A people without heads

Did a coin toss with a bond 25c yesterday
...and discovered that there is no "heads".
Nobody's face. No crest. Nada

So I thought, if we are a people without heads, our control must be our stomachs
We are driven, not by what is wise but by what is comfortable

That can extrapolate in a gazillion different directions, none of them particularly pleasant

A people driven by their passions will not be a people of integrity.
Maybe, rather than focusing on corruption (which it pretty much agreed to be a bad idea), we should focus on getting wisdom; becoming a people with a head again.

James 3:13 says
Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom.

What if Zimbabweans lived by wisdom and understanding?  What if our hallmark was good conduct, and our works were in the meekness of wisdom?
Can you imagine that?
Can you trust for that?
Can you pray for that?
Can you commit to that?

Breaking Bread. Slowly. Over time.

I have, on my shelf, a pile of sermons I have delivered. They are not 21^st century-style iPad documents.  They are written in pencil or ballpoint pen. I think better that way.

For a time I have thought to transfer these notes into readable articles and post them here. I still think I will. Slowly. Over time.

 

Last night, my wife and I went out to dinner at Bamboo Inn in Harare.

Before the dinner, I asked Uncle Google about Bamboo Inn. He came back with links to eatout.co.zw (which did not return any information) and to Dusty Miller’s article in the Zimbabwe Independent. That was it.

So I thought, “Why not add occasional Restaurant reviews as well?”

I will do that as well. Slowly. Over time.

 

Will these ideas increase the number of people who read this Blog?

I don’t know. But we will find out.

Slowly. Over time.

 

 

Zimbabwe election results 2013

23 years ago today in Kuwait, we faced what we believed was not going to happen.
It got ugly. It still is ugly for the people of the region who were "liberated" from dictatorship.

Today in Zimbabwe we possibly face what we weren't expecting.
Relatively, however sad we are as a people, it could be a lot worse.
This feels more like 1980 than 1990. And there are as many looking to leave today as there were then.

In 1980, the part of the world I lived in really thought that the name to watch was Muzorewa. We did not really know much of Mugabe.
We were wrong.  History suggests that those high up in other parts of the world knew more than we did of what was going on. All we knew, or believed, was that this was not good news.

Many left.
Choices are not always easy, but all power to those to make the hard decisions; choices to go, choices to stay.  We all made the decisions, and we have lived with them.

For the first decade or so, it looked promising
True, there was significant genocide in the rural south of the country, but I am in an urban area in the north.
And the buzz word was "Reconciliation", and it looked promising
Later, things changed.

What will be the buzz word this time?
For those who stay, what will they face?

What has really changed?
Are we still trusting human beings to be our hope?

David, in Psalm 20 reminds me

Now I know that the Lord saves his anointed;
    he will answer him from his holy heaven
    with the saving might of his right hand.
Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
    but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
They collapse and fall,
    but we rise and stand upright.

There is no useful hope in dictators, liberators or democratisers.
There is no useful hope in elections, election results or elected officials.

We trust in the name of the Lord our God, and we will rise and stand upright.
 - whether we feel it or not

The Easter message in “Life of Pi”

If you, like me, have seen and been blown away by the movie “Life of Pi”, I can recommend that you read the book! It reads beautifully and is, in many ways, even better – as you’d expect. The only time movies or stage plays exceed the original work on which they are based is when the original benefits from a haircut to get into two hours.

Full respect to Victor Hugo. He was an amazing writer. But the Schönberg/Boublil “Les Miserables” is one such rare example of a great book becoming a stunning stage show and now, in turn, movie.

But back to “Life of Pi”.

There is a scene in the movie where Pi discovers Christ while visiting a tea plantation. In the book, this is chapter 17.  If you haven’t seen/read “Life of Pi”, let me mention that Pi, a Hindu by birth and environment, has a full first name of Piscine, and his father runs a zoo. In this part of the story he is meeting with one Father Martin, a Catholic priest

That’s enough to explain the following extract.

Catholics have a reputation for severity, for judgment that comes down heavily. My experience with Father Martin was not at all like that. He was very kind. He served me tea and biscuits in a tea set that tinkled and rattled at every touch; he treated me like a grown-up; and he told me a story. Or rather, since Christians are so fond of capital letters, a Story.

