Unforgiveness: My journey to forgiveness

I thought of writing this post for a while now and I had convinced myself that I would not write it. Until the other day, when having fellowship with a couple of friends and 99% of us shared how we have held on to unforgiveness and just to add on top,that same day, we had a function and a lady pulled me aside and shared with me how her baby daddy abandoned her and she had a lot of unforgiveness in her for along time until she decided to let go.

Allow me to get real with you and share my journey....
My dad passed away when I was 10 years old.....this changed a lot for us.. we were now the three of us..my mother..my big brother and me....for me death was not really a concept that I thought of at such a young age so it was never really hard for me as it was for my mother and brother.

 It was not as hard until......I noticed that we no longer had visitors at home...I mean we used to host people every weekend when my dad was around....it got harder when I noticed that my relatives stopped coming over....and suddenly it became HARD, that is when it hit me that him passing away meant that we were ALL ALONE...

It got harder when I got older and I was told of how my mother's name never appeared in the obituaries because my relatives deliberately removed it because they never liked the fact that my father married outside their tribe.... I was told of how they tried to remove my mother from his will..I thank God they did not manage to.....
Years passed and I would meet my relatives once a year and exchange pleasantries and fake a smile....They would ask how mother was and all I wanted to tell them was..."why on earth would you want to know?" but I would just smile and say she is fine and she passed her greetings...
.....
15 years later....I am going through a mentorship program and the instructor tells us to write some sort of a time line for our lives...sharing both the good and bad times and to reflect and see how the events have shaped the person that you are today...so as he goes round he notices a piece of paper from my timeline written..."shunned by my relatives" ....he looks at me and says I should meet him for counseling...all that time am thinking "counselling for what? I am fine" so I never met him after....

A few months later....I am talking to God about something I want to do ....and I hear a voice say "you need to let go of the unforgiveness in your heart" ..."what unforgiveness?" ....."you need to forgive your relatives".....I pause and think to myself...."but I have".......then I flashback to when my aunt wrote to me on Facebook that she loved me...and I remembered the feeling of disgust I got and thought to myself "yeah right"...this is when it hit me that I have never forgiven them 15 years later....sounds crazy right???

I have sat down listening to sermons about forgiveness and I really never though that the message was for me...so I would switch off during these sermons.....
God had to reveal this for me...because on my own I do not see my flaws.....but He does....
I decided that I will tell them in one week's time when I see them that I have forgiven them and release myself from this burden....I really do not know what will happen next....I cannot really say that now I can hug and kiss them..but am trusting God to get there...

I do not know your story...maybe its your dad....your mum...brother...sister...friend...relative...a stranger...who hurt you so bad...that you cannot imagine ever moving from that point of hurt and forgiving them......
My prayer for you today is that you will allow God to take you through that journey...to allow God to heal those wounds  and to allow Him to teach you how to forgive after all...He showed us what it means to forgive because He says in His word...that HE WILL REMEMBER OUR SINS NO MORE......HE REQUIRES OF US TO FORGIVE OTHERS JUST LIKE HE FORGAVE US.....

He never asks us to do something that will not be of good for our lives...so today I will ask you to say this prayer:

Dear Heavenly Father, I have been hurt by (say name) and I do not want to forgive them....but today Lord I ask you to heal me and help me to forgive (say name). I am ready Lord to allow you to teach me how to forgive so that I may do your will and so that I may die so that you may live. AMEN

In pursuit of the ONE

A while back I asked a few ladies what they look for in a man, I got an overwhelming response. Then I asked them what they would bring to a relationship when they meet this man and well.....lets just say I got the first response after I had eaten lunch, read a newspaper and watched a movie....(okay, I might have exaggerated) but all in all that question made them stop and think before they answered.

Hollywood has painted this picture in our minds of the "one"...you know the one who when you meet there is always a background song..the one who makes your belly tingle...the one you want to ride off into the sunset with....
We spend so much time in pursuit of the "one" we forget we should be working on becoming the "one"....
Disclaimer: I do not  believe there is that one person in the world for someone...so there is no such thing as the one....otherwise we would miss out if that one person ends up marrying someone else's the one...(stay with me now)

As human beings we are programmed to always look out for ourselves and this one of the reasons why we tend to focus so much on how someone else can benefit us and rarely look at how we can benefit others.

