Click the above link to access the online copy of Kenya’s Harmonized Draft Constitution.
We Christians need to get into this discussion.
Have you read it? Perused it? What do you think?
Vote in the poll and post any of your comments here – they may factor into our conversations at Reality – our Downtown service on Sunday.
… we’ll discern together what’ll make you tick… let’s inject in some octane and drive your journey of faith to a whole new level…
let’s see what we will learn about you and your world
… the truth of the matter is that… there is wisdom that is fake… James 3:15
This October at Downtown, Ufungamano
Lost? Many of us find ourselves lost and increasingly disoriented when it comes to finding and fulfilling our God given purpose. Often times, your personal journey to finding and fulfilling your God-given purpose feels much like a trip deep into the wild bundu with a guide who is blind.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find your God-given purpose and start living it before it is too late?
A definition is in order here: God-Given Purpose: Your God given purpose is what you were created to do. It is that collection of activities that you do consistently and that give meaning and purpose for your life. Your God given purpose consists of the sum total of activities that give you a reason to live, and that will leave a legacy at the end of your life. Your God given purpose at any one time may include a job in a secular place, living in a local neighbourhood, having normal friends and so on.
Be Real Bwana! To be honest it is not easy navigating life trying to figure this thing out. After giving much research [mostly by trail and error] and some thought – I came to the conclusion that we have to go back to the Manufacturers Manual to get some answers. That is where the following thoughts have come from.
What do you need? So far we have learned together that in the journey to finding this God given purpose you will need…
A Compass – these are the values which give you your bearings in finding God’s purpose for your lives. According to 2 Tim 2 some key values you must consider are – endurance, sticking with the [God's] rules, hard work and the “True North,” developing a vibrant relationship with Christ.
A Map – this is a grid or representation of key landmarks which you can use to locate God’s purpose for your life. According to John 15 these important landmarks to finding God’s purpose to your life are that – God’s purpose for your life will have
- an impact on your environment – the people, situations and circumstances around you
- an impact on your personal life – as God works things out for you as you live for his purpose
- divine impact – where you will bring Glory and joy to God as you please him with what you do
Nourishment - On your journey to finding God’s purpose for your life you need to get the right nourishment for your spirit [for the you inside you], to sustain you in your journey to finding and fulfilling God’s purpose for your life. Some key items served up on your life journey’s menu include
- Bleeding Bread John 6:35 – a vibrant relationship with Jesus,
- Out of His Mouth Matt 4:4 – an intimate familiarity with every word that comes out of God’s mouth
- Living Meat John 4:34 – a lifestyle of right[eous] living for God.
Protective clothing - the wilderness of life is a harsh mean environment. You need to get yourself all dressed up with protective clothing if you want to get to where you are going. Check out the clothes in Ephesians 6:10-18
Excess baggage - you don’t want to be slowed down by unwanted, excess baggage of guilt and bitterness. One needs to take the first opportunity to drop such excess baggage so that you can be nimble enough to get to where you are going [and enjoy the trip as you get there]. Hebrews 12:1
Yet another one from Mr Njonjo Mue.
THE GLORY OF KENYA
BY NJONJO MUE
Let all with one accord
In common bond united
Build this our nation together
And the glory of Kenya
The fruit of our labour
Fill every heart with thanksgiving.
Last stanza of the National Anthem
There hasn’t been much glory in Kenya lately. The body politic continues to spin out of control. The press regales us daily with detailed tales of who in government is doing what to whom. The country recoils with hunger; the nation limps on in despair.
The air is filled with the sounds of complaining and griping, moaning and blaming. Starting at the very top and trickling down to the very bottom. The Minister of Justice complains of corruption and the slow delivery of justice. The Minister for Energy moans about the disappearance of oil. The Minister of the Metropolis gripes about the inefficiencies at the City Council. The Minister of Gender bemoans the absence of women in high level appointments. The Minister for Agriculture shouts for the umpteenth time ‘It wasn’t me’. The Prime Minister says his life is in danger. The President’s wife complains of inefficient male ministers. The President complains about his wife’s complaint. And the entire population complains about everything else.
In Kenya today, it is all too easy to point fingers and there are more candidates for blame than fingers to point. But I should be slow to cast the first stone since I am the single biggest culprit in the woes that have befallen the land; I together with my fellow countrymen and women. For we freely chose the men and women whom we have made a hobby of disdaining in private and dismissing in public– the 222 who run this country on our behalf and make the laws by which we live but which do not bind them. And it is I together with my brethren who shrink daily from our sovereign responsibility to call these honourable individuals to order when they step out of line, and resort instead to endless complaining.
