Thursday 10 March 2011

GROWING IN LIFE


1 Peter 5:7 - Casting all your care upon Him; for He careth for you.

 LIKE A CAKE
I am no baker, but this one thing I know, a cake tastes good. And I believe that most people, almost all women, and definitely all children, agree that a cake is among the tastiest things. Even grown men at a celebration will be more than happy to have a bigger slice of cake. The thing with a cake, which is the same concerning a lot of best things in the world and in nature, is that it is no easy task to bake it, neither is it cheap to bake or to buy. So a cake is a special kind of food, some sort of luxury and common at the same time, dessert-bread. How can a cake be an appropriate metaphor for one’s personal life growth? That is exactly where I wanted us to come to.

For one, a cake is not easy to bake, because if it was, many a mother would have forgotten about baking the usual: scones, biscuits, cupcakes, fatkoeks, madombolo, koeksisters, pancakes, and of course, our daily bread; and gone into the cake business, and I say business because cakes are so special that the ability to bake them can make you famous. Something else to consider is that a cake is the perfect baked thing for a celebration. That is where your life comes in. That you be celebrated. Among others, cakes are for celebration for: friends, family, birthdays, organizations, clubs, sports, politics, business, colleagues, marriage, and academic graduations. You can be the cake wherever life places you.

Your life’s personal growth can be likened to a cake being baked - the process. Since I have already confessed that I am not a baker, don’t expect me to know too much about baking a cake, or all baking for that matter. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I trust you to be imaginative and kindly fill in my missing words. Well, in order not to embarrass myself to bakers, the little I know about baking tells me that one would need at least the basics: flower, sugar, butter and eggs. Those, when properly mixed with other necessary ingredients, become dough, and the dough somehow ends up in the oven, which I might add, is hot.

In the hot oven the cake is timed to precision, because if you pull it out too early, to relieve it from the oven heat, it flops, and if you leave it in too long, thus over-exposing it to the heat’s severity, it gets hard and burnt. From the oven the cake is left on some table to cool down and enjoy the fresh air like everyone else. Following the short period of cooling down and being left alone, taking it easy for a bit, the next thing, the cake finds itself smothered with welcomed decoration in the form of icing, chocolate, and any other creamy edible substance that has no nutritional value but sure should be making the cake feel that it was all worth it, because now it looks so impressive to men and adorable to women, as it stands tall and complete with a cherry on top, like a graduate at his party and a bride at her wedding.

Up to so far I will let you do your own further contemplative mental research on how much you are like a cake being baked, every phase of your life comparable to stages in the process or of completing a cake. At this point I will kindly require that your self-realized similarity to a cake be kept in your mind, and that my writing, for a few paragraphs become philosophical, not for scaring you away, my potential friend, but for making you think deeper, because it so turns out in life that the deeper you think is the better you do. So we will tackle a few universal questions that are inseparable from the quest for meaningfulness in life. It’s your life we are talking about. Don’t be starting to act as if you need nothing else. For, don’t we all always find that in order to make further progress we need something else, in addition to what we already know, who we are already with, and what we already possess? Be honest.

For, sincerity is the source of all clarity, the cause for all sanity. Be sincere and you will succeed. Don’t be and you won’t. The primary questions which I would like us to briefly look into for them to usher us into the gist of this work’s body, are: Who, What, Why, How and When? By themselves, when thoroughly pondered upon they can move one to find answers to whatever one is faced with, and to overcome fully. But in this instance we will add to them the phrase: ‘are you here?’. So they become: Who are you here, What are you here, Why are you here, How are you here, and When are you here. The ‘here’ aspect is concerned with you being situated either on earth - the general - or in your current situation: the specific.

I will address the general, because I have some idea about it, and I will leave the specific to you, to be honest about it. When it comes to: Who are you?; I think you need to remember that you are a creation of God. It is God who thought of you, planned you, made you, finished you, before you were born, before you were conceived, and before you made your mistakes and were made to be a doubter. God knows your name. He knows your voice. And he knows your thoughts. He knows your heart, and all its desires, all its needs, all its plans, all its deviations, and all its insecurities.

