Tag: word
Justified to Hurt
I lay down quietly in a boy’s only lodge as about 5 other young men spoke of love and ladies, one guy in particular told the heart wrenching story of how he loved a girl, so much and so truly and how she later left him simply because of another guy who had more money to offer, you could tell the hurt in his heart, he said he couldn’t get over her for months, he confessed there in the confines of us guys, that he truly loved with all his heart, and she broke it with all her might. Having been so wronged he explained how he could now without remorse play with any girls heart he could get his hands on, he knew the words, he knew the motions, he knew how to get in, get what he wanted and get out, without bathing an eyelash. In some mis-configured part of his brain he figured he was justified to hurt others as long he was pleased simply because he himself was once hurt.
Do you remember secondary school and particularly if you were in the boarding school? What was the number one reason SS3 students gave for acting cruelly to junior students? ‘Because they did it to me when I was a junior student!’, that was and still is the main plea by many, because as junior student some senior student took their foodstuffs they are now collecting foodstuffs from the entire student body!
It’s like the old an eye for an eye, but remember an eye for an eye sooner or later leaves everyone blind. There’s something in the average human’s subconscious that tends to do to others what have been done to them, that’s why the molester today was most likely abused as a child. It’s a vicious self-supporting cycle, running through generations and even ages.
It’s like the old an eye for an eye, but remember an eye for an eye sooner or later leaves everyone blind.
But yet the reverse is also the case; As a Jambito several years ago, I went to the newly established Federal university, Oye-Ekiti to write the screening exam required to gain entrance. I entered pari passu the setting sun, with little money, no friends and no contact, I had no place to stay and the stories of bandits who prowled at night did not in any way comfort me. Not too sure what to do I went out of the school compound and sighting some young men close by I went up to one of them and simply asked who I could meet for some sort of accommodation, he told me to follow him, he walked me into a room in a joint condo of sorts, pointed a bed and told me to stay there. To cut the short story shorter, I along with few other stranded Jambito’s ended up becoming buddies for the next 3 days of our stay all at no charge, no cost and no hidden agenda. I asked him later on why his magnanimity to us strangers, he answered simply ‘he was once a Jambito and someone took him in!’.
You see, cruelty of many ages can end in one generation, if the last person to contract Aids was the last person to spread it, HIV/ADIS would be only found in the history books in just one generation. You see you have a choice, you’re not just a biological psychological creature who’s actions and reactions are cast in stone based on the hand life deals you. You can let the hurt you suffered snare you into hurting others or you can break out of the mold like so many others have and change the culture that tried to change you from something beautiful to a shadow of your true self. We’re never justified to hurt because we were hurt, no matter the form, it’s a warped way of thinking that leaves everyone bleeding. You can break out of it, you can start a new cycle, you can set the new patterns for your children and your children’s children and the world at large. We have enough bad news to go around twice, we have enough victims who victimize and troubled people who trouble people. Let the pain motivate you to make a difference, not to even the score on people who were never in the picture in the first place.
We’re never justified to hurt because we were hurt
It was Jesus who brought the radical idea of loving your enemies and even praying for them, imagine; praying for the thief who stole from you, loving the idiot who swerved at 130km/hr in front of you on the highway while making a call, forgiving that guy who used you and dumped you. I admit, these are noble ideals too high for the vast majority of us, maybe that’s why Jesus offers to walk with us as we walk through the hurt, and he will, that is, if we let him.
It may not be popular, you may feel out of place, you may be called a fool, but the freedom from the hurt is in repaying it with love. And truly as it has been said; it’s love that makes the world go round.
…the freedom from the hurt is in repaying it with love
Udousoro William (2018)
My Belief, My Life by MsRay (Spoken Word)
What they didnt tell us about Silence by Egwu Nnanna (SpokenWord)
5+2 efforts
Religion has been nothing but a complex language,
A puzzle that never gets solved,
In the folds of my grey matter,
A mosaic with lots of mystery pieces,
A mortar of rules
There’s nothing my brain detests more
Than figures that never add up,
Or records of extraordinary events,
That stare nature in the eye and disobey her
Yet I find myself in their midst
All I know is we sniffed your mist,
The broken, sick and lost,
All we want is to get fixed,
And from the smell of what I’ve heard,
I knew you would quench,
The desert of a thirst we had
I had a hunch about our lunch
The idea of you feeding us,
These swam of crowd
But not with the 5 loaves and 2 fishes
Mother wrapped in case I grew hungry
You reminded me of math class
Another world of confusion I melt into,
But right there in my very presence
You made integration simple
5+2 equaled 5000 and 12
That day, I went home
With waves wrapped around my hairs,
All He needs is my little to make big
All He needs is my life to make it worth it
Olaoye Adeleye
(C) 2017
GENERATIONS
I have really wise friends
I have really smart friends
And then I have these other friends. These ones I don’t know how to classify them.
For when you hear their thought process, you will wonder if this part of the body called a brain is vestigial in some animals.
When they utter words, you automatically want an occupation with hammers for every thing they say make you want to break their head.
