This is nowhere
Without a vision the people perish
After the third time of asking, they decide to move somewhere else. When they arrive somewhere else, they order a few drinks, wait for friends to gather, and then begin asking the big question: ‘Where is it happening?’ They make a few calls; they wait for a few calls. Then they ask again, ‘Where is it happening?’
After the third time of asking, they decide to move somewhere else. The truth is that in Swaziland, nowhere is happening. What is happening is that everyone is moving around, looking for somewhere else. It is the looking for somewhere else that is happening.
An ancient prophet said that without a vision the people perish, and we can see that judgment played out every weekend in our clubs and bars and every day we can see it in the newspapers. Quite simply, for all its Crusades and Seminars and Televised Ministries, the church has failed to provide any moral leadership and the government is clearly invertebrate—resulting in a people with no vision. And the characteristics of a people with no vision? Three-year-old daughters get spaded and not-fast-enough wives get clubbed and little boys get axed and six-year-olds get raped.
People talk; oh yes, people talk—the wondrous much-lauded and applauded ‘national dialogue’; but nothing ever gets done. Overseas it’s a truism that talk is cheap; here talk is a cheap and quick jingle to score religious or political points while the vulnerable and innocent continue to be exploited and suffer. ‘Faith without works is dead’? Here the message has become, ‘the only thing that works is faith’.
The ‘father’ who bashed his baby daughter with a spade ironically summed things up whilst in the dock this week. He said, ‘Every person should live the way he wants to on earth. God… even created a female that was going to help a man.’ The first part of his statement is political, stressing individual ‘rights’ over community and responsibility; the second part of his statement is religious, saying that God gave him his cherished ‘rights’.
This is nowhere; this is not the vision that a nation needs to survive in these tough and trying times. Nowadays, people are rushing everywhere, blown from place to place by the latest wind, chasing after they don’t know what. Recently an accountant, who is also a card-carrying member of a local high-profile televised church, said to me, ‘Ken, you need a business plan so you can make a lot of money and become somebody.’
‘I already am somebody, ‘ I replied, ‘and my life is not about chasing money. Money is just a tool.’
“No,’ she said, ‘you’re wrong. Money isn’t just a tool. Money is everything.’
How did we get to this? Last Sunday I saw a man wearing one of those very long and expensive jackets. His shoes were so long that they arrived where I was standing three minutes before he did. With an outfit like that he could only have been dressed for church. That’s what it’s like these days. If you’re rich then you must be a minister—government or church, it doesn’t matter. My friend is wrong. Just like a spade or an axe, money is a tool, and any tool can be used to bless or to curse; to help, or to maim and destroy. It’s because so many love the tools rather than the hands that made them and use them that this is nowhere.
Instead of us all making plans to go somewhere else and become someone else, we need to stop and realise that we are already someones who are living somewhere. That done, we need to work together to make our already-here world a much better and more loving place.
posted by swazi @ 1:37 pm
