CALL OF DUTY 4

                                                   
Call of Duty 4 is the best game I have ever played and finished. It is an orgy of gunshots, a buffet of weapons, and a shoot-fest. The tidal rush of adrenaline as I sprayed terrorists with hot lead was incredible; the surge of excitement as I finished each stage was indescribable.
 
That is until I got to the stage where I had to follow a veteran called Capt. MacMillan to snipe at a nasty piece of work called Imran Zakhaev. It was pretty hard going on that level. The bad guys were milling all over the place like soldier ants after the smell of meaty stew; getting through them was a nightmare. With every little mistake I made, a pack of jugular loving ferocious canines were onto me in a flash. Even when I didn’t have the hot breath of these dangerous beasts on my neck, getting out of the radioactive zone was like finding a way out of the labyrinth of Crete.  I had to start the stage over and over again until it wasn’t real fun anymore. In short, it became frustrating. Amazingly this was on easy mode.

I was playing the game on two different systems. After failing twice on the other system which was on a more difficult mode, the game became a breeze, easy peasy. Guess what made all the difference. I stuck to Capt MacMillan like a red billed ox-pecker to an Impala. I always made sure he was in front leading the way.

William Ernest Henley said in his Invictus that he is the captain of his soul and that is where I erred. Instead of following the Captain, I gamboled off like an errant lamb and paid for it dearly over and over again because anytime I went off on my own my mission was compromised.
 
Mr. Henley was wrong and in the game of life this is where we also err.  We have never gone through life, so at best we would be recruits as raw as sashimi and not decorated officers. But there is Someone who is timeless. He has been there, done that and knows the ropes of every inch of life. God incessantly pleads that we should follow but we are naturally resistant to the instructions He has laid down for us, we would do anything but. This is the reason why life may be an arduous task, a circuitous tour where one keeps going back to the starting point, a monotonous voyage of stagnancy.
 
Truth is with the Captain, I had to show a lot of restraint and that was not fun. The dude was too boring for me. The thrill of the game for me was to empty my clips into the guts of the enemy with furious abandon but this brother was cramping my swaggering style. On the other hand, doing things my way invited an early exit. In some of the places I lost constraint and rushed into battle, the Captain would rather side step and avoid the danger. It was less thrilling but I completed the mission.

In life sometimes we have to let go of the fun to complete our purpose. For example a young lady who wants to get married but keeps distributing her sexuality like a charity doughnut to all and sundry would have to zip up to attain her purpose of getting married. Exercise is more boring than gorging ourselves with all kinds of ambrosial dainties but it’s the way to a healthier lifestyle (purpose is more readily achieved with a body that is not riddled with diseases).
  
For me it was a continuous battle. The THRILL of the game was constantly pitted against its MISSION, the PURPOSE of my existence as an SAS soldier. My survival was intrinsically woven into being guided by the Captain and following his instructions to the letter. It made the mission simpler, less stressful and way faster. I went on the next stage in no time.

Thrill constantly squares against mission and purpose like gladiators in an ancient arena: the charged pleasure for the iniquitous opposed to eternity, the sensuous bangs of illicit sex leading to divorce against the framework of marriage, the rapacious love for money resists the long term benefits of integrity, the stimulating blasts of drugs stand in the way of a meaningful future, the explosive high of profligate spending  matched against financial liberty, languid indolence faces off with intellectual progress. If the thrill always gets the upper hand, then we open ourselves up to shrapnel and feral beasts that tear up destiny like it were a parchment from the tomb of an Egyptian monarch. God help us all.
 
Any time we follow, we go onto a higher level of living. A group of fisherman was lost in the hum-drum of their fishing business until Jesus told them to follow him. They did and instead of fish, they were upgraded to fishing for men. From limited country bumpkins, they became limitless cosmopolitan city slickers.

Are you tired of your present level? Do you want to rise to the next level in 2012, you had better follow the instructions of the Captain of our souls like I as a new SAS recruit called “Soap” MacTavish followed Captain MacMillan.
 
