especially in my own home, where i long to act as i should

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and who, when they have chastened him, will not heed them, then his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city, to the gate of his city. And they shall say to the elders of his city, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious;he will not obey our voice, he is a glutton and a drunkard." Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stones; so shall you put away the evil from among you...

Deuteronomy 21:18-21

I've been thinking about this verse for some time now. It was a very interesting law, not because they stoned them peoples who were gluttonous and drunkards ;))) , but what intrigues me most is how parents were required to kill, so to speak,their child. I know from my mum that a parent's worst fear is that of having to bury their own child. But now in this they are to actually kill him! Imagine that!

Yesterday I watched the movie 'The Freedom Writers' , decidedly the most dopest movie I have watched in a long time. This is a story of teenagers growing up in the hood, where the kids handled guns on a daily basis, and you could be shot for being the wrong colour of skin. the black shot the whites, the Hispanics shot the blacks, and no one cared about justice, only about 'their own'. People got put away for crimes they did not commit, because the star witness was protecting the real perp. It was never about justice, only that someone had to pay, it didn't matter who. I've grown up sheltered from all kinds of crap, so I can't speak with much authority on the subject, but I have friends who've grown up in the ghettos (of  course in Kenya it's probably not that bad). Still, trying to educate those kids was a tall order for anyone, of what good is good grammar to a child who may never get to school tomorrow morning? And at thirteen, fourteen years of age, kids have already learnt hate, are already in gangs, and have already lost three or four friends to gang violence. How do you teach kids like that, what do you say to them to make it all better? How do you bring sense to a situation which has no sense? How do you stop the Hispanic from punching the black student in class? But Erin Gruwell, a white 24 year old school teacher, full of vigour and life, was able to do it, she made a difference. She invested her life in them, those hopeless teenagers who hated her on sight, because she was white, she taught them good grammar and tenses, and she taught them life. She did the impossible: she earned their respect, all of them. I cried when I watched this movie, it's just one of those stories. But that may not have been my point.

One of the young men in that class, Marcus, his mum threw him out when he joined a gang. How do you bring up straight-shooting children in an environment like that? How do you teach them justice, when they see their father being carried away for someone else's crime? How do you teach them to have faith, growing up homes where the next meal was a miracle? How do you unteach them violence, and retaliation, kids who, at sixteen, had seen more dead bodies than a mortician, most of them of people they knew? But that's how they were brought up. While 'normal' kids are taught how to ride bikes by their dads, these kids were taught boxing, how to handle a gun. They were taught that nobody's innocent. 

I'm now trying to get my hands on the Freedom Writer's Diary, the real book (the movie was based on a true story) I don' think I have ever been affected this much by a story. I keep thinking about my kids, about how hard it might be to bring up kids, even in the best environment. Sometimes you can do everything right, and still... Sometimes I may have to be the one to pick up the first stone... Like David, all I can say is 

I will try to walk a blameless path, but how I need Your help, especially in my own home, where I long to act as I should!

Psalms 101:2

i'm nothing without You

Michael W. Smith's song, "Grace' from the album, 'A New Hallelujah' speaks volumes to me. I never understood what it meant to be lost and without hope. Not too long ago I seriously considered getting into trouble, just so I could have a before and after story like so many of us. You know when you know what the 'other side' is like, when God takes you out of there, you really don't want to go back. He who has been forgiven much loves much. But when, like me, you were brought up in a Christian home and have never known the other side of the great divide, sometimes it's easy to forget just how much you have need the Lord. Yeah, definitely I had issues, what most people would call 'small' issues. But I always knew I could figure it all out, and get myself out of any mess unscathed. And most of the time I actually did. Until I got myself into one big trap. Trouble found me, and it went downhill from there. When I went to Him, I was lost, lost and hopeless. And then came Michael W Smith's song, and for the first time I saw myself for what I really am, a wretched and evil piece of clay, who received God's grace somehow. And maybe I have not fully understood that, but I pray daily, that I might not fall into the trap of self righteousness, just because I was rescued from the before-after scenario. for me, that in itself is enough of a testimony, and Lord, Let that be enough. Amen.

