The Mind

The Mind

The magic of the mind,
The endearing charm of the imagination,
The highest skies a man can fly,
The figment of the imagination,
Boundless and limitless,
Home to the ancestors,
Ancestors of every action,
Forbears of every tomorrow,


Need no flight to go there,
Not a distant country,
Great escape from now,
Can meet and experience the future,
Catch a glimpse of heaven or hell,
Each one at a time,
Detach from reality,
Delude oneself in the opium of folly,
Until cruel reality strikes again.

© 2009 Afeseh Ngwa Hilary.

Low aim

Low aim.

The sin is low aim,
The mind boggling readiness to resign to our fate,
Lack of an adequate sense of sacrifice,
Rush to blame others,
Refusal to take responsibility,
Love of the easy road,
Rabid selfishness,
Chronic myopic management,
Drive with no backbone,
Quick to surrender in the face of obstacles,
A paralyzing complacence,
In case you wondered that is the reason,
Reason why africa is pregnant yet barren,
She is in dire need,
Yes in dire need of a revolutionary visionary,
Many of them for that matter.

© 2009 Afeseh Ngwa Hilary.

Difficulty

Difficulty!

We cannot drop the standard,
Resign to be a drunkard,
Because standards are difficult to attain,
Or a goal hard to retain,

We cannot settle for mess,
Stoop to reach for less,
When we can be the best,
And fully ride the crest,

May not achieve in an instant,
But never drop the standard,
May crawl like an infant,
But never drop the standard,

Never tire to try,
Giving up is an easy way to cry,
Even though your feet may wobble,
Make your effort double,

With enough practice you will soon walk,
Which is always better than talk,
Triple effort will make you run,
Before you know you won,

But you can't drop the standard,
Refuse to settle for any substandard,
Every difficulty holds a promise,
Indefatigable hard work the only premise,

To uphold and claim even the super standard,
Always strive for a better standard,
Don't mock your potential,
Make it providential,

Don't insult your capability,
Reclaim your life from probability,
And steer it towards better certainty,
With a prayerful hard work which suffocates uncertainty.

© 2009 Afeseh Ngwa Hilary.

I doubly belong to Him.

I doubly belong to Him.

This blog post is in response to a response to one of my facebook status messages.

My facebook status message on 08/13/09 which captures the message on my heart that morning reads:
"He made me, after Adam I strayed, He bought me with the down payment of His life, being the priest, the altar and the sacrifice of that ransom for my guilt... I belong to Him doubly... I have nothing, nothing good... all I have is His... I am only a ...custodian under His tutelage... I own nothing... thank you Jesus!"
In response a friend sent me this note!

"Dear Hilary, “Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama is running so we all can fly.” Jay-Z

Wars have been fought to eliminate slavery and all forms of oppression. Slavery till date remains the most indellible stain on the conscience of America. Africans unshackled themselves from the ... Read Morebondage of colonialism and REgained their independence. The storming of the Bastille in France is celebrated as the day of liberation for of the oppressed-- Victory of the Commoner over the Aristocrats. I can go on.

Here you are; born and raised a freeman, but affirming a love for the shackled life. You were not bought. No one kidnapped you. You committed no crime. You belong IN a community of family & friends. Don't wish evil on yourself. You have EVERYTHING for which you worked hard to achieve. You're young, educated and living in a freeworld. Celebrate THAT. Don't follow fairy tales which can never been proven. Free your mind."


I wobbled and floundered in my mind, unsure how to do justice in response to a mind so brilliant, about issues which even the most brilliant minds unaided cannot fully grasp and comprehend.

Martin Luther King whom you mention in your first quote was minister in Chief of what you call unproven fairy tales... Where has that walk in the land of supposed fairy tales taken the world to today?... I have followed some of your writings and am familiar with your adulation of Barack Obama who also has in no uncertain terms made clear his following for the same.

I refer not pointedly to the kind of slavery which moved people from place to place against their will and forced them to servitude, neither do I refer pointedly to the kind of colonization which you mention in your note. I highlight a slavery of sometimes subtler forms which does not necessarily involve physical movement or service of fellow man but that which has from the beginning of time trapped many in the vice-like grip of spirits and principalities and powers, sin, foolish rabid unbridled passions and insatiable appetites. I refer to a kind of colonialism which human eyes do not readily see which subjugates a people to the King of evil himself, the devil.

I was neither born free nor raised free, and even Jean Jacques Rousseau's 'Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains' is a half truth for me because I was conceived in iniquity, born chained and raised bound to sin - I believe that is true for every person whether they realize it or not, until the great liberator, Christ Jesus sets free. By this acknowledgment I am not acknowledging a love for shackles but embracing a liberating acceptance of a fact as true as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. If a patient does not realize and accept his/her disease he/she will never go to a doctor. It is in fact in this realization and acceptance that my liberation is born. If a person takes a look at a tree fully clad in the garb of spring and says that tree is naked, the problem is not with the tree, but with the person. If a person is born in extended dark periods of the polar icecaps and because he fails to see the sun rise day after day after day, concludes that the sun does not exist, that doesn't make it true.

Oh yes my crime is sin, I strayed to the decoy of the evil one and he kidnapped and used me and only Jesus could pay the ransom which set me free, He paid with His life, after creating me, He bought me and no person in the world could have redeemed me. I doubly belong to Him.