When you see yourself the way he sees you, you will become confident because you know that in spite of your earthly beginnings you are a heavenly traveler, who aught not to accept defeat and cannot lose faith that good things are still possible for him. You are a custodian of the heritage of your people who went before you, in the family, in the secular sphere and in their moral legacy. You are to continue in the good values that have been passed on from past and are vital for future generations. You are to correct the unreasonable traditions of previous years which might have resulted in a large amount of wrong-doing. You. Not someone else.  

When it comes to: What are you?; I think you need to know that while you are made of the dust of the earth, which is the elements of physics and components of biology, yet you are a spirit that was breathed by God into your mother’s womb, the kitchen God uses on earth to bake his masterpiece cakes. You are not just a mere random happening that materialized when your father, whether you still have him in your life or not, and your mother, combined like humans do without a clue on how to scientifically create.

It is God who takes the ingredients that are human and mixes everything with his breath of fire, to technically create the combination that is you, everything corresponding, everything for a reason, every mental interest coordinating with the capacities of the body. That makes you special and supplies you with an eternal and heavenly parent. I know that they want you to imagine, though it is near impossible, that you somehow evolved, and are to be classified with baboons, which can’t even plan their own future or speak out their thoughts. If you are only a baboon, what makes you so special?

When it comes to: Why are you?; I think that since you did not find out for yourself why you were born, before you were born, yet you have this feeling in your soul that you were brought here for something greater than fulfilling the flesh’s needs of the body of dust, which is only after the things that come from the earth, like: food, sleep, sex, and other comforts and pleasures for happy continuation for the body; then you have to turn to the word of God, which is universal and eternal, to find real meaningfulness.

Talking about pleasure; come to think of it: the capability of man to experience pleasure is in itself further proof that man has a soul and that that soul was given him by someone higher who loves him and wants him to fully experience all that he prepared for him on earth as a creation from heaven. Now, seeing that we have this parent and giver above, who breathed us with his Spirit to be individual spirits that have feeling and acting souls that are unique and housed in bodies, then it must be that at the end of our lives we will have to answer for what we did, to that higher parent, who gives us purposefulness.

When it comes to: How are you?; I think it is important to regularly evaluate one’s life, to see if it’s headed in the direction that is intended and whether it is satisfactory to the one living it. It is important to check if you are the way you need to be at all times. What’s the point of having whatever you could wish for and not being able to enjoy it because you don’t have peace inside of you or with those you are with?

What is the point of saying you can achieve a lot of things or that you could have if only your circumstances were different, if you are at present not developing yourself from the inside to actually be ready to realize your dream and perform what you envisioned, if opportunities present themselves? The sad thing about not recognizing how you really are is that your denial prevents you from improving. A person who regards himself as not being in need of extra refinement has in that way disqualified himself from developing. It is imperative to first accept that you are the way you are, in order to carefully consider what your way forward can be.

When it comes to: When are you?; I think a person should always look at his life’s progress and placement in relation to time. By this I mean that if you live as if time does not matter you will always be late. That is because time does matter. The more you are in touch with the times you are living in is the more capable you will be to make the necessary adjustments to stay in line with what is required and to be relevant to those you interact with. In fact the better the grasp you have of the time you find yourself in is the easier it becomes for you to spot opportunities and to resolve predicaments.

If an obstacle came your way and found you fully aware of the time that is long-term, which continues after the obstacle, you will not be overwhelmed with frustration. Also, because of clear awareness of short-term timing, in the course of which there may perhaps arise an impediment, you will adapt yourself and your resources accordingly until you have weathered the storm. Mastery of time allows you to both live in the full experience of the moment and to live past the reality of the experience of the moment.

THE MIND
In Psychology the soul is said to consist of: the intellect, which is the mind; the emotions, which are the heart’s feelings; and the will, which is the heart’s choosing. Everyone who desires to thrive in this precarious world needs to have a sound mind. A sound mind can be developed, and it is pivotal that all effort be made to improve intellectual capacity. Intellectual capacity can be improved, and all people that you may know who got somewhere in life, did so particularly through increasing mental potential.

