"Am in a mess, Lauretta. I have no idea what to do; am very confused right now....I told him but he wouldnt hear me out.."Okay, thanks dear". Lucy snapped the phone shut. Pacing around the room seem to be the only visible solution to her right now. She decided to give it a try once more and she picked up her phone.
The phone rang endlessly with no answer. She kept trying until the network decided to give her an excuse "the number you're trying is not available..." that was the end. She sat helplessly on the cushion and hang her head on her hands.
Dave walked into his living room to see his wife sleeping on the cushion. He felt like sniffing life out of her. He had place all his hopes, dreams and even his breathe on her and what did he get in return!!!......
Dave couldn't even bring himself to think about the scenario again....His wife suddenly became conscious of her surrounding and she sprang up from the cushion.
Dave, let me....
Don't even say a word. I don't want to hear it.
With that Dave stormed out of the living room.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
THE PROCESS OF WAITING
Patience is a rare virtue but a necessary one. The period of waiting for some takes longer than for others. In most cases, we rush out from our waiting period and the outcome, though deceptive at first is a very disastrous one.
The process of waiting is a period of preparation, refining and test of character. After the waiting process, all these features achieved can now be used to make one soar higher. It is a common saying that a talent/gift/ministry/anointing can take you places but only your character keeps you there.
#1: Train yourself in your waiting period.
#2: Build your character and keep it.
#3: Do not be envious of others pace.
#4: Never allow your patience run thin or run out....
Itz a process loved ones, tables turn.
The process of waiting is a period of preparation, refining and test of character. After the waiting process, all these features achieved can now be used to make one soar higher. It is a common saying that a talent/gift/ministry/anointing can take you places but only your character keeps you there.
#1: Train yourself in your waiting period.
#2: Build your character and keep it.
#3: Do not be envious of others pace.
#4: Never allow your patience run thin or run out....
Itz a process loved ones, tables turn.
Sunday, March 9, 2014
BEULAH- MY EARTH SUIT
>Let me give a quick background to this piece.
>
>It's about natural and spiritual beauty.
>About 4 years ago, God began to lead me through a change in my lifestyle. The way I dress was largely affected. Overtime I dropped makeup, jewelry, trousers.
>
>I was "born again" before then. I grew up attending mfm. But I just didn't understand. Now I understand.
>Reflecting back at how it was 3years ago- my spiritual life remarkably improved. Worship became more than emotional frenzy. Praying made more sense. The Fruit of the Spirit began to matter so much more. "Being born again" had a better meaning to me. I know that the changes I had made was the catalyst. These added to my certainty that God really wasn't comfortable with the way many christian women dress /besides what the scriptures say/.
>
>I have a burden especially for christian sisters who are truly sincere but don't know about this subtle device of the enemy. And so here...I call this piece "My Earth suit"
>
>***
>
>My Earth suit.
>My face is oblong.
>My hair grows curled and spiral from the roots.
>My eyebrows grow like a bush.
>My eye lashes are quite long and full.
>I've got teary eye bags.
>I've got facial spots and blemishes.
>I've got dimples.
>My ears are perfect.
>My fingernails are cute.
>My fair skin is sun-burned.
>I am really skinny.
>I have a petite stature.
>Now, I am God's intricate design. My designer label reads G.O.D. Made in Heaven. I'm not an assembly line product. I was carefully and uniquely crafted by the hands of a Creator who goes by the name "the perfection of beauty". And so, just the way I am, I am beautiful. I am African. I am Natural.
>I need no add-ons. I require no artificials.
>
>I really do not need a mascara to make my eyes look darker or lashes longer than they truly are. I don't need to lie.
>I do not need to use eye-pencils. My face is not a drawing board.
>I have no use for red or purple lipsticks. For I am not a clown.
>I do not need to fry my hair. Every kink in my natural hair is so beautiful!
>Hair extensions are unnecessary, God's work is complete.
>With care, my facial spots eventually fade away. Some choose to stay longer but I am still Beulah anyway.
>I do not need a concealer. My eye bags aren't what make me. And those things aren't what make me truly beautiful.
>The color of my skin isn't who I am. The shape of my head just isn't me. This is an earth suit that might die and decay eventually.
>
>My earth suit Vs my soul.
>One is temporal, the other is eternal.
>One is the container. The other is the content.
>One is totally corruptible. The other can put on the incorruptible.
>I choose my soul. The real Beulah is in my soul.
>I may leave her to decay but she will never really die.
>So I give her my total attention. She needs to stay beautiful. She must not decay.
