What is Praise?

I want to simplify what has become a very mysterious topic in our days, so complicated that the normal believer must have an expert to explain what is plain in the scriptures.

Allow me to use our normal relationships, especially with our leaders.

What happens when a leader visits a region, especially a place far removed from much development?

Do the residents start with whining that they have been neglected for a long time?

Of course not.

They start by talking positive about the leader and his leadership.

In positions where leadership is got through the electoral process, they will seek to compare him with his predecessors to demonstrate to him that he is the best among all the leaders they have elected, even if he had just been elected.

They will tell him that they voted for him, even if he got a pittance of votes from that region, because of his good heart and development record even if he had never occupied a public office.

They will even sing songs that have been composed for that visit to make him feel good.

This is what will warm the leader’s heart immensely before they then make their demands.

That in simple terms is what praise is.

Praise is not singing, though it will sometimes involve singing. It is not dancing though the explosion of the same could very easily burst into dancing.

The detestable person we call a bootlicker is the embodiment of praise, only that he uses it for personal gain and against others.

Let us take it to the spiritual realm since that is where it is most spoken and taught.

Praise is not a song or series of songs.

Praise is simply telling God who He is, especially to you.

It is not running a commentary of what has been happening to you. It is not whining about what He has failed to do. It is not reporting the devil and his mischief. It is not telling Him how much faith you have in Him.

Yet the simple act of genuine praise will do all that and more.

But praising God is telling God in the best way you know how He has been good to you.

Gratitude and praise have a seesaw relationship.

Just as praise will very quickly lead to gratitude, gratitude will also result in praise.

Gratitude is recognizing God for what He has done for you and praise is doing the same for who God is to you.

One is looking at the person of God while the other is looking at the workings of God, the same God.

Hearing some of the songs being called praise is as scandalous as hearing a dirge in a wedding or a party song in a funeral.

Many have no relationship with the person of God or His acts.

To many people, any danceable song is praise and any slow song is worship even if both have identical lyrics.

But I will not write about worship in song since I have written about worship just recently.

Biblical Worship

But when David saw that his servants whispered, David perceived that the child was dead: therefore David said unto his servants, Is the child dead? And they said, He is dead. Then David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the LORD, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him, and he did eat. (2Samuel 12: 19, 20)

Many people associate worship with fun and a good time.

I have written of my reservations about our generation’s warped understanding of worship.

But I think it is warped because we are confused as to the object of that worship. Knowing the object of our worship will guide our worship aright.

As usual, I use extreme examples to make my point.

Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, (Job 1:20)

This is immediately after Job had lost everything and everybody he owned and loved just as David had lost a son he had gotten to love.

How close is that worship to what we call worship today? How many choruses did they sing to get them into the mood of worship?

Can you compare what you call worship with this?

It is important to properly identify the object of our worship since worship is inherently what guides our whole lives.

We worship what we can’t do without. We worship what defines us. We worship what we revere. We worship what makes us who we are. We worship what occupies a central place in our lives.

Let me give you a few examples of some of those objects.

Just look at your cell phone. Think of life without it. How long can you stay without it?

Think about the internet.

Don’t shout that it is just a tool since some are unable to concentrate even in church and must sneak some glances at those ‘tools’

Think about your TV.

Where have you placed it.

Is it not an altar that you are bowing to?

Think about your job.

Would you walk from that job if God ordered you to? Can you trash it if it does something contrary to your faith?

Think about family and relationships.

What I am saying is that we already have enough objects of worship that what we think is our worship is nothing different from the Hindus with their three hundred million gods, only that we do not have that many.

We therefore come to church to worship another deity.

But our lives are full of the worship of other gods, some that are of our making.

True worship of God says that it is God or nothing. I am content being yours. Though He slay me yet will I trust Him.

That is what we see in those two examples.

A study of David is a study of worship and of a worshipper.

The boy who stood up to a giant felt guilty for cutting a small piece of Saul’s cloth.

Why?

Goliath was blaspheming but Saul was a king, backslidden and rejected as he was.

David was guided by God’s revelation.

Look at him when he is overthrown and the priests want the ark of the covenant to accompany him.

And the king said unto Zadok, Carry back the ark of God into the city: if I shall find favour in the eyes of the LORD, he will bring me again, and shew me both it, and his habitation: But if he thus say, I have no delight in thee; behold, here am I, let him do to me as seemeth good unto him. (2Samuel 15: 25, 26)

The same ark signified God’s presence and could have been a very great motivator to his men and demotivator to his enemies.

But David worshipped God and not His representation.

His surrender is the worship I am talking about. And he said the same thing when his army was pleading with him to kill Saul who was seeking to kill him or Shimei who was abusing and insulting him to high heavens, even throwing stones at him.

That is the kind of worship that led him after his young son died.

The first aspect of worship is surrender. And I think the message can be complete even if I stopped here.

Do you know that in the Bible worship is depicted as prostrating before God?

That is an indication of absolute surrender to the object of worship.

You realise that it is the same thing that happened with kings before our time though I know it even happens in some kingdoms even today.

A worshipper is in effect saying, ‘I am totally under your control. Do with me as you would’.

Is that how we worship God?

You realise that one outward aspect of repentance is tearing of clothes, wearing of sackcloth and more or less bathing with ashes.

That also points at worship.

Clothes cover our nakedness and shame. Our respectability is reflected on our clothing choices.

Tearing them is therefore a clear statement to God that I am unworthy of any respect from Him. I am going to him worse than naked. Remember Isaiah 64:6?

Wearing sackcloth goes farther by saying I am completely and totally unworthy of respect, either from God or from fellow men.

Bathing with and sitting on ashes is going farther as a cry to God for mercy as I am really nothing apart from His mercy.

