, their own problems to solve. I’ve seen it happen in car parks at shopping malls. A clueless car guard who wants a coin or two from you stands behind your car as you are reversing and starts to direct you with hand signals going, “Woza boss, woza boss! Wooooza boss!”  You innocently trust the car guard knows what he’s doing until WHAM!! A car comes from nowhere and hits you. You get out to assess the damage and ask the guard how he let that happen, but he’s disappeared into thin air and you’re left to pick up the pieces.

I have nothing against sharing our problems, sometimes, so that we don’t suffer in silence. There, however, has to be a limit to how much we are prepared to share and who we share that with. We need to wisely pick the people to talk to about matters that are really private. I’ve had my moments when I felt I had over-shared and started stewing in my own juices thinking, “Good Lord, why did I divulge all those details?” Sometimes you tell someone something personal and discover after that conversation that you’re in a deeper hole than you were in before the conversation. I did it once when I had a problem that I thought was really insurmountable. I called my friend and told her about it. She said, “From the look of it, your problem is most likely going to get worse so you must just pray. Sorry hako! (Pity you!) As for me, well, my life is a fairytale. I just don’t go around saying it because people will hate me for it”. Sharing that problem reaped no rewards.

These days the fashionable thing is to run to faith healers who congregants call “powerful men of God”, “Papa”, and other titles of endearment.  

On numerous occasions we hear stories of people who were fleeced off by prophets who they had entrusted to pray for them. Countless women, around Africa especially, have been raped and/or impregnated by these “powerful men of God”, men have lost their wives to these shepherds that prey on their flock. Why we insist on calling another person man/woman of God is beyond me. We are all people of God, created in his image. I acknowledge that there are people who are gifted at saying powerful prayers, but that doesn’t mean we should bestow all our faith in those people to a point where they become deities. There’s only one God for me to worship. The rest are mere mortals who have their own sins to repent for. The bible says, “For all have sinned and come short of his glory”. Christianity has never been as confusing as it is in this era. Anyone who just fails to find a job will study the bible from front to back, back to front, run and form a church. Before you can say “Hallelujah” they are Pastor or Reverend so and so, even though there is nothing to revere about their conduct.

I’m not anything near what people call a “Prayer Warrior”, I totter in my faith a lot, but I am aware that I need to have constant personal connection with God. Things happen in life that make you sit down and reflect, and realise that regardless of how much wisdom you think you have, how revered you are in the community or how many resources you have at your disposal, without God you’re nothing. You need to say your prayers from the heart, not through an intermediary. It’s not like being a company executive where you can assign your PA to send flowers to one client, thank you notes to the other, and a bottle of champagne to the next. To those clients, everything will be acknowledged as having come from you. But prayer is a different ball game altogether. God will know that you are sending other people to pray for you while you’re not doing anything for yourself. If your prophet prays for you, God will know it’s not you and that you’re sending messengers even though he said, “Come let’s reason together,” in Isaiah 1:18. I know people who haven’t knelt a day in their lives to pray but are quick to run to prophets at the first sign of turmoil to get prayed for. I’m all for people praying for each other, the bible supports that too. But expecting some of these weird pastors, or anyone, to intercede for us while we lordly sit by expecting some miracle to happen is wrong on so many levels. It’s a display of arrogance.

We need to take time to study the bible, think about our lives and pray for God’s guidance in everything that we do. We shouldn’t just jump to ask our friends for solutions before even giving ourselves time to reflect on our problems and coming up with our own solutions.

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Robbing people in the name of Jesus