Friday, 29th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search

Trouble Gets To Know The Budget For Prayers

By Kole Omotoso
11 October 2015   |   3:51 am
POWER 101 states that between withholding of prayer and the granting of power, it is the withholding that shows power. This means that the withholding of prayer is the greatest demonstration of power.

Travels of trouble by Kole OmotoshoPOWER 101 states that between withholding of prayer and the granting of power, it is the withholding that shows power. This means that the withholding of prayer is the greatest demonstration of power. The prayer (the one who prays) understands that the prayee (the One who is prayed to) continues to be relevant to the wants of the prayer as long as the prayee does not grant the praying of the prayer. Into this fundamental of power has been introduced the Nigerian Factor of acceleration of access. This Nigerian Factor states that acceleration is the thing. Whatever you can have you can have right now with the required acceleration nexus. Nexus is a good word to use in Nigeria intellectual circuses or circles.

Accelerator nexus is money. If you have money you do not have to wait for anything. You can have it now. So, you need to pray? What format is the praying going to be? Do you want your praying in English, or Arabic or in Yoruba? We have accelerated miracles and accelerated super miracles and finally miracles more miraculous than miracles – the mega miracles. While governments are preparing their annual budgets, money for Praying has never appeared in the itemizing of recurrent expenditure like salaries, or developmental expenditure like roads and hospitals or incidentals.

A young man who was until recently jobless and unemployable narrated the story, between swigs of his favourite drink, of how his mother gave him a piece of land. For days and nights he wondered what to do with the land. He could sell it and use the proceeds to go to Abuja. He had been told stories of Abuja. A fabulous place. A place where every kind of praying is answered. A place in fact of material mega miracles. A place, in one word, where criminals arrest law enforcement agencies for preventing the normal flow of criminal activities! It is a place where law enforcement agencies cannot act to prevent criminal activity.

How do you know a potentially criminal activity? Are you God? Can you see the future? When law enforcement agencies insist that an overloaded vehicle with bald tires and defective brakes is likely to cause an accident that could lead to the loss of lives, the law enforcement agencies are asked if they do not believe in God and how God can make sure that no accidents happen. When the accident has happened, the law enforcement agencies are asked not to prosecute the driver who caused the accident. Why not? Amuwa Olorun ni. It is what God has decreed to happen. Insanu dabara wa Allahu qadara! Man proposes and God disposes. Are you going to now judge the act of God who said it should be and it was? Let sleeping dogs lie and forget the past and pray for the protection of God in the future.

Which means budgeting for praying in the future. The young man heard about fabulous mega miraculous Abuja but he did not sell the land his mother gave him. May be he should plant something on it. Maize and in ninety days he would harvest. Yam and nine months he would harvest. Cassava and three years. . . No, he needed something that would yield now! Acceleration! Praying! So, he prayed and the inspiration came. He heard the call. Come over to Macedonia and help us! He went and looked for Macedonia in the atlas; also checked google because he could not locate such a place in Nigeria. May be it is near to Abuja. Then he got a super inspiration – Macedonia is on the land that his mother gave him. So, he went back to the land sandwiched between two development projects. The one on the left is a shopping mall to be located in a bungalow of face me I face you rooms that would double as bedrooms at night and shops during the day.

He lay on the land that his mother gave him and he got a final mega inspiration – it said go forth and buy a hand bell, like the one that schools used in the olden days to mark the passing of the change of lessons! So our young man borrowed money and bought a hand bell and then went to the piece of land and called forth the weary, the tired, the bored, the no hopers to come and pass their burdens on his shoulders from where he would transfer such burdens to the accommodating shoulders of God for a fee.

Just as the times dictate the titles in Nigeria, these praying times have also dictated the proliferation of episcopal titles. Remember the civilian times when every musician and every shoemaker and every coffin maker was Doctor this and Professor that and Vice-Chancellor or Barrister so and so. That would be the time from the days of the seeking of the Golden Fleece up to the first coup d’etat of 1966. Thereafter, every musician and every shoemaker and every coffin maker was General this and Colonel that and Major so and so. That seemed to have ended with the termination of military rule. Now, that we are at the time of praying the titles are pastor this, evangelist that and reverend so and so. Other titles go into brackets to demonstrate which is more important. Even professors put their professorships into brackets (in hiding really) when they display their episcopal titles. Like the sainthood that our lately unemployable youngster imposed on himself most of these titles are self-imposed.

It is difficult not to see the budgeting for praying as similar to budgeting for mourning. Rented mourners are in the habit of weeping blood tears while the real grieving affected weep water tears. Their intensity of their own tears has to do with the need to display that they are earning their fee by weeping blood. In the same way hired prayers (those who pray) cry while praying to show their earnestness, which is more earnest than the praying of those who hire them. Such are the ways of things when praying is a budget item.

0 Comments