Attention: Words! loads and loads of words. This is also a long read you would need to settle in comfortably with, worth your while? decide at the end.
Sometime in April 2020, I had a conversation about life, human choices, and the place of the divine. The conversation was basically on the following:
1. How life has to happen because life is imperfect, the earth is imperfect, and we have imperfect systems, structures, and evil activities.
2. Humanity and the choices they make.
3. How we ask God (the divine) to intervene in our affairs through prayers (in whatever form).
I had the following perspectives to share with my audience (as at the time this conversation was holding):
Perspective 1:
Often we make the statement “life is not fair”(of course an imperfect world cannot be fair). I have held conversations and understood from those conversations that as humans we were conditioned to believe at one point or the other that in doing the right things and checking the boxes, life has to be perfect. I believe that doing the right thing is peaceful and we should practice it more although with the right motives yeah? So, boxes checked 😁 and boom! life throws a curve ball in the form of people. Someone somewhere(structures, governments) starts a chain of events of negativity that we do not expect and it messes up systems, economies, and personal daily lives. Drilling down to personal human lives, some people have been thrown too many curve balls in life. They practically believe, they are doomed as they are the only ones ‘who go through twists and unexpected turns’ so there is no point pinning for the best. Their motto would be: ‘Let’s live, eat the food we can get, buy the things we can buy, experience doom”. As that’s the order of the day, nothing is right with the world “even presently ” anyway and then die boom! is that you?
Perspective 2:
Let’s leave life, and look at the perspective of Human Choices. Have you ever sat down to honestly review the shots you once called and how your choices may have controlled some events or actions? We already addressed ‘life is not fair above’, so no we are not addressing ‘oh! that wasn’t me, life just happened, my influencers(family and friends) were part of the causes e.t.c’ nope! still not that. I mean the choices you made with your eyes wide open. Come to think of it even if you were influenced, the will of man given by the creator is still in you. So yeah, you still had a small window of choosing and sticking with a choice so 🤷♀️. In all fairness and sincerity of heart, have you ever accessed the perspective of ‘I chose to do this, I was this and it led to this and that’s why things are the way they are?’ (Admittedly, this calls for honesty and some ugly painful truths you have to face, don’t even ask me how I feel when I do such evaluations ‘hian’).
Perspective 3:
The Divine/Divinity. I’d like to relate this perspective by sharing a short story from one of the many crafted from GREEK MYTHOLOGY. If you are familiar with this mythology and novels centred around that theme, you may have an idea of the version I am about to share. This version states that the gods were angry about how humans had stopped praying to them and were now dependent on themselves. Hence, they reported to Zeus(head god). It was inferred that humans were supposed to pray to the goddess of fertility Aphrodite, god of war Ares, and of course Zeus the king of all gods e. t. c but nope! humans just decided to call their shots without consultation and prayers. Prayers and offerings to the gods were the only way Zeus and the gods were made to feel useful on earth. So, the gods revolted and decided to show humans they were in charge of the world systems 😃by creating chaos. Oh well! , this is not about Greek myth. Over time, when events occur negatively in most cases yeah?, we all remember there is a God. The Divine, the creator of the entire universe and we call on His divine powers to come and interfere and intervene. We sometimes even think along the lines of the gods ‘Maybe the creator is punishing us for our actions like the Greek gods revolted against the humans’ (😃 I’d leave you to reflect on that personally, for me God is love). We must call on the creator to intervene in life’s struggles as I learned this early in life and also from Dr. Myles Munroe a few years back. He simply stated that prayer is the way to ask the Creator to intervene in His creation. The creator has granted humans the autonomous power of personal will and choices. You have so much power to call the shots and decide on how you want things to unfold. So He respects that and says ‘You know what I’m not gonna mess with your choices except you ask me to by saying Hey God! (you know how you address your creator) Okay we gotta talk or I need you here or to fix this’.
As oftentimes as events occur in life, three things are constant. Life as an entity, human choice as a consistent if not a major factor, and the divine will of the creator. Hence, before making judgments, drawing conclusions or seeing perspectives on any event in your life (at least if you want to be self-oriented as the human nature is, you might not bother about events in the world, except it’s COVID 19 😅 because this has affected everyone yeah?). However, for events in your own life, you might need to evaluate from at least 3 different perspectives before drawing the conclusion of the whole matter. Evaluate life as we know it (systems structures, earth, etc, ), choices and willpower, and finally, the creator/God’s divine will.
I have an open-ended question when events occur in your life(yeah let’s talk about you first before fixing the world) where do you turn to? your intellect, your creator, or life’s structures?
P.S: Viva La Vida