If I do not feel a sense of joy in God’s creation, if I forget to offer the world back to God with thankfulness, I have advanced very little upon the way. I have not yet learnt to be truly human.
-Kallistos Ware
Author: Ikenna Nwachukwu
I'm a christian who seeks and speaks and writes for more of a REAL RELATIONSHIP with my Lord my creator and king. The inspiration of the message I share is this: Christ's heart in us, and ours in Him; His breath we must breathe, and His life, live..LITERARILY.
QUICK QUOTEs
Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in
LOVING AFTER YOU
I thought I understood what the “world’s end” meant
When I saw you breathe your last , have your last gasp
My plans for us vanished, the road ahead, now lonely
The skies blackened, the stars falling down
My face in my hands, my shoulders quaking, shaken
Blown apart, in pieces
My love for you made me see you as beautiful,as unmatched, peerless
Priceless, valued over great pearls and dales and ecstasies
The world, it appeared, was ours to take together
For even death could not part us
I wonder if I will ever see you again
Neither the picture of you lying lifeless, nor my head upturned, can halt it
Nothing, not the crumpling of dried leaves dead by harmattan’s haze
Never even the fading of whitewashed walls or the tastelessness of stale salt
No demise on earth, no matter the sort
Will take away the gift my God has placed in my heart
Though you be gone, even when my emotions are worn and torn
The unclarity of our fallen world will not confuse me
I am resolute, my God is faithful
Your memory is strong, but it also reminds me more
There are uncountable folks, whose lives must be touched
Who have never had the love we shared in our time together
As you gave me the idea that first time you kindly paid my debt
And got us into small talk that blew into bond so great, so strong
I will show them now, in memory of you, the wonder of a life given
Of sacrifice and of friendship
And of hope which even death cannot quench
God does, you did, and I must do likewise.
TREND LINES AND EMOTIONS
Digits and digital screenshots sum up a decade’s material history
Figures summarize lives’ trajectories and mass movements
A matter-of-factly tale of the wide-world, or of a chip of it
Axes drawn, with zigzag lines dancing across the cartesian
Fine definition of boom and bust
Of the struggle to become, the becoming, and the loss of being
My place is a forecaster’s: I tell of unemployment rates and poverty lines and deficits
Cheery new homeowners’ smiles and jubilant shareholders’ faces I barely count
Neither do I the tearful small business owner’s wails over irredeemable loss
The once self-sufficient, now paupered, set back by the invisible hand’s mercilessness
Theories trump themes in the world of unfeeling averages and projections
Now and then the numbers come alive as I remember that I count people
Only a lucky spark; I soon become statistical again
It would seem to me that man feels pain only to an extent
When his memory of another’s brims up, he sinks it into the subconscious
To bear human hopes shattered, he creates an outlook of fateism
He separates fact from emotion
He forgets to feel, just to feel relief again
But is it not the insensitive that wreaks the most havoc upon human flesh and heart?
Our God, though great unto infinity, is closest
His heart beats, His heart feels, He sees farthest
He needs not aggregate and simplify to understand
All of history is to Him the present moment
All of one loner’s concern, a legendary significance
When the cycle of plenty and little turns and churns out beauty and pain
His arms are always outstretched to hold up the triumphant and the losing alike
In the end, all the world’s fancy and riches fade and rust
But God’s loving gaze never strays from our affairs.
SEVEN BILLION BUBBLES
So we’re all caught up in our individual spaces, in our personal places, thoughts, dreams, aims, strategies, and views of life. Personal opinions about how to be, to do, and to live, what it means to strive, to overcome, and indeed, our individual answers to what the ‘good life’ means. And if we’re inspired enough, we go for it. For most of us humans, this defines the essence of the cycle of our existence. Otherwise, we’re all simply about living to ‘try to live’, that is, just keeping alive for the sake of it. This alternative is absurd, and downright depressing if we look at things this way.
You, my friend, are also in your own little space, your little BUBBLE. A world, maybe real, maybe make-believe, in which you live…as the center of your own existence. Your perception is the prevailing view, and you see the whole world through your own eyes. Normal, isn’t it?
And yes, its the most convenient way to live as a human being on planet earth.
Lets say something or someone comes in to burst your BUBBLE. Your little hallowed chamber, your way of looking at things, at people, at life. You are no longer the one who draws the lines, dictates the pace, defines objects, understands phenomena, evaluates people, or worst of all lives life as a whole. Everything you see and say and do is ordered and supervised by some external agent. Surely, you won’t take it! You would fight to maintain your space, your world, your BUBBLE. Its your life! No one has the right to tell you how to live it, what the bubble should look like, or whether it should even exist.
