The Observer, Kampala – Wonders never cease to happen. In fact the person who dies is the only one who stops seeing wonders. This week I saw one that got me shaking and shivering.
A certain group of Christians in South Africa have a pastor that tells them to eat grass. Eat grass like cows and goats, and it gets me wondering do they suddenly think they have the four stomachs we learnt about in science?
You know the person that manipulates the way you think is the person that has you at the centre of their hind pocket. Modern-day Christians have done so much for miracles. From carrying containers with water for the prophet to touch, to spreading their dresses on the ground and staying naked, to being electrocuted so that they can fall down, there is nothing Christians haven’t gone through.
Is it the ever-growing levels of poverty? Is it the hunger for a miracle? Is it the love they have for the lands that have four seasons unlike Africa? What is making us reach these levels? And the funny thing I see is that the desperate people are commonly women. If you see the photograph of the human-turned-grass-eaters (so much for being vegetarians), you can see they are all women.
Does that confirm we are the weaker sex? Are we easy to manipulate? Or are we just overly responsible and troubled and carrying the world’s problems as we look for solutions, as we look for love, marriage, family and belonging?
Maybe if God gave us power too, the power to look for husbands ourselves; the power to marry so many men when one disappoints, maybe we would not surrender to the higher power. So many churches today are doing so many things we can’t imagine. Unscrupulous people are using the scripture to fit their own selfishness; to feed their own egos and it is getting scary.
South Africa is a country that has a high HIV prevalence; maybe they were promised a cure. As they toil and dig and give to the pastor as if he is a bank, the pastor invests in cars that he comes driving and they undress and put their cloths on the ground for him to drive on. A while back I was told in a certain church, the pastor told the congregation to join a networking group under her name so that they would be blessed and they willingly did so, losing money in the process.
What haven’t Christians done for the love of miracles? And what aren’t they going to do? We can only watch the space. Every time I look at the photo of the women eating grass in South Africa as they prepare to be stamped on, I can’t help thinking: the funny thing with people in such situations is they don’t realize they are in it until the day they leave, if at all they ever do.
By then it is too late. As Christians and any other faith, we need to know that God is love. God is a good God; we don’t need to follow anyone’s extreme ideologies to be close to Him.
All we need is to build personal relationships with Him, understand them in the best way we can, from our own perspective. That is the only way we can be able to discern from the good people and the people that just want to take advantage of the fact that we are seeking something greater than us to understand things that happen in our lives.
If we can, let us avoid these miracle-promising and seeking churches like the plague. Our lives are miracles, the fact that we wake up each day is a miracle. The miracles are within us, and God’s providence is sufficient; we don’t need to first sweat blood to get God’s love.
Jesus did all that for us. He paid the price, so many years back.