Just to take a few responses I got when I asked about qualities to look at.:
Example 1:He must be a man after God's heart...Question: Are you a woman after God's heart?..what makes you think that kind of man would be attracted to a woman who halfheartedly follows Christ?
Example 2: He must challenge me intellectually.....when was the last time you picked up a book? learned something new? are you as stimulating as well?
Example 3: He should be hardworking......sis, do you work hard at your job? in school? do you go all out to achieve your goals?

I could go on and on with the examples, point is.....during your single hood you should strive on becoming the "one"...cultivate the qualities that you think would make a good spouse...develop your character...grow spiritually.....pick up a book.....have fun.....discover yourself and learn ways on improving yourself instead of actively looking for the one because you will miss out on that person because simply you will have nothing to bring to the relationship.

When laughing leads to compromise

I am just from watching a "funny" video of a man who was chasing his crush and his wife shows up and he starts dancing...it is "funny".......Oh...pardon me, let me explain why I use the quotation marks...you see I do not see anything funny with a married man chasing another woman no matter the humor they try to put in it.......
I have received so many "funny" clips..audios.images through social media and some I am even tempted to share until the Holy Spirit convicts me...then I try to rationalize that it was shared in a Church group am in so it has to be okay.....

What am I getting at?
The impact of Christianity is not felt so much because we have compromised in one way or another and one way that we have compromised and we do not seem to notice is in the jokes we listen to, laugh at and share......


The problem?
You see why would you as a Christian who reads the Bible and believes it as true....laugh at the video of that man chasing his crush when the Bible condemns adultery? Oh...am being too spiritual???
Why would you as a Christian share a "funny" image with curse words when the very Bible you believe clearly says that;

Ephesians 5:4: Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.


Colossians 3:8: But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth....

Why would you as a Christian sit down watching a stand up comedian making jokes that are obscene and laugh.?...

Why would you as a Christian share "funny" audios, videos, pictures when you believe that God has called you to be holy just as He is holy.?

Why do we want to fit in so much into the world that is so anti-Christ?

Why do you feel the need to be labelled as cool when it requires you to go against the very things that Christianity stand for?

The solution...

I believe that if you never get the conviction of the Holy Spirit regarding certain jokes, then you do not spend enough time with God.... because the more you spend time with God...the more you get to know what pleases Him......

So start spending more time in His presence......

If you are hanging around people or you are in a group in social media where people share so much of these "funny" jokes ...I suggest you share with them that you do not entertain such jokes....if they do not respect your stand...cut them off...it is better to make it to heaven without one hand.....and one eye....

If it is the comedy movies you watch...the standup comedy shows you watch....I suggest you stop......because if we say we are Christians we have to be willing to count everything a loss for the sake of Christ.......

It is high time we take Christianity seriously because Christ took it seriously to the point of giving His life for us....then we will be a light in this world....a salt that will not lose its saltiness.....we will be distinct.....and stand up for Christ when the world is against Him.

Lets NOT talk about sex

 

Last Sunday I sat through a sermon where the preacher was giving an example of how conflicts occur and she was talking about how young people get into "agreements" and this creates an atmosphere for conflict. mmmh....didn't get what she meant? me neither so instead of her calling things as they are and call it shacking up or come-we-stay arrangements she decided to just call it arrangements and failed to hit the nail on the head and drive the point home.

Then there was a time a certain church in Nairobi made headlines because of the way they decided to advertise their next sermon on sex and relationships. Every talk show for two weeks was talking about how they "failed" just because they were bold enough to say it as it is. I sit every day in loud 'matatus' where half..okay more than half of the music played is talking about sex....not just mentioning it..but in detail..such detail that makes you create a video in your head to go with the song (I need to stop procrastinating taking those driving lessons). So why is it that the world is so bold to talk about sex and no one complains but when the church is bold enough to even hint they are talking about sex..they get bashed?

I once wrote an article on sex and purposely sent it to the church editors to publish it in the monthly booklet.....they outright told me that the church does not post "such" articles....so if am not writing about how God is merciful, baptism, the holy trinity...etc my articles will not appear in the booklet.