Even if its a bubble of fantasies, of fakes and self-gratifying but silly and even dangerously toxic matter.
Even if your bubble is a mass of mess, of hidden struggles and pain and despair. Even if the ‘intrusion’ is a loving surgeon’s incision, a friend’s concerned inquiry, or a glass of liquor spilling and splashing on your floor or God stretching out His merciful hands to help you, to heal your wounds. Even if.
If your bubble stifles and suffocates you, strangulates and snuffs the life out of your lungs and sags your spirit, maybe its time to let it be burst. And no one does the job better than the boss with the divine pin. You may loose all that ‘privacy’ but you’ll gain something priceless. You’ll gain an endless life, joyful and unfettered.
Think about all the bubbles in the world, and how easier things could be if we all were huddled and safely bouncing about in one massive bubble. God’s bubble. Which isn’t really a bubble anyway. Its boundless…love.
WHY CAN’T TRUTH SET OUR HEARTS ON FIRE?
WHAT’S THE POINT OF BEING A CHRISTIAN, IF IT LEAVES US NO BETTER THAN ANY OTHER PERSON ON THIS PLANET OF OURS?
I think that this is the big question that must bug us, if we’re really serious about our lives, and the whole point of being ‘saved by God’ and ‘transformed by him’. If we are unable to look ourselves in the mirror and tell ourselves the truth about ourselves, it may just be the case that we’re just playing with our lives and our lives matter too much for us to simply spend it on a merry-go-round circus, deceiving ourselves till we’ve kicked the bucket.
The essence of this piece is to shout out the words of truth as loud as I can, because truth is all that our life is worth. I really mean this. Continue reading
EX-CRUCIS
It would mean more than strapping logs across one’s back
For lives have passed through time’s turmoil without knowing rest from toil
At a moment’s notice
To glory in the fame of decided misfortune would not count as worthy
A messiah that comes to be a star is far from pressing need
From creation’s yearning heart and tear-stained cheek
From the clearly cracked voice of a mothering child
From the dirt of sweet-smelling soured cup’s content
Life’s handed ups and downs
And its miseries and boring nothingness
Giving up and giving in is spot on
Letting the will for comfort lose
Letting loss of self pride be now and ever more
Letting go of me
Zealotry has changed the course of history many times over
Whether it be shattered glass panes or loving with abandon
Whether it be cities ruined or lives enlivened
Whether it be slaved provinces or a culture of sacrifice
Bearing the crossed stakes should inspire to conquer hearts, not lands
To build a family, not an empire
To have faith, not greed
To be Jesus, not merely famous
If the world chants your name, it may erode your meaning
If your life is not given, your worth is hidden
Or worse, lost
Martyrdom without purpose is precious blood wasted
Selflessness that saves dwarfs it a million times and more
Let us see the meaning of life as not our pleasure
That leads us to a dead end, a disappointing emptiness
Let us, as our savior did
Bear the burden of letting our will revolve around another
God first, and others too
An inseparable mission at the center of our existence.
DIVIDED
I see you now, on the other side of the drawn line
Before us lies what makes ourselves apart, what causes us to fight
To tear merely hostile glances, but keeps our eyes from meeting
From interlocking, until there are examinations of our souls, until we commune
From one end of one’s imagination, arms may stretch to catch another’s
But the indoctrination of set-apartedness has smothered desire for peace
All I want is to war with you
All you want is to destroy my realm and make me wrong
All we want is to be perfection, and the other, wrongfulness defined
Besides the standing order though, there’s a lingering wait
Internal contradiction, twined it seems, by my own unease
I am battling to keep down the rising wanting palpitation
I want you to be here, or somewhere with me
Not beaten to death, after our swords have crossed, or missiles have flown
But in the circle of belonging, of friendship that is deeper than brotherhood
We want our lives together, sharing what differing but common gifts we’ve recieved
We want the cremation of fear and suspicion, the annihilation of othersidedness
We want the truce and the treaty to be articles that call us to love
To be in awe of the bond of our common hope in our savior’s promise
If we are in want of stretching out our arms to each other
We cannot catch those who truly are unlike us and are falling off
We could then be just as lost as they
Living pieces in spite of God’s gift of a complete picture beautiful
Our harmony as ones saved and in love
In Him.
Christ a poet 