And so today, although the temptation to complain is overwhelming, I must choose a higher road, a more excellent path. I must pause and contemplate the Kenya I will set out to build for my children and their children after them. I do so with faith that there are many patriotic citizens who, like me, are concerned that we have chosen to murmur where we should be working; and to weep where we should be fighting for the survival of ourselves and our country.
Rather than watching the morals of the nation go down the drain we should vigorously promote virtue in our own private lives, in our homes, in our communities, on our roads, in our workplaces. We must take personal responsibility to make our personal spaces a little part of the Kenya we want. We must create little islands of excellence every day and have faith that at some point in the not too distant future, these islands will meet and squeeze out those in our midst who labour to destroy rather to build.
In private therefore, I choose to consider every moment of every day as an opportunity to build Kenya. I will make myself aware that every time I choose to act unjustly in private, I am destroying my own island of hope and so postponing that day that we all work towards when the glory of Kenya shall be realized and fill every heart with thanksgiving. It is a project of great honesty. For it allows no space to drink water in public while imbibing wine in private. It leaves no room for pointing fingers because all the hands available will be too busy building the new foundations of our nationhood.
This personal responsibility will inevitably lead to our public greatness as a people. It will contribute to creating a Kenyan society that is – to paraphrase 18th Century English writer, Samuel Johnson – opulent without luxury, and powerful without faction; its counsels will be steady, because they will be just; and its efforts vigorous, because they will be united. The governors will have nothing to fear from the turbulence of the people, nor the people anything to apprehend from the ambition of the governors.
The encroachments of calamities we cannot always avoid, but we will certainly be prepared to defend ourselves, for scarce any civilized nation has ever been enslaved till it was first corrupted… Difference of opinions will never disturb our community, because every person will dispute for truth alone, look upon the ignorance of others with compassion, and reclaim them from their errors with tenderness and modesty. Persecution will not be heard of among us, because there will be no pride on one side, nor obstinacy on the other. Disputes about property will seldom happen, because no man or woman will grow rich by injuring another.
As I call on my fellow countrymen and women to unite with one accord in order to build this our nation together so that the glory of Kenya, the fruit of our labour might fill every heart with thanksgiving, the prayer of Rabindranath Tagore rings in my ears with increasing urgency:
Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
Into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depths of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not
Lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee
Into ever-widening thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
Let my country awake.
In the big scheme of things, Kibaki and Raila, Karua and Ruto, Uhuru and Saitoti mean nothing. They will be confined to the footnotes of history before you can say “Kenya Tuitakayo.” You are free to choose to join them on their long journey to nowhere, or you can hide behind the fig leaf of endless complaining.
As for me and my house, we choose to work towards a new Kenya where the dark days of despair shall soon begin to give way to our season of hope.
NJONJO MUE
Nairobi
19th February 2009.
Reproduced with permission.
Here’s another of those pieces by Mr Njonjo Mue.
HERITAGE OF SPLENDOR
By NJONJO MUE
Let one and all arise
With hearts both strong and true
Service be our earnest endeavour
And our homeland of Kenya
Heritage of splendor
Firm may we stand to defend
2nd Stanza of the National Anthem.
We are living through dark and difficult days in Kenya at the start of the ninth year of the first decade of the twenty first century. Society has simply stopped making sense. We are unable to feed ourselves, to keep watch over the public purse, to pay our teachers, to protect our children, to resettle the displaced, and to apprehend and punish criminals, including those who bear the title “honourable.” The tragic fire that recently engulfed a leading supermarket in downtown Nairobi is a sad reminder of the flames that are engulfing us on every side, flames we are apparently unable summon up the courage or the will to put out.
We are frustrated and we are angry. Angry at those who have made it their stock in trade to gamble with our very lives; angry at institutions which only seem to work for the rich and trample upon the poor; angry at our own apparent helplessness to take charge of our destiny. We are also guilty. Guilty because the selfsame individuals and cartels are where they are because we helped put them there. Guilty because we voted for them, we sang for them, we praised them and carried them on our shoulders; we even fought and killed each other for them.
Yet one year down the road, many of the once excited masses are on the verge of utter despair. The daily newspaper headlines tell a sad tale of a country adrift coasting along on auto-pilot with no one particularly in charge. The walls surrounding our nationhood seem to have collapsed. Now it is a free for all as people who call themselves leaders help themselves to our scarce resources as they build up their bribing arsenal for the next round of this debilitating duel scheduled for 2012.
