Useless Column: ‘God is confused’

Praise the Lord! Ohhh! Yes, yes, yesss! Who is that knocking on my door wanting to break it down? You? who, Bra Panyin? Oh ok. Please come in o, Chairman. You know today is Friday and, as usual, I am scribing a certain non-fa here. You are welcome, Sir. Please take a seat and read this article next week before I get it published.

I am just wondering what is wrong with our sanitation behaviour o. Everybody keeps throwing rubbish anywhere anyhow. Go to Kaneshie market, Darkuman, Lapaz and see. Ah! With all these, at the end of the day when somebody dies of cholera or drowns in floodwaters after the slightest rainstorm like what happened recently in Accra where plastics were racing at Olympics with each other into our gutters, we begin to ask: ‘God, why? Ern? God, I say why, han? The worst consolation expression is this: ‘God knows best’ for the filth we have generated? Hmmmm!

As adults, why can’t many of us be clean small! God has a problem indeed. ‘Pastor, I am owing somebody GHC40 and cannot pay. Anytime I see the person, I dodge or walk s33s33 (in reverse order). I want you to pray for me so that God can intervene so I can pay or you can let the one I am owing write it off’! God has a problem! So you don’t know that if you owe you have to pay back? Or is it the fact that anybody can just call a radio station bcos a pastor is available on radio?

Some of the least places to expect help from people is the church, or you don’t know? Make no mistake! Abeg, I don’t know about your own church but one of my former churches, they would need your help for church projects but direct you to God if you need help. For God to do exactly what if the church on earth cannot come to my aid?

The church is supposed to be a place to have a relationship with Jehovah God not a solution centre or a clinic. Many of us are fair-weather Christians seeking God’s face only when we have problems. When a friend calls you only when he or she is in need of something, is that one too a good friend? Ahaaaan! It is the same way we make God feel anytime we only seek Him when we have a problem. If you are far from God, the devil gets closer and then you run back to the same God for solutions to fight the devil – what a reactive strategy! Haaba! My friend, why? Eish! Looks like I am preaching to myself now o. Hahaaaaa!

At a point in time, things were tough for me and I started ‘seeing visions’. I could see what would happen in the next minute and it would come to pass! I think I was so lucky I was personally called by God to do his work and ‘win souls’!

When the thing started, I thought it was magic, though I reckoned that hunger can make you hallucinate – clear symptoms of cases of psychosis and manic disorders, in my own case! I could look at people and tell them ‘their mothers are women’ and they would believe me and give me money! I was enjoying the ‘ministry’. Occasionally I failed in my prophecies as nothing happened to those ‘victims’ of my prophecies.

Alansi, my primary school mate was my Assistant pastor. As for him, akpeteshie and him were like shoes and socks – one can hardly move without the other complementing.

We managed to get a small cyto classroom where we used to preach, dance and sing. The church started growing. I know the reason most churches have women dominating but I I don’t know. My wife suspects everything in this world being superstitious. She sees cockroach inside fridge and she sees either her auntie or my uncle coming to put poison in our soup. Ao!

Some women in my church believed anything including the fact that their gas cylinders would be filled even if they didn’t go to buy. Some of the men too did. They gave me money for blessings they believed they would get. Hmmm!

I decided to buy airtime on radio to preach. That was when you would notice that either many Ghanaians have a problem or God does and we keep confusing God every time! We don’t know exactly what we want Him to do for us. The phone-ins broke my heart. Ei. Somebody can call you to tell you ‘Pastor, pray for my husband bcos he is having a toothache’. With my artificial patience, my response to this one was for her to send her husband to the hospital first but she got angry with me bcos her husband’s problem was spiritual and not medical. Yea! God has a problem because we are confusing Him.

Someone called to say I should pray for him bcos he has a problem of womanizing. Though I didn’t see that as a problem, I still prayed for him anyway.

Whenever there was a revival in my church [where do I even go to church?], people would come with the expectation that you would prophesy about them. Even if you don’t see anything prophetically, they insist you have to tell them something at all cost because you must see something. One lady after putting in GHC100 in the offertory bowl which she claimed was a gift to God was upset with me. Why? Bcos after praying for her, I didn’t see anything and she expected me to say she should be careful with her colleagues at work bcos of what I saw spiritually or I should have told her that something bad would happen to her. It is true that the churches are full not bcos of snakes and scorpions but bcos of fellow human beings but must everything be spiritually motivated? Haaba!

Someone’s prayer request was that since he finished his national service 4 years ago he has been praying from Monday to Sunday in Achimota forest but still has no job. What does this one want God to do if he is using working hours to pray instead of looking for a job? He is still there saying ‘I receive’.

Some will come with prayer requests to revenge someone who has offended them and expect God to ‘strike’ their enemies dead. These are the ones that resort to juju if their enemies are still progressing. Yet, the same person person wants God to give him visa to travel.

Testimonies of missing goats being found later were in abundance! Some will call you and you won’t even know how to go about the prayers!

Another person called ‘pastor, for three days now, I have not been able to visit the toilet and something tells me it is a spiritual withdrawal of licence by my auntie. Wey kan licence? ern! Another one called to say her male cat has disappeared for 3 days and so I should pray for the ‘cat to come home so that the devil will be put to shame’. The craziest of all the prayer requests was this: ‘Pastor pls I am a hw3so mami (caretaker) of somebody’s house at Gbawe and I have lived in that house for 5 years now since it was being constructed. Now the house owner says he and his family are moving in. Pastor, please let something happen to him so that he forgets that house belongs to him’. How will God answer this prayer? God indeed has a problem if we keep giving him problems we can either solve ourselves or create by ourselves!

As for my church prayer team, they call themselves ‘Prayer Warriors’. They were a bunch of konkonsa people and stylishly exposed the ills of their friends in the church. ‘Beloved, Cynthia our sister has suddenly fallen out of love from Brother Jacob all bcos of the last failed abortion that resulted in she giving birth to that moron two months ago. Yes, the Bible says in Proverbs chapter ‘whine whine’ that ‘God forgives the sinner’. They were unmarried but living together. Let us pray so that God will intervene and bring them back together again and at the end of the day, the glory will be to God. Let’s pray…pray….pray!!!’ Konkonsa prayers paaa nie! I say prayyyyyyyyyyy….

It’s Fridayyyyyyy, and brethren and Sistern, I want us to prayyyyyyyyyyyy… for hmmm!