10 THINGS I WANNA SAY TO A BLACK WOMAN

Joshua Bennett

1.    I wish I could put your voice in jar, wait for those lonely winter nights when I forget what God sounds like, run to the nearest maximum security prison and open it. Watch the notes that bounce off the walls like ricocheted bullets, punching keyholes into the sternums of every brother in the room, skeletons opening, rose blossom beautiful to remind you that the way to a black man’s heart is not through his stomach, it is through the heaven in your ‘hello’; the echo of unborn galaxies that pounces forth from your vocal cords, that melts ice grills into oceans, baptizing our lips, and so harsh words fade from our memories, and we forget why we stopped calling you divine in the first place.

2.       When I was born my mother’s smile was so bright, it knocked the air from my lungs, and I haven’t been able to breathe right since. It’s something about the way light dances off your teeth, the way the moon gets jealous when you mock her crescent figure with the shape of your mouth. Queen, you make the sky insecure, self-conscious for being forced to stare at your face every morning and realize that the blues of her skin was painted by that symphony doing cartwheels on your tongue.

3.       Who else can make kings out of bastards, turn a fatherless Christmas into a floor full of gifts and a kitchen that smells like the Lord is coming tomorrow, and we must eat well tonight. I used to think my sister was a blacksmith, the way she baked fire and metal and made kitchen miracles at fourteen, making enough food to feed a little boy who didn’t have the words to say how much she meant to him back then, or enough backbone to say so the day he turned twenty.

4.       Your skin reminds me of everything beautiful I have ever known: the colour of ink on a page, the earth we walk on and the cross that hung my Saviour.

5.       I’ve seen you crucified too, spread out on billboards to be spiritually impaled by millions of men with eyes like nails, who made mothers of your daughters; so I’m sorry for the music deals, for Justin Timberlake at the Superbowl, and that young man on the corner this morning, who made you undershade your flesh and become invisible. Never doubt, he only insults you because, men are confused. Now we are trained to destroy or conquer everything we see from birth.

6.       If I ever see Don Imus in public I will punch him in the face, one time for every member of the Rutgers and Tennessee Women Basketball Teams. Then I’ll show him a picture of Phylicia Rashad, Assata Shakur, Arthur Kit, my mother, my grandmother and my seven-year-old niece, who’s got eyes like firebombs, and then dare him to tell me that black women are only beautiful in one shade of skin.

7.       You are like a sunrise in a nation at war; you remind people that there is always something worth waiting up to.

8.       When we are married I will cook, do the dishes and whatever else it takes to let you know that traditional gender roles have no place in the home we build; so my last name is an option, babysitting the kids a treat we split equally, and our bed will be an ancient temple where I construct altars of wax on the small of your back. We make love like the sky is falling, moving to the rhythm of bedsprings and Bell Biv DeVoe. Angels applauding in unison, saying this is the way it was meant to be.

9.        My daughter will know her father’s face from the day she is born, and I can only pray that the superman complex lasts long enough for me deflect the pain this world will aim at her from the moment she is old enough to realize that the colour brown is still not considered human most places. But my daughter will have a smile like a wheelchair, and so even when I am at my worst, when the Kryptonite of this putrid planet threatens to render me grounded, the light dancing off of her teeth, will transform the shards of my broken body into heart-shaped blackbirds, taking flight on a wing that reminds me of my Saviour’s hands, my daughter’s smile, my mother’s laugh when I was in her womb.

10.   Never stop pushing, this world needs you now more than ever...

to feel or not to feel...

Yesterday at service came a man with his son. The boy looked like he was around eight years old, but i couldn't tell exactly. His arms were clutched around his heart, his face was mostly expressionless. I thought he must be the saddest little boy I'd seen in a long time. His hands could not stretch, there was something wrong in his elbow joint. So he walked all of those years in his life with his hands clutched around his heart. Being that his father was hardly able to make ends meet, it was likely that the boy couldn't go to school, couldn't play, or do any of the things boys his ages should be doing. My heart broke.For the first time in a while I wanted to ask God why such things happen to poor innocent people.