Many citizens have already resigned themselves to the fact that blood will again be shed as the titans battle it out again in four year’s time. Others are simply too exhausted to engage. They simply throw their hands in the air in surrender to the politicians whom we have allowed to move to the centre-stage of national affairs with their dizzying intrigues. Many still are in awe of the waheshimiwa’s and treat them with pretended reverence hoping to have a morsel of the stolen bread tossed their way. Most are just too busy trying to put food on the table to get distracted by the daily shenanigans of politics.
One suspects that the various crises unfolding in this country almost on a daily basis are orchestrated from certain quarters. This with a view to overwhelming the people with the sheer magnitude of the challenges that face us. We are too busy putting out the fires to stop and think and plan ahead. The idea seems to keep the citizenry too preoccupied to notice that 2012 is fast approaching, and then do what politicians do best – mobilize along ethnic lines and whip “their communities” into meaningless coalitions for the sole purpose of making a grab at power.
Writer Milan Kundera poignantly reminds us that the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. And so for the sake of our national survival we must remember. We must remember all the injustices visited upon us by the oligarchy that has arrogated upon itself the divine power to misrule. We must remember the oppression and repression, the pillage and the plunder, the murder and the torture of the governed by the governors. We must also remember that those who conspired to steal the garment that covered our country’s nakedness are the same ones who will come in four year’s time calling us out to line up behind them and give them the mandate to once more loot, kill and maim by their acts of commission and omission.
But we dare not stop at remembering. We must act and act decisively. We must draw a line in the sand and tell the oligarchy “thus far and no further!” We must recall once again the ringing challenge of our national anthem which bids us to stand firm and defend “our homeland of Kenya, heritage of splendor.” Time has come to defend this homeland and this heritage from all enemies – foreign and domestic – including the domestic ones who drive around in big cars, some even having the temerity to fly our national flag while all they do is plan the next heist on our national resources.
If our so called government can sit tight and watch what has happened in this country over the last few months take place and not act decisively and convincingly to rid itself of those in its midst who are responsible for the starvation, the murder and the mayhem, it is not only our right, but our bounden sovereign duty to overthrow it and replace it with one that shall be accountable to the people – not to tribal blocks or to this or that or the other party or coalition.
Now is the time that the Kenyan people have to call upon the courage of a different age and the spirit of a previous generation which dared to take up homemade guns in a blatantly unequal contest to take their country back. Only this time, where others chose violence, we shall engage with our intellect; where others killed to make their point, we shall heal to make ours. But we should not kid ourselves. No matter how peaceful the means we choose, there shall be a cost, for power concedes nothing.
If we keep silent at such a time as this, God will raise another generation that is able and willing to take on our demons and lead our country to the Promised Land while we ourselves perish in the wilderness of our despair. But if we recognize that our very freedom is at stake and proclaim from the rooftops that no one shall take us hostage ever again, God shall raise a standard and He shall lead us on to victory. On which side will you stand?
Njonjo Mue
Nairobi
3rd February 2009
Reproduced with permission
I got my hands on a series of pieces by Njonjo Mue and found them to be very thought provoking. I’ve asked his permission to reproduce them on this blog. Here’s the first one.
BLESS THIS OUR LAND AND NATION
By NJONJO MUE
O Lord, do not your eyes look for truth?
You struck them, but they felt no pain;
You crushed them, but they refused correction.
They made their faces harder than stone
and refused to repent.
Jeremiah 5:3
This week, the world celebrated as Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, and Kenya basked in the reflected glory of ‘one of our own’ taking the charge of the ‘most powerful nation on earth.’ But our celebration, like so many other things in this beloved country, is a lie.
For in Kenya, we have loved lies more than truth. We have embraced the lie of individual prosperity and the lie of our tribal identities. And we have invented and believed in the lie of our greatness as a nation, while denying our state of terminal decay, or merely moaning endlessly about it without lifting a finger to address it.
Those of us in our late thirties and forties can recall when as children, we started seeing for ourselves the creeping signs of decay – occasional press stories of corruption, reports of the odd violent robbery. The attitude among adults at the time always seemed to be, “Oh well, we have our problems, but we are not as bad as Uganda, or Nigeria,” or “It’s all Moi’s fault, it’s all the Kalenjins’ fault…” The last refuge of a fading elite was to hack back to a golden era that had been golden only for themselves. “The old days were better,” they sighed with indignation. “When our people were the only ones in the civil service.”
It is like every blow that has been struck against this nation as a chance for us to recognize how far we have fallen and to prompt us to repent and return to God just hardened our resolve to ‘cope’ to ‘adjust’ to ‘make do’. Doesn’t it sound uncannily similar to Jeremiah’s lament above? Resilience is an admirable quality, but rebellion is an abomination. And the line between the two can be very thin indeed.
