Author Archives: Calabarboy

issues

CONFESSING TO WHO?

A while back I became convicted about certain teachings which we have come to be comfortable with in church. This brought about my close and careful reexamination of the matter of confessing sins by believers. The usual way is to confess our sins to God, repent and He will forgive us. There are scriptures we use when we start out in a prayer meetings; scriptures like 1 John 1:9 “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” When this is done, we then begin speaking to God and confessing our sins quietly to Him and letting no one else hear, afterwards it’s to God we confess to. Very convenient isn’t it? Very easy to do and get away with and do it time and time again, because no one is holding us accountable, only “God”.

Well, I had another reality dawn on me as it has to do with God’s mind on this issue. When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, He didn’t hesitate to show them the pattern. When He got to the issue of sins, he put it this way: “And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors.“ This shows that we are to ask God to forgive our sins. But the question now is if we are meant to confess our sins to God? I have read several articles that hold this position and wonder if indeed we are practicing the right thing.
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issues

SOME THOUGHTS ON NIGERIAN FOOTBALL

My dad was a speedy left winger who played all the way into the then popular Nigerian Ports Authority Football team in Nigeria. He probably quit playing to pursue a career in Law. His younger brother was the captain of the legendary St. Gregory’s College Football team, who were champions of the Principal Cup in Nigeria many years ago. My mother, on the other hand, was a serious football fan who frequented stadiums with the paraphernalia of her chosen team. She only stopped going to the stadium when she almost lost her ear after a fight broke out in a tension soaked match between Nigeria and Ghana in 1969 or thereabout. But she continued her support for local Nigerian teams of which Shooting Stars was the object of worship. I can actually remember my mum having the then coach of Shooting Stars over for lunch at our house in Calabar when they came to play against the Calabar Rovers. Of course they were beaten (smiles). My point is that for most of my life, I have been engrossed with analyzing and assessing skill, technique, team strategy, and pattern of play in football; and I’m proud to say that this has lasted as long as I have had the ability to swallow lumps of eba.

I was keen on taking Football as a major sport until I found that I was easily exasperated after running around the pitch. For this reason I played in defence position and still ran out of breath easily. I also played for one full year in secondary school and was coached by an extremely passionate Irish Reverend Father, who took soccer like a national call to warfare. He approached it with a kind of diligence that was akin to qualifying examinations. Once you made a mistake and didn’t follow his laid down pattern of play, he will stop the match, pull you out of the field and give you a few strokes of his bulala, then send you back to do as he says. The fear of the Reverend Father was the beginning of conventional football wisdom in St. Patricks College Calabar. As far as I can remember, my school team remained invincible until the Father was transferred elsewhere and his new team of course became the new invincible eleven. But as hard as his regime was, I learnt so much about the game.
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issues

FOR WANT OF MY FUTURE MY CHILDHOOD WAS LOST: ISSUES WITH MY MIS-EDUCATION (1)

I remember reciting this poem as a kid in nursery school and knew nothing of what I quoted. My fresh brain had crammed it and spat it out at the instance of Mrs. Nkuda. The poem went this way:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

When Shakespeare penned this down, he probably didn’t realize how perfectly fitted this sestet would be to describe some of the contemporary issues surrounding the process of education in much of today’s world. Unbeknownst to him, he was ordained a poetic prophet to a certain time; a time whose vagaries may have been too complex to comprehend at his time. Consequently, this poem has given me a historical frame through which I can share my thoughts on how mis-educated I feel today.

Now by ‘mis-education’ I do not mean the same thing as being uneducated. But I am speaking of a concept that encapsulates a whole process of wrong applications of the mind over time that result in a mediocre performance on life’s stage. At this stage of my life, when finding satisfaction in whatever I lay my hands to do is more than a wish, but a need, I find that I am less qualified to really get a hold of that life I so want for myself. How did this ever happen to me even after I went through formal education and doing very well at it for that matter?
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