Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta
I did not need anyone else’s passion to assess. Those few people convinced me that I was on the right path in choosing passion over money.
I felt like I needed to give something no matter how small. This was because I was scared. The idea of not worrying about money when money has been my greatest worry since I started earning some of my own was daunting. I thought that if I at least gave something, God would give me the money I needed for the passionate project I was considering starting.
For a while I had been considering making tea for the security guards who guard the gate and barrier into our estate. The weather had been unusually cold and I used to look at them and think that I should give them a hot drink. What kept me from doing it was because I was certain that as soon as I gave them anything, they would ask for more. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and asked my house keeper to be making them tea in the evenings. They were so grateful for the tea that a few days into the tea giving, they asked me to employ them because their boss is a torturer!! I made it clear that tea was all they were going to get and left it at that.
I could not become a teacher. I was still happy being a lawyer and I was not satisfied with how far I had gotten. I thought that I needed to challenge myself and take a step towards achieving more in my legal profession. I realized that I had become complacent.
Fighting the fear is not easy even though I was already my own living example of how passion had helped me become what I was. I went back to the faith in myself and my abilities issue I had thought about when assessing my husband’s passion. I wondered how I could acquire this faith. Without it, I thought that I would fail.
My husband goes to church. He goes to church on Saturdays. He started going to church ardently almost 2 years ago. Actually, it was meeting me that interrupted his church going routine for a while. He has always been a member of a congregation somewhere. In the beginning, we used to go to church on Saturday as a family.
For Saturday church goers, you are expected to be in church the whole day from 8.30am till 5pm engaging in various church activities planned for you. I assure you that you need to have been raised in such a church to be able to accept this as your routine. Thankfully, my husband is only interested in the sermon which comes between 10.30am to 1pm. So we did not ever go the whole hog. Once in a while a great interesting preacher would visit and teach something awesome. I still remember one preacher who preached about “death in the pot”. He was fantastic. If he was the resident pastor of the church, I would probably have stuck to it.
On Saturdays, my husband, me and my nephew would get ready and go to church at around 10.30am. My niece is in boarding school and if she was on holiday, she would come too. My nephew always fell asleep. Sometimes my husband would too. Eventually I decided that I did not need the pretence and I would find something productive to do on Saturdays like sleep in a little longer, more so when I was pregnant. My husband still kept at it, even now. These days he says the good sermons have become more frequent. In reply I say, Good for you!
As far as my nephew was concerned, I enrolled him at ligi ndogo on Saturdays and took him to a Sunday church for Sunday school. I would drop him in church at 11am and pick him up at 1pm. On the first day of Sunday school, I went with him and even attended the main church while he attended the Sunday school. I was not impressed but he was. So he kept at it and I slept. Just like me and my mum huh?!
Now I was thinking about faith. I knew that the reason my faith was shaky is because it was based on what I had been taught from childhood. That life is tough. You need money to get what you want. Making money is tough. Getting what you want is tough.
No-one ever gave me the formula to success yet everyone said that I needed to work hard. There are so many hard workers I know who are nowhere near success. I mean the guys who wake up at the crack of dawn to walk or cycle several kilometers to work in factories or flower farms and the like. Manual labourers chipping at stones at a building site in the hot sun. No doubt these guys are hard workers. But where is the success? Same applies to university graduates who are thrown out into the world with a beautiful piece of paper testifying to their hard work only to find nothing for them to do.
We are mortal beings. We die. We have no control of when and how we die. We are vulnerable to disease. Criminals attack us. Wild animals will eat us if given the slightest chance to get at us. Mean people around us will abuse us. Our hard work amounts to nothing due to apparent scarcity of jobs and money. How can we possibly have faith in ourselves and our abilities in such a world?
The answer depends on whether or not you believe in God.
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta
I did not need anyone else’s passion to assess. Those few people convinced me that I was on the right path in choosing passion over money.
I felt like I needed to give something no matter how small. This was because I was scared. The idea of not worrying about money when money has been my greatest worry since I started earning some of my own was daunting. I thought that if I at least gave something, God would give me the money I needed for the passionate project I was considering starting.
For a while I had been considering making tea for the security guards who guard the gate and barrier into our estate. The weather had been unusually cold and I used to look at them and think that I should give them a hot drink. What kept me from doing it was because I was certain that as soon as I gave them anything, they would ask for more. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and asked my house keeper to be making them tea in the evenings. They were so grateful for the tea that a few days into the tea giving, they asked me to employ them because their boss is a torturer!! I made it clear that tea was all they were going to get and left it at that.
I could not become a teacher. I was still happy being a lawyer and I was not satisfied with how far I had gotten. I thought that I needed to challenge myself and take a step towards achieving more in my legal profession. I realized that I had become complacent.
Fighting the fear is not easy even though I was already my own living example of how passion had helped me become what I was. I went back to the faith in myself and my abilities issue I had thought about when assessing my husband’s passion. I wondered how I could acquire this faith. Without it, I thought that I would fail.
My husband goes to church. He goes to church on Saturdays. He started going to church ardently almost 2 years ago. Actually, it was meeting me that interrupted his church going routine for a while. He has always been a member of a congregation somewhere. In the beginning, we used to go to church on Saturday as a family.
For Saturday church goers, you are expected to be in church the whole day from 8.30am till 5pm engaging in various church activities planned for you. I assure you that you need to have been raised in such a church to be able to accept this as your routine. Thankfully, my husband is only interested in the sermon which comes between 10.30am to 1pm. So we did not ever go the whole hog. Once in a while a great interesting preacher would visit and teach something awesome. I still remember one preacher who preached about “death in the pot”. He was fantastic. If he was the resident pastor of the church, I would probably have stuck to it.
On Saturdays, my husband, me and my nephew would get ready and go to church at around 10.30am. My niece is in boarding school and if she was on holiday, she would come too. My nephew always fell asleep. Sometimes my husband would too. Eventually I decided that I did not need the pretence and I would find something productive to do on Saturdays like sleep in a little longer, more so when I was pregnant. My husband still kept at it, even now. These days he says the good sermons have become more frequent. In reply I say, Good for you!
As far as my nephew was concerned, I enrolled him at ligi ndogo on Saturdays and took him to a Sunday church for Sunday school. I would drop him in church at 11am and pick him up at 1pm. On the first day of Sunday school, I went with him and even attended the main church while he attended the Sunday school. I was not impressed but he was. So he kept at it and I slept. Just like me and my mum huh?!
Now I was thinking about faith. I knew that the reason my faith was shaky is because it was based on what I had been taught from childhood. That life is tough. You need money to get what you want. Making money is tough. Getting what you want is tough.
No-one ever gave me the formula to success yet everyone said that I needed to work hard. There are so many hard workers I know who are nowhere near success. I mean the guys who wake up at the crack of dawn to walk or cycle several kilometers to work in factories or flower farms and the like. Manual labourers chipping at stones at a building site in the hot sun. No doubt these guys are hard workers. But where is the success? Same applies to university graduates who are thrown out into the world with a beautiful piece of paper testifying to their hard work only to find nothing for them to do.
We are mortal beings. We die. We have no control of when and how we die. We are vulnerable to disease. Criminals attack us. Wild animals will eat us if given the slightest chance to get at us. Mean people around us will abuse us. Our hard work amounts to nothing due to apparent scarcity of jobs and money. How can we possibly have faith in ourselves and our abilities in such a world?
The answer depends on whether or not you believe in God.
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