So you move to another suburb, or you send your children abroad when the system crumbles, or you pay up the bribe and continue doing whatever it takes. You refuse to see the kids on the street and roll up your window each time you approach the traffic lights. And they grow up and become menacing glue-sniffing teenagers. Still you ignore them and soon they are hungry and angry adults with no options left in life than to get together and organise the next car-jacking, the next bank robbery… then what do you do?
You see, if none of us takes care of Little Mutua, as he looks through the glass of your firmly shut car window, all of us will be forced to take care of Big Mutua, a few years down the line, by putting more bars on our every window, driving with our car doors firmly locked and imposing a curfew on ourselves in our city. But back to the present, and to you. You refuse to see the decay; you refuse to ask yourself what YOU can do to change the situation.
We were sent off to school full of hope and excited at the possibilities that lay ahead, but our expectations were soon crushed. Now we spend the rest of our lives making excuses why things cannot be done differently or change effected quickly. We love the lie that things are not so bad, or that things are bad and ‘someone’ is going to change them. We watch from a safe distance as people take risks and fail, and we shrug internally and think, ‘at least that wasn’t me’. We acknowledge the mess, but our reaction is to call up the university and join the Parallel Programme to enrol for another degree, and hope that by the time we are through someone will have fixed this mess so that we can get on with our lives.
We have exported our collective hopes to one Barack Hussein Obama, whom we have claimed as one of our own. Our leaders have fallen all over themselves to send congratulations to him as he assumes the reigns of the most powerful office on earth. They even gave us a public holiday when his people elected him their 44th President, to enable us to drink ourselves silly and numb the pain of the meaningless search for meaning that has become our daily existence, as we watch our fellow countrymen, women and children starve in the country and freeze in makeshift camps. All this while the watchers of the people’s purse refuse to pay taxes; and steal the people’s food and precious oil.
All this has got me thinking of our national anthem, that soulful prayer that we sing so frequently and mechanically exhorting God to visit our land. But do we really mean what we sing, or do we merely mock God with a prayer we have no expectation of seeing answered in our midst or any intention of working for its fulfillment in our time?
Justice be our shield and defender:
We have asked for justice to be our shield and our defender and done nothing to lift up this shield. The shield is supposed to prop itself up, somehow. We do not lift up the shield for ourselves in our prayer for the nation; we do not lift this shield up for the widow, the orphan, the IDP, the refugee, the religious minority, the kiosk owner whose livelihood is destroyed before our very eyes, the thousands of people being abused in prison, or the people who are exploited by our labour system.
So long as we can do what we want to or need to do, then these other people just have to suck up their misfortunes. We hear about different attacks on different people for different reasons, and we shrug our shoulders because that is just the way these people are.
We are convinced that it cannot be done; we are devoted to making absolutely no sacrifices that are grounded in the bigger picture of this land created by God whose blessings we are asking for in mock supplication.
We counsel our children not to ‘waste’ their lives as teachers in schools, because there is no money in teaching and the quality of education is so bad anyway. Of course once ‘someone’ fixes these things we’ll be fine, but until then, we’ll just send them to private schools, or try to get them jobs somewhere else, or whatever. We cope the best we can.
Dwelling in unity?
We want to dwell in unity, but do nothing to build that unity. We must honestly ask ourselves how are we building that unity – in big ways and in little ways? As families? As communities? As workers? There is little evidence of unity-building. Instead we tear one another down so that we can be better than the other person. In big things; in small things. We want this cake to be eaten and to be eaten now; and if at all possible, to be shared only among people who look like us and speak like us.
Peace, Liberty?
We desire peace and liberty, but have not made any individual sacrifices necessary to uphold this peace or to guard this liberty.
Just think about it. What are we doing? What do we desire above all else? Excellence or comfort? We have been unfaithful to God and to our country; we have raised up a generation and taught it to crave ‘Western things’ that are synonymous with comfort. We have given them nothing to safeguard, because we have made it clear by our lives that there is nothing we consider ourselves to be guardians of. Our creed has been, ‘live your life, do your best, and let someone else deal with the situation, whatever it is.’
Then the world starts crumbling around us; things that were unimaginable five or ten years ago become commonplace – gangs attacking and mutilating people in the city, car-jackings, murders, rape, mayhem, cheating in exams, no water, no electricity, no roads, thousands of road deaths, rising illiteracy, rising unemployment, post election violence – and we are shocked. SHOCKED?!
