I CALL UPON YOU TO PUT A SMILE ON SOMEBODY’S FACE Every now and then we think of how to touch lives around us that we feel truly need to be touched. We say prayers for the hundreds of thousands suffering around the world. For those being afflicted by squalor, war, hunger, drought, disease, devastating natural events like earthquakes and typhoons and so on. Then we think of how we can do something and conclude that we do not have the economic wherewithal to do something significant and so we live on waiting for the ‘right time’ when we can effortlessly do something about these situations. We forget that their suffering does not halt to wait on us. Then there are those of us who are well endowed to do something but we become too embroiled in getting noticed; we live in opulence and spend so much time seeking attention; seeking more and more of means and ways that we shall never harness to open ways for others; we go about flaunting the wealth; we commit it to non-human causes like over feeding pets; then we also become wasteful with our resources and the list continues down an endless latitude. I am young in the faith and I don’t know much in the word but I know that I can do something to transform a life; to better a life. I can comfortably propound that if I do something pragmatic about the life of another person, I have said a prayer. If I do this, I have practiced the Word, not just read it; not just been to church on Sunday and went on to live oblivious of the suffering of somebody around me awaiting yet another Sunday to hear another Praise and Worship; another preaching. And here is where we have to forget about our titles in life; our achievements; our academic accomplishments; our business prosperity; our future career prospects; our wealth. All these are not the most important things to care about. You and I do not have to know the co-efficient of resistivity of brass to do something. You do not have to understand the property law principle Quicquid Plantatur Solo Solo Cedit (Latin: whatever is planted in the ground, belongs to the ground) to boost the status of a life that is languishing in poverty. You and I do not have to own whopping fortunes to do something. Now I am not saying that we take all our possessions and donate them to the destitute. Let us look around our kitchens. That food that you have just left over, do not throw it in the dust bin only for the sanitation worker who collects garbage for you to find it already decomposing in the garbage bags. I call upon you to pack that food in a dish and hand it to him in the morning as he embarks on a long and hard day ahead. Look at your closet. There are some clothes there that you never wear these days maybe because they have lost their gloss, or have become a little older now, or they have become a size smaller, or you have shed off some weight lately and they are now over size. I call upon you to pack them in a paper bag and hand them to the cleaner who cleans away around you compound, with a smile on your face. We do not need to make more than one or two moppers out of our old T-shirts. Among those many pairs of shoes you have piled up in your house that you no longer wear and have now collected so much dust and particles that they have created a permanent state of stuffiness in there, take out some of those and donate to somebody around you going round in torn shoes or barefooted. Why do we keep those shoes when some do not even fit anymore? Don’t tell me we need to keep evidence of how many shoes we can own. Is this too much to do? I don’t know about you but as for me, I think it isn’t. We have the power to improve the living conditions of those who are suffering around us. We need to start doing that now, not tomorrow; not when we have become wealthy. And let us do this no to get noticed or to receive praise. We all love to be praised but this must not be the driving force. Let the driving force be to better a life. One after another and that effort by each of us will fuse and grow into an unstoppable force with immeasurable momentum. From Kenyan corner to Kenyan corner, let us endeavour to better a life around us.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Dec 2013 07:04:59 +0000
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