How can you too do that for yourself and your future? Firstly you must know that there is never a point in life when it can be said that you know enough or you are perfectly skillful for all aspects of life. Secondly you have to understand that one more new thing that that you learn about or learn to do will make your life that much easier and your life-style better informed. So have a willing mind. And learn more, everyday, anywhere and from anyone. In that way your life becomes richer and your experiences forever meaningful.

Read. Listen. Humble yourself. Be patient. Apply yourself. Be confident. People who read a lot will always know a little more than those who don’t. If you learn to listen carefully to what every type of person, great or small, has to say and really thinks, you will have objective and balanced views and attitudes in life. The more you humble yourself, when you need to and even when you don’t really have to, you will always have the greater advantage of learning more, thinking better and surviving, with many benefits, from any situation.

Patience is what many people lack, which explains why a lot of young people cannot sit to read for long enough, have considerably short concentration spans, listen rather passively, and seldom get to exercise sound judgment about people and occurrences. Applying yourself is about getting up to do want you are capable of and what you have trained yourself to do, in the process also gaining extra experience. Being confident should not make you stubborn or arrogant, which are always signs of being naive and self-centered, but should instead make you willing to stand up for truth with justice and to not feel intimidated when you really don’t need to be.

THE EMOTIONS
The wellbeing of your emotions is essential to the wellbeing of your whole self, and possibly that of your entire life as well. That is because emotions by themselves, without the consent of the mind, can drive a person to do things that are not well thought out beforehand. Don’t let your emotions run away with you. There are many people who end up in bad relationships as a result of having acted only on the basis of emotions for those relationships to start. There are many people who have ended up being drunkards due to having undergone a period of excessive sadness that led them to drink too much in an attempt to drown their sorrows.

There are many yet, who repeatedly lose the friendship of trusted people and superiors at work or in society, all owing to their outbursts of anger and the harmful words that come out of their mouths at those times of uncontrolled, and at times unreasonable, anger. There are many still, who gave up on their dreams, visions, plans, resolutions, aims, and aspirations, all because when things became a little harder and they came across hostility they feared and worried above measure and discouraged themselves to the point of altogether letting go of a good thing. All because of emotions.

Good emotions must be cherished, as they are the ones that sustain you when you have no one and you have fewer reasons to hope. It is in times like that that happy memories, focus on ultimate goals and creating present peaceful moments, all come in handy. Beautiful emotions of pure joy and deep sentiment are the very point why we live, why we seek more, why we do better, and why we make friends. It is all for the sole purpose of permanent happiness and meaningful sentiments. Love, for instance, has been known to revive the sunken heart like nothing else can.

Courage, as well, can make someone previously thought to be insignificant, to arise with strength and accomplish remarkable feats. Faith, without a doubt, has kept people going who could have never made it without strong faith, who by their faith attempted and performed unbelievable deeds. Conviction, like faith, is on record in history as the reason why certain outstanding individuals rose out of obscurity to push on and on until the right thing was finally done. Care for your emotions and they will care for you. Listen to refreshing music, spend some time with children, watch a clean comedy, walk in the beauty of nature. Be at peace.

THE WILL
As I have already said, the will is the freedom and ability to choose. That it is a freedom means that you are held responsible for your choices and you should always be ready to account for them. That it is an ability means that you should make use of it with all your heart and strength, unless you want to cripple your life and you are simply not interested in growing up. So choose. You can’t make the excuse that you will not choose because you could make the wrong choice. That is no excuse, because you also have the freedom to first choose to prepare your mind with intellectual knowledge and common understanding of what you could go into way before you actually decide to take it on.

Again, choose. But be informed. Do choose. And let it be good. Always choose, but don’t be too quick. If you don’t choose, you will know nothing better, you not experience new things, you will keep shrinking in the face of challenges, and your overall existence will be backward. Choose, because it could well turn out to be the best thing for you to get involved in. Of course, you can also, and should every now and then, choose to refuse.

