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I'm sitting in the car, on the passenger side. We're talking, the driver and I and the guy sitting on the back seat. We get off the highway into a side road, and this driver does not see that his lights are red, so he does not see the oncoming pickup truck, also partly because it's oncoming from my side (him he's turned right so he's looking ahead not to the left - which apparently they do teach at driving school. I see it, too late. I hold my hand up to the window, almost as though I can myself prevent the crash. "Oh. My. God!" Time stops. The car starts honking, from afar, getting closer and closer, now accompanied by screeching tires as he tries to brake. My guy now turns to his left, sees it also, tries to swerve, but does not help. He screams. A loud pop. Escalates into a crash. A sharp searing pain from my shoulder to my head. Broken glass. Crumbling metal. I'm thrown to the right. The pain is now in my lower ribcage - which I later gather was me hitting the gear lever. I lose all feeling. My elbow knocks the steering wheel, followed rapidly by the rest of me. Then I fee myself pushed back by the driver's airbag. My head now on the driver's window. Needless to say, the car I'm in was not a Volvo, does not have side impact bars, or passenger airbags. The pickup comes to a screeching halt, stopped cold by the force of the collision. I start to see white, my head whirls round and round. A warm stream starts to flow steadily down my forehead, my hands, my neck. It's all happened in five seconds, but at slow motion they feel like two hours. And then it starts to get dark...
So we ran a red light some time last week in town, and that accident almost did happen, but the pick up stopped in time in the real-world(TM) version. I've been having this nightmare on and off since, and every time I wake up just as the crowd starts converging. It's almost as though I have one of those out-of-body experiences, where it's me in the action, but it's also me looking at it from above. Like the way on TV when people are having flashbacks they can see themselves as though from a third-person point of view. As I have learned, now and from past experience, death is like a thief in the night. It happens in an instant. There really won't be time to repent and all that stuff we tell ourselves we'll do just before we die. But like they say, you tend to survive if it wasn't your appointed time.
So anyway, here's my question: what age are you when you're in heaven? The age you were just before you died? The time you remember as being the happiest in your life? Or do we, like, get application forms filled where we pick? What if you were in the army and you died in combat - do you hobble around heaven sans the foot you lost to a land mine? What if you die by hanging - will you forever walk around all gross and blue with your tongue sticking out? And what if we can choose, and you die at 15, and you pick 35, how will anyone ever be able to find you then? Mark Shultz is playing (by design more than coincidence... :) "...Coz I believe that He never lets you go/I believe that He's wanting you to know/I believe that He'll lead you till/You're back in His arms again..."
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"For love, for honor, for mankind." When they released Armageddon in 1998 that was the tagline, ostensibly meant to explain why akina Bruce Willis sacrificed their lives to go blow up the meteor that was coming to destroy the world (of course starting with America, as always :) The first two I get (yes I get love!), but that last one, for mankind, I have never understood. I've never seen the sense behind us having a predilection to identify with the rest of mankind just because we're similar, or with people my tribe just because we speak the same language, or people who come from my town just because we come from the same place, even people my race - just because we share ancestors. As irrational as I find love in general, this particular one I don't even bother rating - it's too out there.
When I was in uni I was in a club called SIFE, that's Students in Free Enterprise. Essentially it's a movement that aims to empower disenfranchised members of society with the economic wherewithal to empower themselves. So each uni carries out projects where they teach members of society how to make the money, then at the end of the competition cycle we all meet and present our projects and it's left to a panel to decide who's the winner based on who had the most financial and sustainable impact. My team was just the one - it was full of superstars! So two years running we go do these killer presentations, and two years running we win and get to go represent the country and our uni on the world stage [that's how I made it to NYC, btw], and the school administration used to be so proud of us that do you know how much help they accorded us? Nothing! Absolutely nothing. Even just a letter to say these are our people could you please help them any way you can we had to ask till we were hoarse, so lemme not even go into financial assistance. The first time maybe you could argue we were a small club, relatively unknown, but the second time around, we were already reigning national champs and we'd just done it again [we actually used to go present the trophy to the admin as a courtesy]. I swear there was even this time we thought seriously about going as independents, rather than emissaries of that uni!
I'm thinking about these things coz in the just-concluded Project Fame, I saw on Twitter some time that Kenyans showed Patricia madha ati coz she had voted out Debarl (or one of the others - don't watch broadcast TV so I wouldn't know), and I was thinking dude! she doesn't like the guy she doesn't like the guy. Me I wasn't even one of the people who were up in arms when a while back Kaz voted out Didge in SA I think. I totally got it. If she thought he should go then she shouldn't have had to keep him just because "we're kinsmen." Or that time that runner Keter agreed to be bought by Denmark, so that he even changed nationalities - good for him. If he thought they were a better deal he shouldn't have been villified for accepting it just because "he's a son of the soil." Lord knows this country hadn't done much for him!
