fear not, He said, I have overcome the world

 “It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.” 

~John Steinbeck, Cannery Row~

Is it true that when a man is dying hope is the last to go? Or maybe regret, you know, for the more important things one should have focused on but didn’t: family, love and a whole bunch of like stuff? I don’t know, I’m not dying, but I watched my father almost die every day for months, and every day I wondered what life was like through his eyes. It’s not something I like to remember, until recently I think I blocked every image from that time. I still wonder even now, even though the threat of death is now behind us.

Flo died. She was loud and lively, she had the optimism of three rainbows, and she died. And she is in a better place. It’s easy to say that, because I mean, it is fact. Where we are going is a better place than where we are. But this was truer for her. And I am angry. We are all angry. Not at God for allowing it to happen, because God’s truth I don’t think any of us would call her back even if we were given the choice.

27 years, that’s how long she was around for. And for the better part of those years no one ever saw the burdens she carried. No one could imagine that behind that frame that clung to Christ so ably, making all of us imagine it was totally doable, there was a gory tale.

Flo downlived it every day for years. And she did so without changing, without losing grace, without frowning at the world or taking it out on anyone. And now she is not around anymore. And we are angry. We are all angry. We are angry at human beings. Not in general, with faces and names and stuff.

I’ve always imagined that nothing is impossible with man given the right set of circumstances. Mother will turn against daughter, father against son, and every single one of us is capable of the most heinous acts of evil that has ever been. That part is fact. Which is why I cling to Christ, because even I cannot imagine the depth of my wickedness, I must have Him with me at all times.

So, given the right circumstances, someone can tear your resilience down bit by bit. Hit you below the belt and never let up. Continually crush your spirit and every ounce of dignity and self-belief that you have nurtured, and tear at your very essence until you are nothing but a mass of shrapnel not unlike a building torn down by bombs.

A number of statements come to mind:

You are capable of handling situations you couldn’t have possibly imagined. Fathers will disown you. The love of your life will sleep with someone else. The person who made you will hit you. Your best friends will die. A man will ignore your fervent “no” and take what he wants. And still you will find yourself filling your lungs when situations should have left them empty. It is in those moments that you’ll remember there isn’t anything you cannot overcome.

~Danielle Campoamor: 30 Life Lessons for 20-Somethings with Too Many Feelings~

Mostly that’s true, but what if you can’t? What if you can’t fill your lungs anymore and you just simply give up and say something like ‘I am going to be quiet now’. And then nobody ever hears from you again?

I went to Google in search of answers. Not about life, actually I was looking for quotes about forgetting. I found that first one up there. Shortly after we found out Dinah and I kept wondering how life could possibly keep going as though nothing happened. You know, you want to stop people on the street and go like, “Yo! People, hold up, hold up, this major thing just happened; this unbelievably strong woman is no longer with us. Please be still and respect that for a while, okay? ”

But you couldn’t. Life goes on, and pretty soon people will forget. Maybe we too, will not remember it with as much vividness. We’ll always have memories of the times and etc, but as time goes by, the pain will fade, and new memories will take part of the room we have reserved for Flo.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing at all. Because it’s a sad thing when you are relieved that your friend is no longer here. It’s sad when you know that given the chance you would never call her back to the life she lived. I wonder what she’s thinking, looking at us from up there. I wonder what life would be like if we didn’t forget things, if we remembered everything as vividly as though it happened yesterday.

So this is my lament. I hope I am allowed that much. I have not questioned God’s Will, or His wisdom. In Him I have unshakable faith that everything in the universe is unfolding exactly as it should. But David wailed. Jeremiah wrote an entire book wailing. I’m allowed this much. Because our souls need to be purged of the pain, and in the words of Anne Frank:

"I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn." ~Anne Frank~

I write because a great woman died. And while the world will go on, we noticed. For a few people in the world, time stood still. And so maybe in time, we won’t recall as much; but right here and now, today, we noticed. I noticed. And I write to engrave the memories of this remarkable woman all over the sands of time. I will write for as long as I have the words. Because people deserve to be remembered when they are no longer here. Life must go on, but we in turn, must never forget to those to whom we owe a significant chapter in our lives.