Your strength is determined by how strong your will is. A weak will leads to a weak life. Likewise, a strong will produces a strong character. The will is what you work with to take control of your life and whatever happens in it. With the will you let what you want into your life, and with the same will you resist whatever you deem to not be beneficial in the long or short term, avoiding trouble and grabbing opportunities, all because you possess this one advantage, you choose for yourself.

In your choosing, never be negligent, in your doing don’t be weak-willed, in your starting don’t be doubt-willed, in your continuation don’t be careless-willed, and in your finishing don’t be tired-willed, and surely you will succeed. The will is what separates champions from participants. The will is what makes victors out of victims. It has always been the will that decided who won and who lost. Some complain that they try but without any luck, and so they have decided to sit. Well I have news for them. It’s not a matter of luck. With careful consideration you discover that good fortune seems to be more available to the persistent.
                          
YOUR BODY
Like I said before, the body is a house for the soul to live in one earth, in the same way that astronauts working in a space station or walking on the moon cannot stay alive unless they are wearing their space suits that have oxygen tanks and a helmet that has a clear wide glass for good vision, the soul, which is the real person of heaven walking on earth on a short visit, cannot function on earth without the body.

The inner oxygen from the suit’s oxygen tank, which has its constant supply coming from the space craft that is equipped with things form earth, is like the spirit from God that keeps the soul alive to see with the eyes and use the body like an earth suit for souls from heaven to do what heaven has sent them here to do, the space craft itself being very comparable to the word of God with supplies for the soul. Here I will make a short side point, which is that you should realize from the similarities I have just highlighted, that much of what science and society think are the result of their own practical wisdom, are in fact acts of God through man to demonstrate through society and science how he works forever.

You only have one body, so mind how you treat it, or mistreat it. For a moment imagine if honorable and noble astronauts, being the accomplished men of higher intellect that they are, were to return from a space trip with their suits covered with graffiti, tattoos, cuts, spikes and piercings, and couldn’t even stand straight because of being drunk or high on drugs, and couldn’t walk upright because they walk with various swaggers, and that when we looked at their glass for eyes they showed smoke inside.

Those astronauts, by so doing, would have, by their actions, expressed complete disregard for their noble suits and utter disrespect toward the honorable occupation of being astronauts, for many are the people on earth, like many are the angels, but the fewer that are astronauts and human beings get to be on earth, like on the moon. The body is much more noble than the suits of astronauts, for with the body we don’t only hear, see, speak, touch, and move, but in addition to that we taste, feel, are creative and express or feelings, never having to take it off until our days on earth are done. The body is not for being shared with more than one sexual partner in a lifetime, is not for dying before time, and it is not for laziness.

YOUR ENVIRONMENT
Where do you live? With whom do you live? How are your surroundings? What surrounds you? All these questions have to do with your particular environment, which you know, and which you must re-evaluate. Do you live where you are able to cope? Do you live with people who hinder your personal growth? Are your surroundings reflective of a person who has self-respect? And are you surrounded by things that by themselves are just de-motivating to the mind and depressing to the emotions?

If your surroundings remind you of sad things, improve them or your attitude, to keep in your mind encouraging things. If you are frequently where people do not believe in your God-given ability and inner strength, leave them and join those who appreciate and teach you how to be more complete. If you live where the environment is loud or untidy, regularly remove yourself to somewhere where you can have peace of mind, and have enough sense of dignity to tidy up your immediate environment.

If you behave in a way that is rejected by the beliefs of the community you come from and belong to, readjust your manners to be acceptable to their core inclinations, in order to be relevant to them and to be benefitted by what they have to offer, as long as you do not offend your own conscience, and as long as they do not lead you astray. Know where you come from, where your community is from, what has happened in the past, how your family came to stay there, what are the possibilities for someone staying there, and what that society has that is contrary to someone like you who is purposeful.