WILL YOU FOLLOW???

HE THAT FOLLOWETH ME SHALL NOT WALK IN DARKNESS, BUT SHALL HAVE THE LIGHT OF LIFE…………

WORD AND WONDERS!

                                                                  

Ranking high on the list of my favourite superheroes is Shazam (Captain Marvel).  Ever since I saw his advertisement in a comic book showing him towering over his boyish alter-ego with a caption that read “the world’s mightiest mortal is a kid at heart”, I have remained absolutely in love.

The story of this hero is that a boy called Billy Bateson someday happened upon an old wizard who gave him the magic word “Shazam”.  Anytime this boy utters it, he is transformed into a mighty being with the super powers of legendary figures whose names form the acronym of the change igniting utterance.   The wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury.

The part of this that hits me like the fist of an enraged incredible Hulk is how one single word alters a lad into someone beyond his wildest dreams. That word for young Billy was an agent of change and amazement. It was inherently imbued with the power to effect astonishing feats by making his cells, muscles, bones, body, mind, soul, will, intellect go through metamorphosis like the conversion of a grubby caterpillar into an exotic butterfly. Likewise in “Masters of the universe”, Prince Adam is an ordinary fellow who turns into He-man, the most powerful being on earth when he holds the power sword aloft and cries “by the power of grayskull, I have the power”.

If you have been following my blog for a while now, you will have gotten acquainted with my reiteration that there is a thin line between fantasy and reality.

Words are usually much more than we think they are. Since they gush from some of us like water from leaky faucets, we make the mistake of thinking they are merely the wheels on which communication is conveyed. But that is where we miss it, WORDS ARE POWERFUL!

Have you ever noticed that spells are cast through the instrumentality of words! Blessings are rained through the same, curses too. No oath is covenanted absent them. The world we live in was formed with words.

The book of Genesis is filled with …..and God said, then God saw………….His words are active and powerful; saturated with living unction, they bring transfiguration and inspire wonder, they are supernatural. Our world was chaotic and disorderly until the Almighty spoke, then out of darkness came light; beauty came of ugliness and order out of chaos. When He wants to deal with a situation, He releases a life changing expression. An ancient Hebrew king recorded that when his people are mired in the quick sand of challenges, His words are the instruments sent to heal and deliver. There is dynamic power in His utterances to bring about a revolution. If God wants to remove a mountain, His words will become bulldozers and dynamite, if He wants a garden of daffodils, His words will become trowels, seed, water, sunshine and weed killers. If He wants to heal a septic patient or a cancerous growth, His words will become a living organism that will gobble up the inimical micro-organisms and malignant cells.  Jesus and his disciples found themselves in a vexing financial conundrum. He told Peter to go catch a fish and that the first one would have enough dough in its mouth to settle their bills. His words caused a chain reaction; not by happenstance a rich merchant while being ferried across the Sea of Galilee was counting his days proceeds when the ship hit a swell which made him lose a coin. The money was accidentally swallowed by a tilapia which got caught on Peter’s line (my own version of the story).

Simon was a shifty dude with the consistency of a reed who could not even stand up to a maid but the Messiah spoke words over him that turned him into Peter a rocky character that would become a bedrock of the early church. We are and become what his words say we are!

Mary even though a virgin conceived when she believed that God’s word can become a baby in her (are you hoping to jump the broom and it seems you are all alone like a marooned sailor on a hostile island, the word can become your mate).

Is your body continually ripped with the cat-o-nine tails of sickness and limitations? Does the tremor of challenges rattle the foundations of your marriage? Has the blight of lack tarnished the verdant growth of the fields of your finances? Have the orchards of your life stopped bearing fruits? Does your career swing like a yo-yo in the hands of a manic clown? Do you need the supplements of wisdom, strength, stamina, power, courage and speed that make one extraordinary? All you need my friends is the transforming power of your Creator’s words. YOU NEED A REVELATION! WHAT HAS HE SAID ABOUT YOU? WHAT DO YOU HEAR? For it is as you imbibe and speak those words that you will find yourself and your circumstances transmuting from an infantile state into a marvelous one like the word shazam turned an unassuming kid into Captain Marvel. All the growth and fruitfulness you need is in one word planted into the heart of your spirit.