Farewell Flocy, I know you make the face of heaven so fine!

of idealism and broken science

“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”     ~Anne Frank~

They always told us that men shall be men. That it’s okay for them to be philandering pigs, because that’s just who they are, you know, a leopard cannot change its spots. If you bring a cow to water then it has no choice but to drink. And a bunch of other wise sayings I consider to be broken science. No, I don’t really mean to say broken science.

It’s my fault, I guess. I have been too sheltered, and have been taught that I am responsible for my own actions. I’ve made many mistakes, maybe even more than I made as a child. Sure, you try to pass them off as “It just happened, I don’t know what got over me.” But that’s really not true, is it?

You DO know why it just happened, you DO know exactly what got over you. That moment you decided that you’ll deal with the backlash later, now. Now you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. So you did. And the consequences came. You couldn’t have known the price tag attached.

Like going to the supermarket and opening a bottle of mineral water to drink, assuming it was the usual 50 bob. Only to get to the counter and it is say 5,000. I know, a stretch, just go with it okay? Your entire present fortune cannot add up to 5,000 bob, but you already drank the water. Let's imagine it's because you walked from the other side of town to Nakumatt Mega on a hot afternoon, because in your view it was ‘just here’ (this actually happened).

So you’re stuck at the till. You have to pay somehow. But that’s the kind of situation that resembles the quality of being a lady hound. No, I don’t really mean to say lady hound. But you drank the water, they’ve gotta exact their pound of flesh. Sorry.

My problem is that I’m too idealistic. It’s weird because that idealism is tempered by a significant level of general cynicism. Essentially that means I expect to be let down, but up until the actual let-down, I somehow imagine I can’t possibly be let down. Please tell me this is normal. Ish.

So I refuse to accept that men shall be men. I refuse to take the Pharisees who brought the woman to Jesus’ feet, caught in the act, alone? So it’s okay for him but not her. So she bears the curse and ridicule while everyone understands that yes, ‘men shall be men’. Broken science. In a huge pile.

And believe me, I hold all those mantras with the same disdain I hold the positions of Woman county representatives, affirmative action and those feminists fighting for special treatment because they are women. Yeah. Hold your own, pull your weight. Carry the cross for your own shortcomings. Don’t pass them off to your gender. If you didn’t get elected because you’re a woman, too bad your people are MCPs. There’s no constitutional crisis. The 30% threshold applied to appointed posts, not elective.

Enough politics. Being that there are only two people on earth who know the truth, I refuse to be caught in the middle, and get lost amid the ‘I think’ and ‘It must be true’. I suppose the better part of being me is that I’m able to open a clean new book and work with stuff as they are, and pretend that the past doesn’t exist. Sure, I’ll remember the past, but interestingly, it will be like a far off memory, rather than a shocking pain. 

Maybe I just haven’t been properly hurt yet. Well, I'm young still. I’ll always you the benefit of doubt. I’ll always believe in the goodness of mankind. Maybe it’s faith. Maybe it’s gross naiveté. Whatever, even if Anne Frank died, it’s not what killed her. Ergo, I too, will live.

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”                                                              ~Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl~

girls just wanna have fun...

It’s a morning of random thoughts.

Top of that list is the lovely Flo, about whom I am so engulfed with sadness. This girl, this girl had the spine of a dinosaur. I don’t know, I’m just assuming those behemoths had to have had some incredibly sturdy spines, unless of course they didn’t, which is why they are no longer in existence. In which case the girl had a spine of steel. I know, why didn’t I just use that in the first place, the word was gone, something that happens more frequently now.

I think the truth of Flo’s demise has not yet sunk in, I keep sitting here, looking at that picture from Mukiri’s wedding and hoping this is some sick joke. But deep down I’m afraid of the reality of finding out that it really isn’t. I mean, c’mon, I know it’s true it’s just not real, is there a difference? I think there is…

So there, she was loud, and jolly and no-nonsense and sweet. She managed to be all these things at the same time on occasion. I know without a doubt in my heart that she is with Jesus, and that heaven’s choir is sounding so lovely with her voice in it. She sang, Lord, did she sing!! And she brought me out to sing with her. Me and my freshman eccentricities, in a place that was very unaccepting of the uuhhhmmm... ‘free-spirited’ Christian that I was then. She helped me to strike a balance between my trademark short skirts and pleasing the brethren.  I eventually let them go (sort of), but it was in my own time and after my own processes…

She was something, that girl, she was something… I will miss her... So will a million people I know, but she lives on, she lives forever in our hearts… But we must inure ourselves to not having her around anymore… And we shall meet at Jesus’ feet in the fullness of time.