>
>The Word is my daily mirror. The Blood will bleach away my soul's spots and blemishes. To makeup for my ugly original, I choose love, joy, peace, faith, kindness, goodness, gentleness, long suffering, self control and wisdom. These are totally of the Spirit of God. I should appear Mary, Lydia, Joanna-like. I should appear and be Christ-like. I choose spiritual beauty.
>
>I shouldn't use silk, cotton, linen, wool, rubber nor hair extensions. I don't need to alter my hair by perming, relaxing, straightening, bleaching or coloring.... I truly have no use of nail polish or cat-claws. These are totally of the spirit of the world. I shouldn't and do not want to appear Jezebel-like neither to a moderate nor excessive degree. I do not need vain beauty. It's too dangerous for the eternal me.
>
>Besides, (Jesus took lashes for my lashes. He took nails for my nails.) He took pain for my paints. His face was mutilated for mine. His skin was ripped open for my skin. So I better stay conformed to His own image. We better stay conformed to His image. He knows He gave you curled hair. He can pick your hair in a sea of others. He knows He didn't give you red lips. He knows He gave you neither nylon nor indian hair. He made you fearfully. He made you wonderfully.
>
>Ladies, Friends, (let's not play russian roulette with our souls) because we want to look "beautiful". You know the very few preachers who teach this truth aren't fools. Let's not follow the majority christians cos it's the minority christians that walk on the narrow way. Why allow the temporal corrupt your eternal days? Our lifetime here is only a tiny fraction of the total timeless time of our existence. 1Thess 5:23 says our spirit, soul & body must be found blameless. So, it's not just about "what is in your heart". Although, sometimes what's on your body is a reflection of your heart. Give no place on your body to the enemy of your soul because that little distortion of the hair or skin is big enough to hold one down from being rapturable. That light distortion is heavy enough to slow down your spiritual growth pace. Our physical image must remain totally original, we shouldn't edit it. We should groom it but not edit. Now, grooming and editing are two different things. It's our souls that need to be edited. She's eternal but ugly in her fallen original.
>
>These beauty instruments aren't really after your work for God, your money or "anointing". Nah...those may remain intact. They have become silent killers used by spiritual wickedness in high places whose real target is the soul. They use "harmless" and subtle tactics. Their wickedness is epic. We war against wickedness here but you must realize that the greatest wickedness is in high places...accusers of the brethren. The magnitude of the enemy's disgust and hatred for God and His children is something many christian don't know. If we all did, it'll show.
>
>(Stop being so obsessed with image. If anyone ever tells you that you only count if you fit in, they would be held accountable for counterfeiting. Its better to be an outcast now than be cast out then. He said come out from among them and be ye separate from the superficial things of this world. That's the only segregation that Christ has ever accepted.) Not even denominational segregation because phil 3:16 says let's abide by the same rules. Let us mind to same thing. So its a question of who is properly keeping the bible rules. And I tell you, very few. People say my life my rules. Christians say my life God rules. And this is not about legalism. Its about loving God. For He said if you love me you'll my instructions. Eph 2 says we are saved by grace through faith. James 2 says what is faith without works dead. So there are certain rules you must keep. Our faith walk is on a grace road that lies between two extremes of legalism and indulgence. Neither of both is good. Keeping these rules isn't what saves you but indulging disobedience is dangerous for you.
>
>If you change the natural to unnatural you distort His creation and like the homosexuals you leave Him absolutely no choice. You think its not possible? How do you think God will judge someone who stole a pencil and another who robbed a bank with a pistol? They committed the same sin.
>
>Ignorance is no excuse because many, very many of God's own people, who are not aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, who are not strangers from the covenant of promise, who have a hope, who are not without God in the world, will still perish because of Ignorance. But thank God you are no longer ignorant of this.
>
>Our natural beauty is a composition of our journey to authentic spiritual beauty. So my advice is value the eternal. Stay natural. Be you tiful.
>
>I beg you to heed my advice today, bcos these words I've spoken to you are life and truth but this is your life and I cannot impose anything on you. But this I can promise you- going completely natural will not kill you. God bless you.
>
>- Beulah Olutayo 2014
>
>Those in bracket were adopted from other poets' pieces.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
THE UPSIDE DOWN WORD
The language of home and mission field is still used by many churches and agencies, but it fundamentally misrepresents reality.
The map of global Christianity that our grandparents knew has been turned upside down. At the start of the 20th century, only ten percent of the world's Christians lived in the continents of the south and east. Ninety percent lived in North America and Europe, along with Australia and New Zealand. But at the start of the 21st century, at least 70 percent of the world's Christians live in the non-Western world—more appropriately called the majority world.
More Christians worship in Anglican churches in Nigeria each week than in all the Episcopal and Anglican churches of Britain, Europe, and North America combined. There are more Baptists in Congo than in Britain. More people in church every Sunday in communist China than in all of Western Europe. Ten times more Assemblies of God members in Latin America than in the U.S.