Experiencing the miraculous in 2012 is dependent on your life being illuminated by the light of God’s word, quickened by the power of revelation. Whatever he tells you will come to pass because He watches over his words to bring them to pass. One of the popular catch phrases of Stone Cold Steve Austin in his hey days was a very emphatic “that’s the bottom line because Stone Cold said so”. If a human can be so cocksure of his statements, how much more the Master of the universe, He would rather self destruct than see any word He speaks to you fall to the ground.

This is what would make 2012 a year of WORD AND WONDERS!!!

 …… AND SO MIGHTILY GREW THE WORD AND PREVAILED!!!

2012

                                                       

                                              

There was something about the apocalyptic theme of 2012 (the movie) that could make one break out in goose bumps as huge as the Andes’.

The hair raising tsunamis, the heart racing earthquakes, the spine chilling disasters that marked the end of the world were almost too much for one’s imagination to conceive.  They were petrifying!

The globe has been inundated with different tales about the world stopping in its tracks in 2012. I read somewhere that following the movie people bought coupons on the internet in the bid to escape destruction when calamity strikes (isn’t it quite preposterous and hilarious that people would buy tickets to avoid death and destruction instead of repenting from nefarious activities).

For me the flick’s conclusion was quite intriguing in the sense that we were not told what happened to the survivors. Did they ultimately meet the end in the depths of a watery tomb like their unfortunate counterparts or did they survive the odds. But I think that was left for our imagination to decide by the producers.

The movie brought to my mind a similar story that happened in the genesis of creation. It was about a man called Noah, his family and the animals in his ark. The world as at then was wiped out by rain leaving this man and his family in a waterlogged earth. Everything had gone south; the world had drowned in the furious tears of heaven mingled with that of terror crazed earthlings. The planet was dead and silent. The only sound heard was that of rippling waves as the vessel was tossed to and fro in the mischievous grip of nature’s wrath .

Something then happened that changed the whole scenario, the scriptures recorded that God remembered Noah and his family. He sent a wind that dried up the world for them and gave the man a rainbow of promise.

You see it doesn’t matter how your previous years might have been nor the kind of sustained pressure the last years might have poured down on you.

Have the rains of life tried to pound you into submission? DON’T WORRY!  I believe strongly that the old is gone and the new has come. You are not forgotten or forsaken. Irrespective of the predictions by the bookmakers, this is your year of positive change.

The last years might have been so cold that you have gone into a frostbitten hibernation.

Have you stopped feeling? Has life has become a stuporous feast? But the truth is the winter season prepares a seed for spring.

I believe God will remember you this year! It all depends on whether you can see the RAINBOW of His promises, the bright colours of a better tomorrow. The rainbow tells us that the things that plagued us yesterday cannot overcome us tomorrow. It impresses on our hearts that the possibilities of tomorrow are better than that of the past. Can you see His assured token of a better future?  

In the midst of all that bleak landscape of never-ending water, Noah sent forth a dove which brought back an olive branch to him. Release your faith and it will come back to you with something that will tell you your life will be green again; your colours will reign once more. Your destiny will be sweet again. Things for you will become better than normal. Out of the oceans of pain will bloom trees of fruitfulness. Your heavens will once more be filled with the joyous cackle of singing birds. All you need to do is to allow the winds of God’s good fortune to blow away the memories of the excruciating agony of days gone by, the flood of pain induced tears. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy!

This is not a year of death but glorious life. You will not drown; you will not be submerged by evil but by blessings. But you will need to sign unto Noah’s friendship terms with the One who controls the seas and the elements.

Welcome to 2012, THE DAWN OF NEW THINGS, THE SPRING OF HOPE!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

REMEMBER NOT THE FORMER THINGS, BEHOLD I WILL DO A NEW THING……..CAN YOU NOT SEE IT……………..????