I’ll keep going forever if you let me, but I’ll stop now before the wells open…

So I met this man the other day, we used to work together during one of my many tu-small gigs. I haven’t been the lean trim one, you know, since ever. It’s not something I care about much, people seem to though… It’s the kind of society that places every plus sized girl in the want-to-be-thin group. Me, I just know I have seasons, sometimes I want to eat everything, and sometimes I don’t want anything.

Naturally the size of my fundamendos fluctuate with those seasons… and people notice. And make a point of pointing it out. Every damned bloody time. Like sijaona. As though I told them I was on a to-be-size-10 marathon. I have written about this before, and now even saying this makes me feel as though I am defending myself. As though it’s wrong to be like me and actually love being like me, and not at all on a regimen to make me Ajuma-esque. Like it’s sacrilege to be a big happy girl not at all trying to fit into the ‘it Ajuma figure’.

Anyway, so he congratulated me for losing a lot of weight since he last saw me. And enquired whether I have been ‘doing a lot of practice’ whatever that means. Recently that’s been happening a lot. People lauding my new weight loss, of course silently insinuating that they didn’t approve of what I was before, but now masquerading it as a compliment, ‘Umeslim, you look really nice, umekuwa ukifanya nini?’.  Which I never know how to answer because I genuinely haven’t been doing anything differently. Go explode. And yes, I will say it at the risk of sounding like an angsty teenager trying to be understood.

It wasn’t always comfortable to be me. I didn’t always love it. And now I do, the thick seasons as well as the thin. I have clothes that fit both, and I can hold my own. So, you know, can I just be left alone. Those backhanded compliments, those unspoken reprimands, as though being size 10 and/or older and/or male automatically earns you the right to open your mouth and volunteer your crass and prehistoric opinions. Woishe die.

But it’s the thing I know I will have to deal with forever, because those mindsets won’t ever change. Having to come here and vent and end up feeling like I’m defending myself for not being slim enough, not having enough of a rack for my size, for being almost as big as my mother, it’s a thing that’s just going to be there, like the sun. It's going to be like my own little cage, my own little Paul's thorn...maybe it's supposed to teach me patience and tolerance, make me more like Christ, who was/is also patient and tolerant. Still.

I have enough of everything, too much of some things :)))))))))))) but you know what, I love it… I take care of myself, but I go easy on myself. Life is hard enough without counting every calorie that goes in versus out… Let the girl fly free...

By jolly, let the girl be…

sleep with the angels Flo...

Death and grief are little things. They are transcient. Life must be before death and joy before grief, else there are no such things as death or grief. These are only negatives, life is positive. Death is only the absence of life, just as night is the absence of day…

~Frank Norris~

 

I was asleep, just a few minutes ago. It’s hard to believe that now, because I do not see any sleep before my eyes now. It’s funny how things work out. The first familiar face I met in campus was this girl who I had been in high school with, the girl in whose Bible study I landed, who helped me settle into campus and everything. I spoke of that here. It was through her that I met Dinah and Mukiri, and a bunch of other people who eventually ended up a lot closer to me. Sometimes life happens that way.

Oh, her name’s Flo. It’s funny how things work out. I woke up this morning and went through some of the things I mulled over earlier in this blog, including this post in which I paid tribute to Lasoi’s mother. I knew her, not in any warm chummy kind of way, but her passing hit home. Enough to write a post about it. And now I am in the same shoe. My friend and sister Flo rests in the Lord’s arms tonight, after a hard and spirited fight with illness.

She won’t be there when the next wedding comes up (I bet that’s gonna be Dinah’s), no singing the night before until morning, no hugs from heaven itself at the most opportune of moments… 

But she is with the Lord. And we remain here, torn between those questions we so desperately want answers to, and believing that indeed all things are working according to God’s perfect plan.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away… For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then (we shall see) face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I am known…

~The Bible~

I do not doubt it, not for a second I do not doubt it, but it’s just hard. It is the way of every human, it is my way too... she was so young… and so brave… it’s almost as though God was preparing me for Mukiri’s call… I almost didn’t answer, I was so tired… But the moment she began I saw it a mile away…

And so, even though I don’t know the grander plan, or you know, tomorrow, I choose to say blessed be His name… Florence Anyango Okoth, sleep with the angels… rest easy love… God knows we shall miss you, but you are in the best hands under the best care possible… You won’t be crying anymore, only praising eternally… until we meet…

Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the thing which are not seen are eternal.