If you want to do well in school, why would you want to be in an environment of those who do not care about school, like at constant parties? If you want to be fit and to get your body to be healthy, through exercise and clean eating, why would you hang around where you are tempted to forsake your good values? If you are someone who respects your elders and is always ready to assist those who need help, why would you be of the company of rebels? Either be where you should or transform where you are. 

SOMEONE’S CHILD
Everyone in this world is someone’s child. No one fell straight out of heaven. No matter who you are you are definitely connected to some history. A good history to uphold. A bad history to amend. Your parents and elders are your first teachers, your church ministers are your second teachers, and your school teachers are your third teachers.

I do not include your friends among those you should learn from, because they are young like you are, so whatever they know is new, like they are new in the world, which means they either know little or understand little, because experience is the best teacher, which is why your parents, because of experiences, love you enough to save you from experiencing future disappointments. You can learn from your friends though, and you should, with caution though. Also, you don’t have to be the passive one among your friends, especially when it comes to trying harmless things that develop your skillfulness and experience, neither should you forever be the silent one among your friends, because there is a lot that you also have to offer them to help their lives.

If you do not have parents at all it does not matter, you have sensible relatives to learn from, and if not, you have caring elders in your community to learn from, and if not, you have the bible to learn from, and if not yet, you have God to pray to for wisdom and Jesus to depend on for everlasting security. If you have one parent, respect and honour that parent, who is doing all that is possible to care for you. By respect I mean, you are not your parent’s equal, you come from your parent, it’s not the other way round, your parent provides for you, so don’t you dare have the audacity to be ungrateful and spoilt.

If there is anything else that you wish for that your parent thinks is unnecessary, like staying out late and buying expensive items, remember that one day you will work, if you excel in school, and you have your own house and your own child, if you be patient enough for the appropriate circumstances. By honor I mean, make your parent feel proud of you, it’s not as if you won’t be happy at that too. If you start stealing, to buy what you can’t afford, or you get yourself boyfriends to buy for you, remember that thieves end up in jail or dead, and remember that prostitutes end up regretting all that they ever did.

SOMEONE’S HELP
This is what is the meaningfulness of life. To be valuable to someone. One or many. To be the one that someone somewhere at some time, in your lifetime or when you are gone from the world, remembers you with a grateful heart, same as we greatly esteem the former participants in the struggle against apartheid, same as we have high regard for every past peacemaker and pathfinder. To be useless in life is to have not affected someone positively. To be ineffective in life is to have not been prepared adequately to be a proper husband, wife, son, daughter, parent or leader to someone.

Sometimes you don’t even have to speak to the person who looks up to you. All you have to do is simply continue being your inspiring self from a distance, and the attentive watcher will pick up good things from your conduct and accomplishments. If there is a child to be adopted and you feel strongly about it, maybe you should be the one to be a parent to that destitute orphan. If you are profoundly troubled in your heart about the plight of the homeless, it might well be that if you have the means it is you who should put up a shelter for them. If you are convinced that political parties are not serving the people to optimum capacity once in government, maybe you should make your way there.

Start looking at yourself. What good are you doing? What good are you capable of? How are you a benefit to the society? Are you being a source of motivation to those watching you? In business are you honest? In hospital are you gentle? In the police are you reliable? In court are you fair? In entertainment are you constructive? In broadcasting are you connecting? In teaching are you devoted? In manual work are you precise? In industry are you innovative? By doing what we do to the best of our abilities, we are in that way improving our society, we are directing the younger ones, and we are creating the platform for a thriving economy, of job creation, of less taxation, of larger companies, of less unemployment, and of attracting investors.

This nation can be what it is meant to be, one of the best in the world, but that will not happen if the people of this nation continue to develop a culture of carelessness and blaming others, while they only want free things and uninterrupted fun. We have to be more serious than we are. We have to restore the ethic of hard work. We must stand up for truth and justice, be well informed, and take our place in history, playing our part in the world, for morality and for creativity. And surely we will be like one of the famous Western countries and the risen Eastern nations. Yes, us! It wouldn’t be any new thing for Africa.


Ps. M. Kekana

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