I love my family. I love my schools - high school and primary, (obviously not uni). And I love the two towns I grew up in. And since I moved here, gotta say, me I love Nairobi regardless (pun pun). You see those are places and people that changed my life. But I can't say I love the countryside where all luhyas are supposed to be from coz I've never been there. I can't say I love ugali just because "it's your people's favorite meal." Obviously don't even get me started on the small transistor radio thing. I gotta have more than that "sentimental value" to go on. There was a time in I think '04 when Natalie Maines [one of the Dixie Chicks - she's actually the Dixie Chick who sings] went on national TV and proclaimed that she was ashamed of Bush as president coz of the Iraq war. Now, you need to understand that when you sing Country you don't speak out against a president who hails from Texas - which is Country's biggest market - so naturally there was massive fallout, their concerts and air play suffered, she got death threats, so she apologized publicly; but later she changed her mind and reinstated her earlier sentiments. And went and wrote a song to that effect [which the Texans boycotted but went on to win the Grammy for Song of The Year and Record of The Year and the album it was from, Taking The Long Way, Album of The Year anyway]. At the time, Natalie commented, "The entire country may disagree with me, but I don't understand the necessity for patriotism. Why do you have to be a patriot? About what? This land is our land? Why? You can like where you live and like your life, but as for loving the whole country ... I don't see why people care so much about patriotism." She said that despite being a citizen in the Holy Grail of patriotic citizens, and just like that [at the risk of sounding, well, unpatriotic], she became my hero.
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The words to a song I wouldn't be caught dead listening to are running through my mind
Radio is playing, turn it up higher,
Gospel music's bumpin' and the place is on fire...
It's struck me because not too long ago, my friends and I were having an argument: does this so called "christian music" exist? And if there is, christian music, does the song need to contain an explicit reference to God/Jesus/the Holy Spirit for it to make the cut? Isn't it just enough that the person singing the song be christian?
I don't know if it's just me, but I've always been of the opinion that there's no such thing as christian music. See music to me has always been just a vessel; it's the reactions the song elicits that determines whether it's a song I love or not. The message behind the song, who the song is directed at, what the writer had in mind when they were writing it, the forums in which it is marketed, the personality of the singer, these are some of the things that cause to me to believe in some songs and not in others. I guess for me it's never really come up whether or not a song fits into this mould society has branded "christian music." If I listen to a song and I hear it speak to me I like it and I collect it. There's one of us who was saying his understanding of Christianity is belief in Christ. You have faith, you love Him, and then everything else follows from there. If you think of being christian that way, [disclaimer: simplistic argument coming up - not my view in any way] then a song can't really be christian coz, well, songs can't believe right? :) The other people seemed to follow the more conventional path - if a song can comfortably be sung in church then it's christian. If it can't, it's not.
Take a song like Everything I Do, by Bryan Adams. Traditionally, he's been known as the guy that sings love songs, so even that just went into that category. But if you listen to it you'll notice it has none of the honey, babe, darling, beau or sweetie that characterizes every other love song out there. Because it's Bryan Adams we just automatically assumed he was singing it to a girl. And that is the ONLY reason we assume that. Now imagine it had been, say, Michael W. Smith, and you sang the exact same words with Jesus being the "you", eh, does that sound like worship or what? Same song, different artist. What stops Alan Jackson's Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)? from being considered a christian song? That he's not religious? That it's about 9/11? Seriously, look at the lyrics:
I'm just a singer of simple songs
I'm not a real political man
I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you
The difference in Iraq and Iran
But I know Jesus and I talk to God
And I remember this from when I was young
Faith, hope and love are some good things he gave us
And the greatest is love
Word for word out of the Bible! And there's very many artists that fall in this ostensibly grey area, as in their songs don't explicitly say "Jesus is Lord!" so they wouldn't pass for Sunday morning worship, but you can definitely see christian principles being advocated for somewhere in there. Creed, Switchfoot, P.O.D, Paradise Lost, Enigma, Relient K, Six Pence None The Richer, Matt Kearney, even Skillet and Sanctus Real and Group 1 Crew - I have no idea why those are considered gospel bands. It's not as clear cut as it would be for, say, Hillsong, and you see those ones literally sing their music in church and record it there. So to me there's no such thing as christian music. There's just good music, and everything else [and clearly, if you ask me Chevelle Franklin above falls under everything else].
Just before he died, Jeff Buckley released an album. It was called Grace, and the biggest song out of it was a song called Hallelujah. It was so good it ultimately made it into Rolling Stones' 500 Greatest Albums of All Time at #303. You'd think it was a christian album, wouldn't you, and that Jeff Buckley was a gospel artist, right? Ya, you'd be surprised. And if anyone still has doubts, you only need look at the market. The best selling gospel album of all time is the Preacher's Wife soundtrack, by, wait for it, Whitney Houston. I'm willing to bet it sold that much because it was Whitney - drugs and fights with Bobbi Brown notwithstanding. Does that sound like double standards? Again, for me there's just good music [=rock], and everything else.
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