I have a colleague who is always making fun of how church girls and boys...pretend to go on church retreats then a few months later the girl drops out of choir or praise and worship because she is pregnant....my first reaction to his statement was to get defensive but after thinking it through ...he was right....and why does this happen? Because the church is too "shy" to talk about sex.

The church has become too busy coming up with sermons that would bring in more people...certainly no one wants a small church ....so if the church is referred to as MEGA...the better...at what cost?

John 6:53: Jesus said to them, "Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

I can picture Jesus saying this to the crowd and probably the disciples going like..."There is that flesh eating sermon, now they will think we are a bunch of weirdos" another one going like.."why can't He just talk about grace and other nice things..He has to go all weird on us, we will certainly lose followers". But Jesus was focused on saving lives by saying the truth as it is, so you would either receive or walk away but as long as He had done His Father's will.

Mathew 5:13: You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

The church has lost its saltiness in such a way now it is conforming to the standards of this world......The church has become so afraid to call sexual sin as it is....fornication, homosexuality, adultery.....in the name of growing the church...to build bigger structures....to be known as a MEGA church.

I particularly touch on sex because I have attended youth services and teens' services whereby the pastors touch around this topic but never really talking about it. 

So what happens when the world is louder than the church when talking about sex? We start having conversations on giving teenagers contraceptives......we start having kids as young as 13 going to clinics to abort....we start having teenager's having multiple partners because no one ever sat them down and told them why God says sex is sacred.....why God says that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit....no one told them sex is just not  physical its beyond that and you form soul ties with people...that saving yourself for marriage is not lame but its the best thing you can give your spouse....

.Instead the church has left it to the world to tell them..that sex is an art that is to be perfected by having many partners....that you should "test drive" the person you are dating before you marry them.....that being a virgin is something to be ashamed of....

Its time for the church to be bold.....because we will be held accountable for the Gospel that Christ left for us to preach...when He comes back having a MEGA church will not matter what will matter is how many souls we would have saved by being bold in sharing the gospel as it is...no sugar coating...but being real.

MOMENTS TO REMEMBER

 

There are moments when I have wanted to give up, because the situation I was in was not changing, I mean I prayed about it,cried to God about it, I did my very best to make the situation change but nothing!
In such moments I am reminded, that God's perfect will must prevail even if it means I do not get what I want....I am reminded that when I decide to trust God, I have to let go of my plans which includes my timing. So in my weakest moments, I am reminded that God will renew my strength and I will soar on wings like eagles and I will run and not grow weary and walk and not be faint.

There are moments when I have had my heart broken and my dreams shattered....all I wanted to do during these times is to stay angry at God for allowing these things to happen to me. In such moments I am reminded that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, I am reminded that God has plans for my life that are aimed at giving me hope, I am reminded that He already had a plan for my life when I was in my mother's womb. I am reminded that He is able to do exceedingly, abundantly, above and beyond what I can ever imagine or think of. So in my pain, I am reminded that He is faithful to complete the work He started in me.

There are moments when I have lost my way and I stopped looking to Christ to be my source and instead turned to myself and other people. In these moments, I am reminded that there is nothing I can do without Him, I am reminded that God is the source of all things, I am reminded that what is impossible with man is possible with God, I am reminded that I should always ask God to bless my plans in order for them to succeed. So, in my ignorance, I am reminded that I cannot live without Him.

There are moments when I worry about my life and the paths I take. In this moments I am reminded that I cannot add any days to my life by worrying, I am reminded that my life is in the hand of the creator of the universe and nothing can shake me off that hand, I am reminded that I should not be anxious about anything but in everything I should make my request made known to God, I am reminded that the peace God offers is beyond human understanding.So in my moments of doubt, I am reminded that my Father is the maker of Heaven and Earth.

There are moments I have felt inadequate and felt like my looks, my gifts and my qualifications are not enough for the tasks I have been entrusted to do. In these moments I am reminded that I am able to do all things through Christ who strengthens me, I am reminded that if God is for me, who can be against me?, I am reminded that I should be strong and courageous for God is with me. So in my fear, I am reminded that God has not given me a spirit of fear but of power, love and self control.