And what a story. The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it’s God’s Son who pays the price? I tried to imagine Father saying to me, “Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas. Yesterday another one killed a black buck. Last week two of them ate the camel. The week before it was painted storks and grey herons. And who’s to say for sure who snacked on our golden agouti? The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done. I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed you to them.”

“Yes, Father, that would be the right and logical thing to do. Give me a moment to wash up.”

“Hallelujah, my son.”

“Hallelujah, Father.”

What a downright weird story. What peculiar psychology.

I asked for another story, one that I might find more satisfying. Surely this religion had more than one story in its bag–religions abound with stories. But Father Martin made me understand that the stories that came before it–and there were many–were simply prologue to the Christians. Their religion had one Story, and to it they came back again and again, over and over. It was story enough for them.

I was quiet that evening at the hotel.

That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnappers and usurpers. What is the Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama? Adversity, yes. Reversals of fortune, yes. Treachery, yes. But humiliation ? Death ? I couldn’t imagine Lord Krishna consenting to be stripped naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets and, to top it off, crucified–and at the hands of mere humans, to boot. I’d never heard of a Hindu god dying. Brahman Revealed did not go for death. Devils and monsters did, as did mortals, by the thousands and millions–that’s what they were there for. Matter, too, fell away. But divinity should not be blighted by death. It’s wrong. The world soul cannot die, even in one contained part of it. It was wrong of this Christian God to let His avatar die. That is tantamount to letting a part of Himself die. For if the Son is to die, it cannot be fake. If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me that it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect?

Love. That was Father Martin’s answer.

That’s how insane Good Friday is!

That is how much our Father wants to save His errant “lions”.

It is too easy to take Calvary for granted. It’s just another event in the Church year. It’s commemorated in just another Communion service.

It is radical.

It is God loving abundantly

Pitiful NGO or the Bride of Christ? It's all about the Cross

In his first public mass after accepting the Ring of the Fisherman, Francis I is reported to have said:

"What happens when children build sand castles on the beach? It all comes down."
"If we don't proclaim Jesus, we become a pitiful NGO, not the bride of the Lord," he said.
"When we walk without the cross, and when we preach about Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord. We are mundane. We are bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but we are not disciples of the Lord."
http://m.apnews.mobi/ap/db_6776/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=qlsj3cbN

I think I am going to like this Papacy!

Poll Rolling

Yesterday's Herald headline - "Poll roll-out begins" http://bit.ly/YtqsxT

To which my mind responds...


(Image source: http://bit.ly/10K4fPf)

Constitutional Referendum - 16 March 2013

Yes, I have an opinion
No, I do not have the right to express it
Yes, I think you should exercise your right if you have it
No, I don't think it is perfectly good or perfectly bad
Yes, I understand the difference between rights and guarantees
No, I don't expect all rights to become deliverables
Yes, I think it matters
No, I don't think it's of supreme importance
Yes, the sun will rise on Sunday
No, I won't be disappointed it it doesn't

Clam the way and the truth and the life

I'm sure it's not deliberate, but the electronic version of Rick Warren's "Purpose Driven Life" that I read on my phone has a thought provoking typo.  This morning I read that

Jesus said 'clam the way and the truth and the life."

...which makes an interesting mental image anyway you open it.

I first read this as "Claim the way".

Now, in a society (indeed, a continent) where various flavours of miracle focused prosperity teachings are endemic, the thought of whether Jesus could have meant us to "claim the way and the truth and the life" caused me to stop and think. 
What if this wasn't a typo? 
What if it was a paraphrase or even an alternative translation? 
Could there be another light here on man's (minuscule) part in the great salvation plan? 
What if God has provided the way, and like Nemo's seagulls, we just had to call "Mine!"?

The thought of naming and claiming not just material goods and "blessings" but the ultimate blessing of Salvation was disturbing but intriguing
But it was not a thought that came to a conclusion - mainly because I started writing it up for this blog and saw that in fact the word was "clam", not "claim".