The old peripheries are now the center. The old centers are now on the periphery. Philip Jenkins brought this shift to popular attention in The Next Christendom. Yet many Christian leaders of the global South resent the implication in Jenkins's title. They have no desire to be another "Christendom"—wielding monolithic territorial and political power. Nor do they wish to be any kind of threat to the West, but rather to help Western Christians in the struggle to shift from survival mode to mission mode—in their own lands.
Can the West be re-evangelized? Only if we unlearn our default ethnocentric assumptions about "real" Christianity (our own) and unlearn our blindness to the ways Western Christianity is infected by cultural idolatry. It may be more blessed to give than to receive, but it is often harder to receive than to give. That reverses the polarity of patron and client and makes us uncomfortably aware that what Jesus said to the Laodicean church might apply to us in the West: "You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked" (Rev. 3:17).
Normal Christianity
Most of the learning and unlearning we must do in this new era is no more than relearning the original nature of biblical Christianity, which very quickly became polycentric. Acts 1:8 can give the impression that the early church spread out in ripples, from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth. But in fact, Acts tells a more complicated story. Antioch was where followers of Jesus were first called Christians, and it became the center of westward-oriented missionary work. Paul saw Thessalonica as a radiating center for the message in Macedonia and Achaia. Ephesus clearly became a key metropolis for Christian witness in Asia Minor. Paul was eager to make Rome a base for planned work further to the west in Spain. Jerusalem was simply one center among many.
Christianity has never had a territorial center. Our center is the person of Christ, and wherever he is known, there is another potential center of faith and witness. So, as mission historian Andrew Walls has said, the emergence of genuine world Christianity and the ending of Western assumptions of heartland hegemony simply marks a return to normal Christianity, which looks much more like the New Testament than Christendom ever did.
The world we are in....the upside down world
The map of global Christianity that our grandparents knew has been turned upside down. At the start of the 20th century, only ten percent of the world's Christians lived in the continents of the south and east. Ninety percent lived in North America and Europe, along with Australia and New Zealand. But at the start of the 21st century, at least 70 percent of the world's Christians live in the non-Western world—more appropriately called the majority world.
More Christians worship in Anglican churches in Nigeria each week than in all the Episcopal and Anglican churches of Britain, Europe, and North America combined. There are more Baptists in Congo than in Britain. More people in church every Sunday in communist China than in all of Western Europe. Ten times more Assemblies of God members in Latin America than in the U.S.
The old peripheries are now the center. The old centers are now on the periphery. Philip Jenkins brought this shift to popular attention in The Next Christendom. Yet many Christian leaders of the global South resent the implication in Jenkins's title. They have no desire to be another "Christendom"—wielding monolithic territorial and political power. Nor do they wish to be any kind of threat to the West, but rather to help Western Christians in the struggle to shift from survival mode to mission mode—in their own lands.
Can the West be re-evangelized? Only if we unlearn our default ethnocentric assumptions about "real" Christianity (our own) and unlearn our blindness to the ways Western Christianity is infected by cultural idolatry. It may be more blessed to give than to receive, but it is often harder to receive than to give. That reverses the polarity of patron and client and makes us uncomfortably aware that what Jesus said to the Laodicean church might apply to us in the West: "You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked" (Rev. 3:17).
Normal Christianity
Most of the learning and unlearning we must do in this new era is no more than relearning the original nature of biblical Christianity, which very quickly became polycentric. Acts 1:8 can give the impression that the early church spread out in ripples, from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth. But in fact, Acts tells a more complicated story. Antioch was where followers of Jesus were first called Christians, and it became the center of westward-oriented missionary work. Paul saw Thessalonica as a radiating center for the message in Macedonia and Achaia. Ephesus clearly became a key metropolis for Christian witness in Asia Minor. Paul was eager to make Rome a base for planned work further to the west in Spain. Jerusalem was simply one center among many.
Christianity has never had a territorial center. Our center is the person of Christ, and wherever he is known, there is another potential center of faith and witness. So, as mission historian Andrew Walls has said, the emergence of genuine world Christianity and the ending of Western assumptions of heartland hegemony simply marks a return to normal Christianity, which looks much more like the New Testament than Christendom ever did.
The world we are in....the upside down world
LOVE
Better than a shining armour
Beautiful than all rubies put together
Purity at its core
Precious than gold and all gems
Stronger than a lion
Braver than a warrior
Is Love from a pure soul.
Show love. Peace.
Beautiful than all rubies put together
Purity at its core
Precious than gold and all gems
Stronger than a lion
Braver than a warrior
Is Love from a pure soul.
Show love. Peace.
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