But then I got to thinking;
6 years,
10 years;
200 years from now and these same ‘not so senseless’, poor in making decisions, and utterly tiring friends of mine would be known as ‘the ancestors’
A status men will begin to idolize.
I see us use a whole lot of our mind’s compartment to believe things that were told to us by people who couldn’t figure out simple things, I mean, some of the very learned of them actually argued that the earth was flat, like a table.
Hollup!
I am not even talking about the unlearned ones from your villages that birthed those you now call grandpa. Just imagine it.
They told you to pour drinks on the floor for the ancestors and you agree, well it’s *Omenala, so it can’t be broken.
They said a woman should be shorn when her husband dies and well, who are we to not obey the voices of ignorance passed down to us?
We carry knowledge like tentacles on a snail’s head but still slip back into the cave of ignorance we use to shell whatever good we can make of life, just because we have been told to ‘stand on the wisdom of the elders’,
Now guess who said that? ‘THE ELDERS’
I feel this is rigged.
Then our faith, love, strength, and even humanity is subject to a broken past called tradition,
Something that might have been suggested by a ‘not so smart’ old man who was only opportune to live before us.
So I take a stand today.
I will relate with the rules of the ancestors like they were still alive now
I will weigh their wisdom based on how wise it is, NOW!
I will not waste my time in their myth, only to satisfy their dead bones long gone with the sands of time.
I will make decisions now and then advice younger generations to learn from my words, but before I go from this earth;
I will let them know I wasn’t the wisest
I wasn’t the smartest
I was as man as man can be
And most of all;
As they grow, and find better ways to do what I said couldn’t be done,
They shouldn’t be afraid to discard my letters and fly the plane of their imaginations to outer space and back.
For no matter how sacred we decide to treat the scrolls of heroes past,
And bend always to their judgments on matters, using them as the ultimate yardstick to measure life.
I dare say that many of them were also as confused as we are at some points of important decisions,
And to crown it all, some chose wrongly.
Which only goes to say that we with them were all normal humans.
And if I won’t let another man dictate what I do and decide I run my life, I’m including the great ancestors too.
*Omenala is the Igbo(Nigerian Language) word that means tradition
FULL FOOL
It was clear that I wasn’t full of anything
But everyone could bet that I was full of myself.
You would think I would weigh a thousand tons when the contents of me were turned into a bag and placed on a weight but I am that feather
Blown
By every wind of doctrine.
See, I had seen suits;
Seasons 1 to 5, and 6, and 7,
Yet
Nothing in the whole seasons of life could suit to cover the empty shell I hid in the well pressed excuse of the suit I wore. ME.
The real me;
Who knew nothing. Just occasional passages from the bible I could jump on, and like a frog; hip-hop on from time to time just to prove that I haven’t been listening to the ‘devil’s music’ and so I dress to kill, looking ‘smart’ on Sundays, my proof that I was scent enough. And I was worthy enough to lift up holy hands with. The cufflinks of doubts connecting my wrist to my chest.
I was unworthy! And I knew it!
I knew it, because whenever I saw people dig in the corners of new buildings around my house I saw something I would never be; WELL.
I felt alone in the world
I knew what I had wasn’t enough
I even told friends I needed space for it felt more natural to the man I was
We all did church, but when I checked how far I had come with what I called the gospel,
I knew it was useless
You are saved by him,
But you are condemned,
Unless you save yourself.
But that was before his light came
The light came
Delight came when his light came
It tasted sweet but I wept;
oxymoron like sugarcane
I got to know how good I was
I got to know who he was
And he told me who I was;
Till then I had always felt I knew so much
But the fool in me was revealed when the wise in him chose a foolish way to change the full in me.
I emptied myself and took him in
And till now,
I’m still intoxicated by the love he gave.
I can now brag about being full
And I don’t need to be full of myself to do it.
It was the first time I learnt, that the first ‘useless’ letter of him, could arrest the empty space in me and make me ‘W’hole.
You heard it from me!
Hey there, my name is Favour Omeje and I write.
I have known the joys of writing especially wielding my pen to summon words together to tell the love story of ‘the Word’=Christ.
Writing has been to me like lending readers shoes to walk back and forth time to experience what good things, I have experienced in Christ; simply put, writing has become like a kiss and tell story.
Soon enough, I got signed up to the Christ A Poet team where I was given a loud voice to express my Christian experience. It was there that I took a dip in excellence and team spirit. Christ A Poet Team provided different platforms for people like me who love to read and write to gain writing prowess while telling the Lord’s story in diverse translations. One of such platforms is the Freestyle Friday.
Freestyle Friday is boundless needless to say.
This is how we do it:
We gather virtually on our social media platforms where a theme is dished out; then we all do justice to it using the different forms of literature available to man.
This time, we want you to share in the experience that we have enjoyed exclusively as team mates for years and you don’t have to be committed to us to enjoy this.
Just follow the link and request entry!
Do you love to read?
What about write?
Then you don’t want to miss this fun. You can take my word for it!
Favour Omeje
For: The Christ A Poet Team
Christ a poet 