~The Bible~

Faith over fear..

It’s Tuesday. This was Saturday’s post; I gave it a hundred and one percent, and then the Wi-Fi went and did its thing. I guess I can still do that whole set the date to Sunday, but meh… Just go with it.

The choices for me this morning were between blogging and being destructive – don’t ask, please don’t ask. Thank God I picked blogging. I have been spoiling for inspiration these past few weeks. They have been crazy ones, and you know, time just flies by. Much as I could answer my CIBAT question about a million times a day, once I started with the silence I couldn’t stop. I have to keep talking or silence will kill me. Silence killed me. Maybe silence keeps killing me.

I read something this morning trolling around Facebook and maybe that’s a little of what inspired this:

When you obey God constantly, privately and for years--He has a way of honouring you publicly. The thing is this: You don’t obey Him for public honour; you obey Him because you LOVE Him. Because you are thankful for Jesus. Because you cannot live without Him. Because He is your life. Because you are lost without Him. Because He is your Lord. And then… like a good father, He gives good gifts to His babies. So, your living for Jesus is not in vain. Hang in there, HE is always watching.

I attribute this to Heather Lindsey, of the Pinky Promise movement. A woman who I follow around, who makes this walk seem actually doable, and not for the rosy petals that we will be walking on as we go down the narrow path, but because she’s real. She’s very real. And I love real. Don’t get me wrong, I love to listen to a good sermon, but like Kirk Franklin in 'Let It Go' I want someone who can ‘teach me how to live when the tongues are done’. Because life is very real. And reality can be very stark.

It is so easy to lift your hands and praise when you have money in the bank, you are in good health, and most things are unfolding as they should. I haven’t had that for some time now... It’s easy to trust God as a Provider when you have a source of livelihood etcetera etcetera. But when the storms come, you know, those ones God tells you He will not get you out of, not in any bad way, but those same platitudes mean little. Because we know them, right? But how do you transform them into practical living?

I think if I ever wrote a book it would be about practical Christianity. It would be how to make God’s principles work in everyday living. Like Joyce Meyer. Transforming Bible pictures into relevant images in our world today, because the Bible was written relevant for EVERY season, from Adam to the day of Jesus Christ. And life is real. So yes, put your trust in Him, but do what in the meantime? Pray, but do what in the time between the prayer and the answer? Practical Christianity. Being not of this world, but living in the world, because we are in the world and we are called as lights in this world. For that, we actually need to be here and do life.

So it’s been a whole lot of waiting and occupying in almost equal measure for the past few years for me. It’s been a whole lot of patience and positivity and despair and crying in almost equal measure. I've had  good friends who've had my back the entire time, and new friends who I hope will be there long after these become the good old days. And now, I think a big door is coming really close, but just like before, I am afraid to hope it’s my door, that the tide could actually be turning. Because even though Heather’s words ring so true, I am far from perfect.

I know Him to remain faithful even when I am faithless, yet still a part of me thinks it too audacious to claim it as my own, ahead of a million more beffiting people. Again the theory of substitution which I spoke of on a Tuesday morning just like this one. Those things that will be mine, there will be someone more fitting, more relevant, more everything, but He will still choose me. Just like He chose the little shepherd boy David, or Gideon, or Mary, or Paul, or Jacob, or Timothy. 

He won't choose me because I deserve it, nothing I've got is anything I deserve. Or for my steadfastness in the face of adversity. He knows my frame, He remembers that I am dust. And as a father has mercy on his children, so will He on me. He is gracious. He makes all things beautiful in His time. So yes and amen, in all things I know it is well.

When He works on the left hand, I cannot behold Him; When He works to the right hand, I cannot see Him; But He knows the way that I take; When He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold. My foot has help fast to His steps; I have kept His way and not turned aside. I have not departed from the commandment of His lips; I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food.