'clam the way and the truth and the life".

How do I clam something?
Take the truth of who Jesus is. 
Crack it open, dig it out, savour it, remember it, never be satisfied, keep going back for more.

Rejoice for a comrade deceased

I have done quite a bit of thinking in the last few hours.
One thought that has kept coming to mind is from the pen of Charles Wesley:

Rejoice for a comrade deceased;
Our loss is his infinite gain;
A soul out of prison released.
And freed from his bodily chain:
With songs let us follow his flight,
And mount with his spirit above:
Escaped to the mansions of light,
And lodged in the Eden of love.

(My Salvationist roots are showing again! Wesley rejoiced for a
"brother". "Comrade" sings better!)

We don't think like that any more!
Since the word went around that one of the leaders in our church had
died, there have been a number of comments to the effect that we cannot
be sad because he is in a better place. But we don't in this 21st
century, seem to grasp the fullness of our Heavenly Hope as our
predecessors in the faith did.

Maybe we don't see heaven in all its glory because we don't see earth in
all its horror.
Maybe we see heaven as "a better place", but not as an "infinite gain".
Maybe we need to stop stumbling to keep up with a post-modern world
where right and wrong are relative lifestyle choices and stand again on
the Truth that this life is not good.
- to recognise again that we live in bodily chains.
- to stop paying lip service to Paul's pained exclamation: "What a
wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to
death?" (Rom 7:24)
- to stop thinking of life as fixable and acknowledge that death is
indeed "escape to the mansions of light" from the real murk of this life.

This world is not our home. And it's not a nice place. At our peril we
have come to be content with this fallen world and everything that comes
with it.

This world is not fixable. No greening of the environment or giving of
rights to the marginalised, however worthy, will in and of themselves
make the difference.
But that is not to say that we have no hope.
Exactly the opposite.
Seeing the stark horror of the world and the infinite glory of Heaven
reveals the immensity of the hope we do possess.

With Paul again, "we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about
those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no
hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so,
through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep." (1
Thes 4:13-14)

There is a glorious hope! (There is too an abhorrent horror for those
who have no hope, but that, beyond a call to intercede for them, is
another topic)
There is a heaven to gain and an earth to shun

'Tis Jesus, the First and the Last,
Whose Spirit shall guide us safe home,
We'll praise Him for all that is past!
And trust Him for all that's to come".
(Joseph Hart)

Mental Arithmetic is not dead

So I went to buy my lunch today and the change came to some odd amount of cents.
"Bother", I thought, "A credit note".

Let me explain.
For the past few years, Zimbabwe has been a "multicurrency economy". What this means is that you can officially use US$, sterling, South Africa rand, Botswana Pula, Euro or even Zim$.  Officially.  In practice, in Harare, you use US$.
But we have notes only, not coins.  What coins are in circulation are rand or occasionally pula.
So if I hand over US$5 for a $4.32 burger and chips, the normal 68c change is not going to happen.  The normal is that the store will issue a credit note for 68c and the next time I am in that particular store (and remember), I cash it in.

Not this time.

I was handed, without so much as a pause, R2.05 and one pula.
Mental arithmetic is not dead!  Who in a normal world can calculate that USc 68 = R2.05 + P1 and calculate it in less time than that?

I might spend my days working in the Payment Industry and helping people do clever things with electronic money.  This helps the coin dilemma.
But it comes no where near close to the cleverness of the Mental Arithmetic at the shop.

The light of truth; the lunacy of reason

Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep
matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express
sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one
created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of
which we look at everything—Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains
everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility—Detached
intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all
moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light,
reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made
Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the
patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a
special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which
all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We
are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something
both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle
of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable,
as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly
reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them
all her name.
G.K Chesterton - Orthodoxy

From which C.S Lewis presumably drew his own and better known
extrapolation:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only
because I see it, but because by it I see everything else
"Is Theology Poetry?" (1945)

Apathy or irony

At Saturday night's NAMA Ceremony, Dr. Tony Mhonda was awarded "Outstanding Arts Reporter"
Unfortunately, the nation's Outstanding Arts Reporter didn't attend the ceremony. 
Maybe he had a crisis, I don't know. 
Or maybe the National Arts Merit Awards are not of interest to an Outstanding Arts Reporter.