5 THINGS I WISH EVERY WOMAN WOULD KNOW

1. Christ should be your first love

The reason why as women we usually end up giving our hearts to the wrong man is because we don't understand what real love looks like so we tend to fall for the counterfeit love offered with the first man who whispers in our ears sweet words.
If only we would take time and fall in love with Christ and have a real relationship with Him first before letting any man have our hearts then we will start looking at ourselves through God's eyes where we are beautiful, loved, talented, smart.....and maybe then we would truly understand our worth and raise our standards and in turn only a man who has asked Christ about you will be able to win your heart.

Revelation 2:4-5 But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lamp stand from its place, unless you repent. 

May we never forget that there is already a man who loves us so much that He thinks we are to die for, may we never forget there is already a man who pursues us relentlessly to just see us have life in abundance, may we never forget that there is a man who already says that we are beautifully and wonderfully made....may we never forget that Christ loved us even before we loved Him.
  
2. True love waits
This sentence has been used so many times and nowdays it is only applicable when you are talking to teenagers about love because no grown woman believes this.
Ladies you need to understand that even if sex is a need to men they can still wait if they truly love you. The minute a man pushes you to have sex with him before marriage it should be a red flag and you need to run because that man is not in love with you. Yes, he whispers to you during sex that he loves you...no hunnie he is in love with the sex. Yes, he has given you time when you are dating...maybe you made him wait for three months or a month before you gave it up to him but fact remains is that he is NOT your husband why do you think he has the right to have your body?

Ephesians 5: 27: that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.

Do you know that the man should present you without spot or wrinkle, holy and blameless at the altar?

Ladies, its time you understand that a man who truly loves you  will wait for you.

3. Tearing down other women is just tacky!
News flash: There will always be another woman who is prettier, more curvy, taller, slimmer, has a better job, a better car, a better dress, a better looking man....you name it....so deal with it!
What benefits us women to tear down other women because we view them as competition while the men are busy striking deals with each other, mentoring  younger men and helping each other up the ladder?
I believe women are unique and we are able to achieve so much more than we can imagine if only we helped each other instead of tearing down each other.

 Proverbs 31:26 :She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue

The woman described in proverbs 31 speaks with wisdom, meaning she thinks before she talks, she does not slander, she does not gossip. She speaks in kindness meaning she does not insult others. 
Its time women realize that being an exceptional woman means building other women because it shows that you are confident in your own skin and you do not need to put another woman down to feel better about yourself.

4. Modesty is still a virtue
I once read this statement made by a man "If your goal as a woman is to be sexy, then you will only attract men whose primary goal is to have sex".
We have come to believe that less is better when it comes with the way we dress, the more heads we turn the better we look. without realizing that we are turning heads for the wrong reasons.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20: Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

1 Timothy 2:9-10 :Likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works.

1 Peter 3:3-4: Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious. 

May we strive to be beautiful inside and out, may we love ourselves in such a way we do not feel the need of proving it to the world. May we use wisdom in  choosing what to wear.

5.Godly man Vs "Saved" Man

I have heard so many women say "saved" men are the worst! because they are pretenders.When i further investigate why they say so...I always end up with giving this difference...

A "saved" man will go to church every sunday, quote scripture but still try to get you in bed. A godly man will go to church, quote scripture and protect your purity.

A "saved" guy would have no problem trying to sleep with you before marriage.He wants the relationship between just you two. He wants little if any accountability  and little or no interaction with family members. Forget about him agreeing to meet your pastor or even your parents before he takes you out. He is afraid of commitment and meeting those people will scare him off. He doesn't want everyone's opinion and wants everyone in his "business." Marriage is not the goal, he just wants to date with the selfish goals of having fun and enjoying romantic attachments.
During courtship, the man after God's heart works at keeping you both pure because he honors you and God. He will talk to your parents, pastor, or mentor in  life when he is interested in pursuing you. He will be invested in getting you to grow in the Lord and will initiate prayer and lead bible study. He seeks the accountability and wisdom of their parents,other mentors, and Christians. He wants to truly get to know you in a more platonic setting without the pressures of physical intimacy or emotions clouding your view. His goal is to seek to determine if it is God’s will for him to marry you.

Do not take the man at his word....the proof is in the fruits he produces. Observe his life, is he seeking God more than you....is his life directed by God?

Eventually ladies a man who is not led by God will only lead you to himself. 

So do not confuse the two..there are godly men out there who are truly after God's own heart let not the counterfeits fool you.