But we see them everyday. The beggar on the street walking on all fours, the man in the wheelchair selling sweets. We see them, but we do not see. We have become so numb to other people's pain. We walk along looking straight ahead, consoling ourselves with shallow words, "I can't help them all", "They should find something to do". That way we can make their problems all about us, and sleep easy at night. True, there have been those who have preyed on the humanity of others with false disabilities, walking around with crutches in the daylight, or until chaos ensue. Crutches long forgotten, "ghafla bin vuu, wananunua pujo nambari mguu niponye" as my Swahili teacher would say. And one too many I'm afraid.

Still, I'd like to go back to that time when parents didn't exploit their children and send them begging, if it ever existed. I'd like to be able to help a beggar on the street because they actually need it, not see the same guy walking at night and spending my former money on alcohol. And though I may be mostly sarcastic and no-nonsense faced, deep down my heart isn't as strong. No matter how much I try to close my eyes and pretend they are not there, I can't shut them out, and I can't do much about it at the moment. And I feel...

I do not deserve the life I now live. I remember when I was talking about the good lady who stole from us I said I saw myself in her, and I had no idea why. So i sat and thought about the life I now live, the schools I've been in, probably ranking as some of the best schools in the country. But what if I, being me, was born to some woman in the village out of wedlock. I could be smart, but how much chance would I have, going to the local village school where the best student would never manage half the mark in the national exam, if I would be lucky enough to just finish primary school, that is. I'd probably not go to school a week every month when "the visitors" came. Or I'd be married off early to cut on costs. The only difference between me and her was where I was born, because Lydia was probably smarter than many people I'd ever met.

I can never understand His ways, His purposes, I don't know why things turn out as they do, why a loving God would allow so much pain to go unchecked. It's easy for me to say "Suffering exists to cause us to turn our eyes on Him", but when I don't have food, and no money, and no education or means, sitting at my doorstep helplessly watching my children cry because they are hungry, will I say the same thing? God help me, I don't want to ever be that person who can look at pain and never see, I don't want to grow cold and dead inside. It may break my heart over and over, but I'd rather that, it'll drive me to do something, and then, even if it's just for one person, I could perhaps make the world a little better a place to live in. God help me.

you don't know the cost of the oil in my alabaster box

Have you ever met those people who are so sure they know everything there is to know about everything? Now there are those who do, those are fun to listen to, like listening to  a geek going on excitedly about something or other i probably will never get Then there are those who are just plain annoying, propagating ignorance with such a sense of righteousness in their own eyes.
I'm one of those people refer to as plus-size, thank God for development and activists, before i was just "fat'. At some point this was something i definitely minded, but in recent years after it was concluded that it was not going to go away, I daresay it's now a thing I don't completely dislike about me. Every so often though there comes a few crude Kenyans who test this resolve. Yes, you know who I mean, those who not only call me 'fat', that's a good word, the Swahili word they use is far much worse, 'mzito' translated 'heavy'. The picture drawn in my head when I hear that word is a 90kg sack of maize slumped against a wall. I'm talking about those people who insist on asking you really rude questions that are none of their business, like "Huwa unaenda gym?" (Do you go to the gym?) Those who assume that you automatically eat a whole lot, "Uko sure utashiba?" and when you don't they assume you are on some kind of a diet, "ama unajaribu ku-slim?" (Are you full, or are you trying to be slim?) It's worse when you skip the meal altogether!
I like to think we're in a new season where everyone is allowed to be who they are. But that aside, in any case, what should give you the right to make someone feel bad just because you got thin genes. My mum says as long as they still make clothes that fit well then there is no problem. You don't know where people have come from,  you do not know what they have overcome to be able to stand up straight. i like Cece's version of Mary's story, you don't know the cost of the oil in my alabaster box. Before you try to point fingers and claim I am wasting it, take time and find out its cost.