I am young with a little education maybe but I am NOT living in a free world... it is a crazy chaotic world to say the very least... On one of my facebook status messages I wrote "Antagonizing as it sounds, there must be such a thing as the boundaries of freedom or else it accelerates mankind on a downward spiral of self destruction...without the apparent antagonizing boundaries of freedom, it(freedom) becomes agonizing...without boundaries the free world becomes a recipe for mindless chaos. Only God knows enough about the unseen and futurities to literally exercise freedom in the totality of the word."

I do not have everything which I have worked hard to achieve - that is a devastating fallacy... there are kids who begin to work harder than I will ever dream of working from their womb and never get the things I get... there are geniuses roaming streets and living in holes who will never get the chances I have... there were thousands conceived on that same moment with me who have slipped into eternity by no fault of theirs and I am still alive by no merit of mine... I have had experiences which many my age will never come close to and it is not because I am better... Everything worth the while in me I have received from the hands of an Almighty God, gratis.

To cap my response, some of the finest minds and thinkers of the world have followed the same fairy tales to borrow your words, which you claim can never been proven and there could have hardly been freer minds than these Christian minds: In literature, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, George Herbert, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, C.S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers; in music Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friederich Handel; in the arts some of the finest world art is housed in the legendary cathedrals of Europe, gloriously beautiful stained glass windows, colorful altars , produced by Christian artists and Rembrandt van Rijn and Albrect Durer represent some during the renaissance and reformation; in politics - the founding fathers of the great USA; in philosophy - Anselm of Canterbury, Saint Augustine, Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham; in Science Isaac Newton, Johann Kepler, Robert Boyle, Lord Kelvin, Louis Pasteur, Michael Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, Blaise Pascal, amongst others...

The fairy tale you say is unproven has been proven more times than I can keep track of in my life, He gives me all I ever need(not want) and He is so real to me, to call Him a fairy tale is preposterous and to say the very least laughable. I never once found Him to be a liar. My freedom in Christ has given my mind fleet wings and more freedom than I bargained for. I may disagree with you but in the spirit of the sages who have gone before me, I will defend your right to your opinion to the grave. Before all things I am a believer, not an understander if there is a word like that - Saint Paul tells me that "The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God." - I believe. We can still agree to disagree my friend. No offense was taken and none is intended.

The lesson from the sperm and heroes.

The lesson from the sperm and heroes.

The analogy with the sperm captures in a poignantly lucid way the main contention of this treatise that all men are created equal. As a believer in Christ Jesus, I need no proof to believe that but even when I distant myself from my Christian beliefs I have no hard time finding more examples than I can possibly enumerate here to buttress the claim. What makes this particularly attractive to me is that it has to do with the concept(ion) of life. The sperm, whether it came from a white, black, brown, or green man is the same color and never stops in its tracks to contemplate whether the egg it might encounter is black, white, brown or green; neither does the egg pause to contemplate the trivialities of race and color to validate reception. What a lesson! How would our world be if we all did the same, if we saw in each other, human beings, with a view which is not distorted by the convex and concave lenses of race, color, social status, etc.

Reason with me. If we were to strip everybody of every bit of the deceptive layer of skin we would see the same man and woman, the same color of the blood, flesh, bones, skull, organs and you name it. It strikes me that even the biggest racist in the world, on a dying bed with their life hanging on the balance and a blood transfusion being the only thing which can tip the balance back to life, does not have time to question what color the donor of the life he/she is about to receive in blood was/is - the same is true with one in need of an organ transplant to live. Tell me the reason why a person of one colour can give life to one of another.

It also strikes me that even when some were sweltering in the cauldron of slavery, masters who considered their slaves on some strata much lower than them, driven by a foolish passion which shamefully reminds us of our equality, abandon the matrimonial beds to sleep with maidens of the lower race, even on the hay of the fields where the latter toiled and sweated their blood. In some cases human beings where the product of this hypocrisy, babies tied by blood to those conceived on the matrimonial beds, babies who brutally reminded a willingly blind and forgetful world that in deed, we are all created equal, different in our ways, yet equal.

Totally cognizant of the fact that color does not make heroes but content of character does, I argue that it can in fact and has been destructive to strings of generations of young people, for them to grow up without seeing role models and heroes who look like them and rose from the similar depths from which they rise. While I dream and pray of a world where the color of heroes will not hold the dual potential to alienate or quicken the coming of the reality of a dream depending on the color of the eyes from which the gaze arises, I am convinced beyond a shadow of the doubt that in our current reality, it is heroes in whose lives the young aspirants can see themselves, who give the young permission to dream and form the best potential rail tracks on which their dreams can ride to reality. It is therefore categorically imperative to have such role models for young people to look up to, it is important that such heroes be also taught to young people in school, heroes whose path of rise strike a familiar chord of semblance to the place where the young person might be. Few things tell a more compelling and invigorating story than the life of one who looks like you and has been where you have been, yet overcoming the things you struggle with. Nevertheless I still dream and pray for a world which is color blind, where irrespective of the way we look, we will realize that it is the same things we seek, the same needs, the same desires, to love and be loved, to care and be cared for, to have a roof over our heads, to have bread on the table, to work, to have and belong to family, the one big human family.

© 2009 Afeseh Ngwa Hilary 08/11/09