So we pick ourselves up, build higher walls around our houses, put glass on top of the concrete separating us from our neighbours or if you can afford it move into a gated compound with electric fencing, try to avoid being in the city after a certain time and adjust to a new way of life. Things are not so bad. Do your best, adjust. You woke up this morning, you went to work, you did your thing. It is bad in some ways, but it is not so bad yet. Pray for God to send someone to do something about this situation.
Plenty be found within our borders…
We want plenty within our borders, but have no regard for those lacking in our midst. We take the little available for the poor and export it to Sudan to sell at exorbitant prices while our people die of starvation and make do with wild berries for supper. We take money meant for reviving our tourism industry after the post election violence and make it disappear. We release billions of shillings worth of precious oil to thieves. All this while we use our judiciary to whitewash the scandals of the past. There is indeed plenty within these boarders; it’s just that you and I don’t get to see or touch any of it; we merely read about it in newspaper headlines.
So we hear about deaths and mayhem, and thank God it wasn’t us, and move on to the next thing. We watch the situation on TV from the comfort of our homes. And we hope someone can come and deal with this. We are being crushed under the weight of culpability in refusing to seek truth. But we harden ourselves a bit more and continue in our ways.
Yet even civilizations and empires do not fall all at once. These things begin one person at a time, in a fundamental and profound way. One person at a time, the spirit of this age is consuming the lives of men and women in this land. One person at a time, we are allowing our inheritance to be taken from us.
What are the dreams we have for this nation? What is our role in fulfilling these dreams? What can we do? In a very real way, recording these dreams, praying about them, preparing for them to come to pass is something we need to do individually and as a nation. These dreams are in every area of our lives – our families, our schools, our jobs, our courts, and our communities. Instead of seeking false comfort in the fact that ‘our own’ has become the President of the World, we should dream our own dreams and work to bring them to pass.
But first we need to seek God’s face, and be changed by Him, recognizing that He is going to change us in order to use us. If we are to be called peacemakers, then we have to be prepared to be making peace in the midst of war. Whatever it costs us, we must gain understanding from Him.
So prepare against all odds, pray against all odds, watch against all odds, and wait against all odds. But we had better not be watching and waiting for the deliverer who will fix everything for us. We are watching and waiting for the fulfillment of the purposes God has for this nation through us.
All begins and ends with me and you. God did not send an angel to build the Ark and then invite Noah into it. Noah acted on this call, and built against all odds, for the day when rain would come. And come it did. We cannot wait for another election, a new leader, a pack of ‘young turks’, a new group of reformers and leaders and politicians to fix us. WE ARE IT. Your children will grow up and their children after them in the country we are making for them today.
And although you are not the one who killed the thousands, confined the hundreds of thousands to refugee camps, stole the maize or the oil or the tourism money, you are living and participating in a society so divided, so hardened, and so filled with injustice that this was allowed to happen. So whether you like it or not, you are implicated in these actions. They are both an indictment and a call to repentance. But above all, they are a call to rise up and take our country back!
Amkeni ndugu zetu!
NJONJO MUE
22nd January 2009.
You may have had a tough 2008. On the other hand you may have had it good this year.
And you may be asking yourself what assurances you now have about 2009? Can you be secure about your future given what has transpired?
I think so. Let me explain.
God has a track record of what he has done for you and for others in the past. We can use this track record to become secure, not in ourselves but in the Lord of the future. When you look at what God has taken your through, you can have a better vision of where God is taking you. What God has done taking you through this year is evidence of what he is capable of doing for you next year if you remain submitted to him.
Here are 4 promises that bring me to that conclusion –
God is consistent: Heb 13:8 God’s word teaches me that God is the same yesterday, today and forever.
God does me good: Rom 8:28 – All things work together for the good of those who love God and who are called according to his purpose
God finishes the job: Phil 1:6 – Our confidence is that he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it
God has great plans for me: Jer 29:11 God knows the plans he has for you, plans to prosper you, to give you a future and a hope
I can’t guarantee that you wont have challenges next year. I cannot also say that it is going to be rough all the way. It may be extraordinarily smooth sailing. I don’t really have a clue. What I do know is that based on those promises, and based on what God has already done for you… next year holds great opportunities of blessing for you – in the good times and the tough times.
On a different but related note – do you have some evidence of God’s track record in your life? To put it differently, is there some amazing thing God did for you this year that you’d like to share with others reading this blog? Go ahead and add it as your comment.
Here’s an article written about MDT on one of our national dailies. What are some of your thoughts about it?
Christian n’ Cool – click HERE
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