Alas, you are not always right!

There is just something about being wrong, no one likes being wrong, I don’t like being wrong, it somehow is just not comfortable…but hey, once in a while, we ALL are wrong about one thing or the other. In fact, it’s pretty normal to be wrong. I was actually laughing at myself recently when I boarded a flight and the plane was flying above the clouds & I thought to myself ”oh, how I used to be really really convinced that God’s throne was on the clouds. I had myself set that He must be sitting somewhere on those white things no one can see beyond.” Yet everyone who has ever flown, knows that to not be true. It was just me and my lack of exposure to that particular aspect that had me wrong for years. Better yet, anyone who understands what scripture means when it says the earth is just a footstool, not a throne, would know that too, even without ever flying. Spiritual knowledge, wisdom and understanding, another aspect whose lack of makes us tremendously wrong!

Oops, excuse my manners…Hi, how are you? Are you well? I sure hope you are!

It has been a while since we chatted, isn’t it? Yes. Despite the many nudges from the people close to me to release the next blog post, I just couldn’t find or rather create the time to commit to doing it. Discipline, an area I am realizing I need to train myself in more firmly…to be able to rather stay up late so as to maintain the consistency I committed to in stewarding a blog (and perhaps some other aspects of my life really)…but I digress, we will get there…

SOOO…the last time we talked, I mentioned moving in with my aunt and her two daughters etcetera. We are continuing from there…

I grew up significantly quiet, so I would like to believe that there are aspects about myself that were easy to conceal or perhaps ‘not notice’ (conceal just sounds sneaky & stuff). I had gone through a number of relatively traumatic experiences by this point, & just assumed they had not had much of an impact on me, but they had.

Unbeknownst to me, I had developed anger issues. I don’t even know when I had picked it up but I had. From the time I was in the village, I was open to fighting with my male cousins, was open to challenging to a fight that classmate who had negatively commented on how skinny I was at school, and snapped whenever I thought my granny was asking for too much. Disclaimer: I actually never got into a physical fight with anyone, I just threatened to beat them and they believed me. When I moved from the village to live with my aunt previously, I obviously carried that with me. I remember one day saying very harsh words to the house-help when we were left alone at home for a few hours that everyone came back and found her already packed up and ready to leave…sigh.

I actually think when I moved in with my new aunt, this grew worse. I became the queen of tantrums, if I can put it that way. If my previous aunt called my new aunt, and I didn’t get a chance to talk to her or she didn’t tell me what they discussed, I would get mad at her, for example. My older niece of my aunt’s two daughters was pretty kind to me; she is the only one who would celebrate my birthday with what she could and the one who noticed when I got my first period and genuinely didn’t know what to do on that penniless day to get sanitary ware. She silently went to buy sanitary pads for me and handed them to me with a smile and said ‘I noticed, you should have said something’. Despite all that kindness, boy oh boy, I was constantly bickering with her, constantly! And yes, I was almost always the one who was wrong; my rudeness was up the roof, my attitude very aggressive and my tone condescending. This went on for quite a bit until one day, after much bickering, and I could see the frustration and hurt on my niece’s face that I got the time to introspect on my actions.

It dawned on me that I was wrong, I was being immature and I was hurting others by insisting on being heard and being right and that it needed to stop. I would like to think that this was God convicting me of my mediocre approach to life. This was definitely not the way to live my life. After that inner voice (I am so convinced that was the Holy Spirit, but I was not yet filled with Him yet, so there is that) convicted me, I just decided to stop it and I significantly changed. I am by no means implying that I never got tempted to anger ever again in my life, but this was a huuuuuuge change, I am talking 85% turnaround. You see why I think it was the Holy Spirit? I mean how could I just…anyway…

I don’t think there is anything incredibly wrong about being wrong perse, except when there is no desire whatsoever to change. When your pride and your ego are flying up with the birds and everyone and everything else is to blame but you. This is what differentiates sonship from religious acts: acknowledgement of sin and repentance.

This reminds me of the first murder in the bible between siblings, Cain & Abel in Genesis 4. Cain was wrong in how he had offered his sacrifice, but that was not the end of the world. He had a chance to acknowledge his wrong, repent and move on, but he rather insisted on being right and the end result was death, first of his brother and that of his destiny that he forfeited with his actions. I used to struggle a lot with this story, I used to think “but why did God just randomly accept one and reject another’s offering?!” This is until I read the fine print of how Cain selected his offering and how Abel did his.

Genesis 4:2-4 Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. ³ In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. ⁴ And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock.

Cain was not thoughtful with the offering he brought before the Lord, he just took ‘some’ of what he had. Abel though? Intentional. Not only did he bring before the Lord his first fruit (the firstborn), he made sure to select the fat portions of it! Many times we give God the Cain type of thoughtlessness in how much of ourselves we are willing to give to Him in prayer, in the word, in serving Him and just forming a genuine relationship with Him YET we expect the Abel type of harvest. God deserves your first and your fattest portions: not the two minutes left after the 23 hours 58 minutes of everything else under the sun.

How intentional are we with God? Are we okay with ignoring Him if there is no urgent need, and only pray up a hurricane when we are in 911-This-Is-An-Emergency situation? God deserves the first and the best of our time. I know we, ourselves, also expect to be prioritized by the people we claim to love or who claim to love us. The first and the best of your time, energy, talent, money, and your whole you is to be set apart and brought before the Lord as an offering, not just ‘some’ of you. Well, even if we are in the ‘some’ box right now, God isn’t condemning us for it, He is just convicting us to seek His face, acknowledge our wrongs, seek His guidance and repent if we need to. Side note: we always need to, haha!

I can tell you that my anger might have been a culmination of frustration from the traumatic loss of loved ones to death, the constant emotional & verbal abuse about my body and the anxiety that came with moving families BUT that did not justify and excuse the behavior. We tend to believe our excuses, intentions, situations and many other non-entities or long paragraphs of explanations than we believe that we are very much capable of being wrong. May God grant us the grace to be able to repent, and turn away from our wicked ways.

1 John 1:5 This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. 6 If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. 7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. 8 If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.

Let’s Pray:

Father, I thank you for being a loving father. You don’t look at me with eyes that are ready to release fury on me even when I am not being the most love-able child. Your attitude towards me is always ‘come let us reason together, though your sins are as red as scarlet, I will make them white as snow’. You are loving and accepting of me. Help me to also be loving and accepting of myself and of others close to me whenever we find ourselves in scarlet skin. You also, however, do not condone my unbecoming behavior, you expect repentance, holiness and righteousness, help me to live my life conscious of that and Holy Spirit, help me to become more and more like that each day. Me being wrong about things does not mean I am a failure and a disgrace. It just means I am a human being needing a savior and needing grace and mercy and I am glad you are ALL THAT to me, help me to embrace it for myself and extend it to others. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

God bless you, thank you for dropping by 🙂