POLOKWANE – There is a breakdown of families and societies. A high percentage of God’s people have even accepted poverty and unemployment as a norm. Something is not right.
Maybe it’s time to reflect and ask an important question: “what went wrong and what needs to be done”.
Simply put, one of the main difficulties in our country is that somewhere, somehow some people have decided to run away from their responsibility to execute what was expected of them.
This is not a new phenomenon at all. This was the same with a man called Jonah in the Bible. We read in Jonah Chapter 1: 1-17 that after having turned down God’s assignment to go and preach in Nineveh, a place known to be against God’s way of living, Jonah decided to head towards Tarshish, running away from his calling.
The consequence of this was to find himself in the “belly of a whale.”
My fellow readers! Before we start judging Jonah, I think it would be wise to look at our own lives first. How many times do we disobey God’s calling to love our neighbours as we love ourselves, love our enemies just as Christ Jesus did, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, forgive others; but we have opted to do the inverse. .
I am compelled to align myself with the preposition that our country is sinking into the worst-ever time because those who have been called to bring sanity and hope have simply run away from their responsibilities.
Running away from God’s calling brings recurring storms in our own personal lives, in our families and the country we live in. It brings misery and unbearable pain. The results of this are the thousands of children wandering in our streets without food to eat, and a loud cry from both men and women, young and old, who weep because of the directionless path our country seems to have taken.
Stand up and be counted. Running away from any problem only increases the distance from the solution. It is a race you will never win. Yes, things might have gone wrong, but God trusts you to bring about sanity.
There is no elevator to success, sometimes you have to take the stairs.
Rev John Mokoena