No matter.  At least his home paper publishes his picture on their report of the evening!

Honoured!

It's more than a question of being recognised. 
It's more than realising that there are many great performances that have not been recognised. 
It's more than the rosy glow that comes with other people being prouder of you than you are of yourself.
It's more than an opportunity to stop and remember that I am nothing in my own strength.
It's more than a trophy, a certificate, a program (and some cash).
It's more than the tantalising allure of things to come.
It's more than I can understand.
But I am honoured, and grateful.

From Changi to Bogota

So, my phone now knows where it is.
Or not.

As with the rest of us, its guidance mechanisms are only as good as its experience and its source - but not necessarily in that order.
The phone knows to ask the nearest GPRS tower for coordinates.
That's experience. That's a learned (programmed) response.

But the tower does not always give valid coordinates. The Source is fallible.

So...
I woke up this morning in my own bed in Harare, but to be told that I was in the Changi aea of Singapore.
And I am now sitting in Harare International Airport being told that I am in Bogota, Columbia.

Well done Econet Wireless!
Changi to Bogota in one morning with no jet lag.
I believe that setting the correct coordinates on the base stations is relatively simple. It just has to be done right. Someone has to be told. And they have to do it.

Thanks be to G-d this Christmas!
Not only did Him tell his engineers, the prophets, what to say, but He made sure they got it right.
And above that, just in case we didn't hear them correctly and still were unable to navigate correctly, He sent His Son to show the way; to BE the Way

Latitude is restored

In an earlier post I bemoaned that my mobile phone had revolted and refused to communicate with the interwebs. Sort of a UDI - Unilateral Declaration of Interuption.

The first nice lady I spoke to at Econet Avondale told me everything was fine and suggest "some men by Herbert Chitepo Ave who do these things". Guess not.

Now I wouldn't take "yes" for an answer when the phone still says "no".
A nice man at Econet Borrowdale said "O/S corruption". Makes sense. How else could one get a POP3 connection for mail and no internet connection?
Solution: Reinstall O/S
Which practically means Hard Reboot.
So backup / sync everything in sight...
And it's worked.


Getting back what apps I want will take time. But any I don't want, I have "reclaimed" their space!

I have just got Google Maps and Latitude up, and the "Where's Mike?" feature on the righthand column of this blog is thus back online!

So...
Does your HTC P3400 have a pathological fear of the internet?
A workable solution a hard reboot.
At least, it worked for me.

Do your backups!

Unrest anyone?

No thanks, We'll just go drink my Schweppes Lemon.  We'll meet you there.  Shuuwa!

(via Cynic Harare  who also points out that "Detractor is a farm vehicle!")

Silver Spur, Holiday Inn, Harare

The "spoil myself" day which has brought me to the Woodlands began with a juicy monkey gland steak at the Spur.
Quality is as good as ever. (although I still prefer my olives pitted)
And it was peaceful.
Maybe five tables in use in the whole place.
Just what I needed. Don't disturb me. Just let me settle down and unwind.
The apple pie was not too bad either. Not perfect, but plenty good enough.
Anyone know where Monkey Gland steak gets its name from?
What do they do with the rest of the monkey?

Lunch time!

There are a number of feeding sites like the one on the right of this picture. Vegetables lie strewn around.
I guess 2011 is not just a lean year for the people of Zimbabwe. Even the animals need food assistance.
Soon after this picture was taken, the group of eleven impala gathered tightly and got stuck in... before a giraffe wandered down to displace them.
Even the guinea fowl realised that the top of the tower might not have been meant for them.

Deep knee bends

Mukuvisi Woodlands

Ok, so it's not Ngezi.
That was the plan for today. But plans have changed such that I scratch Ngezi and the first night of the national One Act Play Festival at Campbell Theatre in Kadoma.

But, God willing, I'll get to the Festival tomorrow.

Meantime, sunny skies, baked veldt, ostriches, zebra, impala,ibis, assorted water fowl...
It's not all bad!