CAIN-ING

Hi there.

How are you doing today? I hope you are doing fine? And I pray that God will continue to guide you as you navigate through this year.

Welcome to today's gist.

When I was younger, like way way younger, I had this neighbour, let's call him John, who seemed to have a propensity to attract wounds, every time we played games, he'd always end up injured and of course the game would have to halt. Think of any injury you think a child can get, he had gotten it; from nails to glasses... one day while we were playing 'boji boji' (catch) from a tree, John fell. The fact that he fell was enough to stop our game but of course it couldn't end there, na John after all, he fell and the inner part of an umbrella shaft pierced one of his ankles, I'm guessing the right one; it went in through one side and came out through the other! Game wey we dey play stop and we had to start looking for a way to get him to help.

Because of his propensity to get injured, we didn't like having John in on games because it invariably meant that we would have to stop the game at some point; when we would be picking team members for games, no one ever wanted to pick him so he would eventually be that person that the last team would have to settle with.

Why am I telling you about John? I saw him last week and I marveled at how different he was from that injury-prone boy he was when we were growing up. And as I thought of how we never wanted to play with him, I realized something; we were all so concerned with the effect of having John join in on our games that we never did concern ourselves with his welfare, it was more about being able to complete the games uneventfully. Never mind that he could play very well and help your team win, the fact that he would almost certainly sustain an injury was reason enough for us not to want him involved in our games.

That selfish tendency that we exhibited when we were small children is one that manifests in most of us today. We now live in a world that has sold us the idea of looking out for ourselves to the extent that we no longer have the desire to look out for others and seek their welfare too. We all now work with the Cain mentality and ask: “am I my brother’s keeper?” Before we begin to rationalize this behavior and ask if we shouldn’t look after ourselves; that is not what I’m saying, I’m not asking you to neglect yourself, what I’m saying is that trying to look out for our welfare should not be to the detriment of those around us. When you see someone you can help, you should help them. 

This school of thought that wants us to be selfish under the guise of self love and self preservation is terrible to say the least, it is what has gotten us to this terrible place that we are in as a generation, that’s we see people taking the time to record people jumping off bridges instead of helping them, gisting about someone they saw being robbed or attacked but did nothing to help and evil people and things thriving unchecked because we have forgotten to care about each other.

Last last all I’m saying is that we should please become more intentional about seeing to the welfare of those around us; no do pass yourself o, but still do something. May God help us to be people who will truly care for those around us and look out for their welfare too.

See you next week.

Love,

Achenyo.