More Than A Pinch Of Salt...

On this as any other Sunday I and many other worshipers rose and went with a rather more sceptical outlook to the glorious well built hallowed walls of that sanctum where ordinary man goes with his sins for his chance to feel his spirit stirred, motivated and moved, to get a slice of joy to his otherwise bleak week. With open minds and hearts we heard the word form that leather bound book we may not have read during the long and hard week gone by, we sat in patient prayer until –at least for me- it came to that time in the service where the pastor clad in his pristine white robe called for however needed prayers or healing to leap to our feat and walk to the alter to receive the desires of their ailing weary hearts. I stayed rooted to the wooden pew having during the weekend seen the expose that centred around a man of the cloth ‘Apostle’- yes that’s what he calls himself, to which any real ones would be awakened and rolling around in the centuries old Jerusalem tombs- Michael Njoroge whose Gospel Fire Ministries hit TV screens around the nation this weekend when the wool he was pulling over the eyes of his congregants and TV audience finally came shattering down when a commercial sex worker whose lying tongue he had hired- to fake an ailment give testimony then submit to ‘healing’ prayers then reappear magically cured a  week later. For her honey lased words and crocodile tears she was promised a fee anywhere from 2,000-10,000-not bad for a few lies and a couple of tears- she would also convince her colleagues to join her in the racket and make some quick cash. All was fine and well for a while for Esther Mwende and her colleagues until after a while the money stopped coming and when her repeated pleas to be paid the abuse came instead.

Now I have always sceptical of televangelists who pray for and lay hand on the sick and especially those who do so to the supposedly demon possessed this recent scam just served to deepen my mistrust of not only ‘empowered’ televangelist but priests and men of the cloth in general. Now we have long since known of priest and churches habits to skim off the collection plates to beautify their growing mansions, grow their wardrobes – it takes money to buy those smart three piece suits the pastor wares-and to send their kids to lavish private schools and universities etc, but this has seemed to strike an all time low note in schemes.

 At a time when people need something to believe in within the country when random death, murder and accidents are all too common man is clamouring to the oak or metal door of their safe places, and even now when in recent months the church has become rather unsafe still we flock to its walls eager to believe in the biblical power and existence of a good old fashioned miracle.

It is not only within the walls of the church that country wide hopes and belief in goodness were dashed but they took a heavy blow when we learnt of the prevalence of a new most sinister scheme by thieves, kidnappers and murderers to walk away scot free from their crimes by using a mere scratch card to frame innocent people whose only crime was to recharge their phones and randomly dispose of the useless card. Apparently the thugs use the scratch card to track the person who loaded that card pin code into their phone and thus implicate the innocent man or woman to a crime they never committed. When one reloads their phone with credit it is safest to tare the card up into tiny pieces to avoid spending time in a jail cell.

Now more than ever our powers of discernment and cynicism need not fail us as we need to view-by the looks of it- all the institutions in the country and indeed the globe to avoid being had as jobs are in short supply and creativity-however skewed and corrupted- is at an all time high we need to view almost-if not everything-with more than just a pinch of salt.