Understanding Restoration: Insights from a Personal Walk
Have you ever faced severe personal disruption? You wake facing west but at night you sleep standing facing South? I have! I woke up one morning and I had lost everything (a story for another day or maybe not). Once the storm quiets, the journey of restoration starts. I continue to learn practical lessons as I keep on the path of restoration.
Each one of us is expected to walk a unique journey – each has an ordained path already. Therefore, a journey of restoration is personal and follows the same unique path. However, some discernible biblical patterns can help with individual journeys.
Judge Dogood Thrown out of Church
Dogood was toted and thrown out of the building. The building was a church. As he rolled off, he nearly knocked down an usher who was walking in with the offering baskets.
Dogood had been invited by a group of pastors of a big church to talk to them about creativity and imagination for religious leaders.
“Do not play that game of telling us to imagine.” They requested him. “Give us specific strategies to boost our creativity and imagination.”
As he was preparing to talk about one of his passions, he kept getting a message about God’s glory. At first, he didn’t see how creativity and imagination were connected to God’s glory, but he saw the connection.
3 Types of Workers in the Marketplace
For clarity, I will use the term ‘worker’ broadly to refer to all of us in the marketplace: employees, employers, and entrepreneurs. When starting, we are taught the rules of the market. This advice and induction become part of the informal job descriptions. For many, they never stop to reflect on who they are or how they were meant to interpret their work until they have retired. This is why it is possible to discern identifiable patterns of behaviour across professions. For instance, you can identify some by their sharp dress code because their work demand they do so, or how they speak. And this is how many end up unwittingly multiplying patterns of whatever category they chose to be identified with.
Alternative Storytelling in the Marketplace
Our identity and convictions are nurtured by the stories we have been told, and chosen to believe in. A random conversation with colleagues on integrity, excellence, wealth, money, ethical practices, and success is a display of the stories we carry. Because of the numerous negative stories we encounter, we are under great danger of believing the dangerous single story that one has to be corrupt to succeed.
Today, in Kenya, to publicly identify as a Christian, declare one’s faith or convictions, let alone talk about excellence and work ethics, is an invitation to be mistrusted and ridiculed. Yet we continue to soldier on because there is truly an alternative, and we must not give up.
Shakahola Mess: View from the Pew
We continue to wait for the final word from the government and the courts. Meanwhile, our lives have resumed normalcy, and we are still going to churches, and soon the Shakahola matter will be constrained to history, only to be quoted the next time there is such a related tragedy.
If you have ever warmed a pew, even if it is for a few minutes, this matter affects you, and you hold the key to the solution. For starters, we are all human beings; thus, we need to remember such tragedies happen to people and not animals.
Mosquito Conversation
“What happened…what did you drink?”
“This is strange…I have never felt this way.”
Dogood was woken up by two voices in the general area of his bedroom window. On looking closely, he saw two mosquitoes. One was lying on the fold of the curtain, and the other one standing holding a tumbler of water.
At that moment, Dogood realised that, in addition to possessing a rich imagination that at times manufactures strange thoughts, he could also hear strange voices and see strange things.
“Did the blood have alcohol and drugs?”
“Please, my discerning tongue the taste of alcohol in the blood.”
“It is like nothing you and I have ever tasted before.”
“What?”
“Dangerous stuff that can kill: anger, rage, bitterness.”
“What?”
“You can taste and smell that stuff in the blood, but I thought it was some exotic spices.”.
“Why didn’t you stop?”
“I was blinded by everything around me: the looks and the ambiance! The mere mention of it and I taste it afresh.”
With groans, the mosquito turned to retch.
“I have never seen you this sick. Do you mean to say that stuff stays longer than alcohol?”
“Trust me, that stuff is lethal.”
“We have to think of a way of screening what we suck. Looks can be deceiving.”
Dogood turned with hopes of sleeping again and perhaps dreaming.
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