I am therefore losing everything, even my name and respectability to gain the acceptance of the One I have offended.

That is why repentance is rarely a private matter.

Again, repentance does not have excuses. It is only in rebellion that as I explained when I wrote about rebellion that someone looks for excuses.

Repentance also does not look for concessions. It is bare and only looking for forgiveness.

Why am I talking about repentance when the topic is about worship?

It is because the object is the same.

This means that both result from the same attitude.

It is only when my attitude towards God in repentance is right that I can relate with Him properly in worship.

When our repentance becomes a fun affair, is it possible to expect a somber worship? And vice versa.

However, can repentance ever be fun?                                                                                                                          

Yet we are inundated with release after release of extraordinary celebrations of repentance and revival.

This is a clear demonstration that the object of our worship is not the One we claim or think.

Repentance is brutal because the One we have offended is unlike us in every way.

He is holy in the fullest sense.

Meaning there is no middle ground between us and Him. Ther can be no negotiation to soften His stance towards our sin. I think this verse says it.

Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts. (Isaiah 6:5)

This is coming from a prophet, and not after he has sinned. It is coming from a servant of the same God.

Yet seeing the same God brings out the worst in him.

I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42: 5, 6)

And this is coming from a person God was boasting about.

And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? (Job 1:8)

Seeing God and knowing Him produces true worship.

I am simply saying that worship is the response of a person to the reality of God; or more accurately after an encounter with God.

And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die. (Exodus 20: 18, 19)

You may remember that Peter said a similar thing after realizing who Christ was after the miraculous catch of fish?

The same happened to practically every Bible who had such an encounter in the Bible.

Which God is this then that we see and dance ourselves lame when we are not even dressed right? What God is this we see that we can talk of boring or exciting worship? Which God is this we see that our worship does not produce any transformed lives, that we continue doing the same things we were doing prior to that worship experience?

Allow me to stop here because I want to have this as a wake-up nudge on someone who seeks God.

The others will me as a rubble raiser who does not want to see others enjoy their lives.

I will be content if only one person can connect to Biblical worship. And I am sure God will lead you to the hows and ifs of the same.

Why Serpents? 4

Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. (Deuteronomy 12:30)

In my write up on Christ’s command for His servants to be as shrewd as serpents, I feel that it is important for us to remember this one fact.

Snakes are never curious. They do not go out looking for trouble. They do not go out looking for information.

A snake only looks for three things; food, warmth and somewhere to hide.

Security undergirds everything a snake does as I have explained in my previous posts on the same.

Why am I writing this? I know someone is wondering.

Man is curious by nature. We are excited about knowing a little bit more.

And God knew that when He issued this command to His people.

What is a bait?

Bait is food with a trap. It is an invitation to willingly enter into a trap. It is the enticement to get into a hole you won’t be able to get out of.

In short, a bait is poison packaged as food.

That is where curiosity gets us.

It is as we are seeking to know that we are entrapped.

A drug addict doesn’t just become addicted.

It always starts with the desire to feel something; to experience something.

Most addicts knew the dangers of the drugs they were getting into but felt that sampling was harmless. Until they got hooked.

Curiosity is dangerous, and not only on drugs.

That is why God issued that commandment.

Do not seek to know how the other side operates. Destroy their pictures, their shrines and everything that represented their worship was God’s command.

That is why I am revisiting serpents.

Jesus used serpents for this reason too.

As we minister, we are supposed to stick to our lane. And for a very good reason.

Curiosity is enticing in very subtle ways.

And in no greater way does it beat the desire for knowledge, especially esoteric knowledge.

That is what Eve fell for. And that is what a majority of our seeking ministers are falling for too.

This is especially in places where culture and superstition reign.

We think we will be more effective as evangelists if we are at par with what whoever God sends us to. We therefore seek to know as much as possible about their belief systems with that goal in sight.

But it does not work that way.

We may in our pursuit get swallowed into what we are seeking to rescue them from.

I have written of pastors who went to a new country for a conference and were warned against visiting the red-light areas.

But they probably thought their hosts were not good enough or bold at evangelism and went there anyway.

The truth of the matter is that quite a number of them returned home with HIV.

That is the power of curiosity, the curiosity God was warning the Israelites against.

God did not mean His servants to be ignoramuses. We should be knowledgeable.

But our knowledge should come from God and His revelation. AND ONLY THERE.

God knows the kind of knowledge we need to accomplish the assignments He has for us. He will thus avail the same to us in ways consistent to His revelation.

There is a great difference between you looking for information about witchcraft and their way of doing things and having a converted witch giving you the information. It is completely different when you seek to understand harlots through ingenuity and hearing the testimony or counsel from a converted one.

Though the information may be the same, one comes through pursuit and the other through revelation.

One is led by curiosity while the other is brought by God.

That is the reason God in Eden gave the commandment, do not eat.

But man sought to know why and for what purpose God had said that. And that enticement is the reason he tried to ring fence his obedience with his own commandment, do not touch.

That is what the devil capitalized on.

I have always said that it is interesting that though Eden occupied all the land from Ethiopia and South Sudan all the way to Iraq according to the boundaries in Genesis 2, they were found around the forbidden tree.

Though a sampling of the whole land’s fruitfulness could have taken decades, they never left the vicinity of the forbidden tree.

Being mesmerized by the forbidden became their obsession.

That is what curiosity births.

Should we neglect knowledge?

Of course not. But we should stay withing God’s limits in our pursuit of the same otherwise we will replicate what happened in Eden.

We should immerse ourselves into the primary sources from God and allow them lead us to the relevant information we will need in our ministry.

Our primary source is God’s word, the Bible.

Every other pursuit should start from there.

Anyone who has been reading my blog will notice that I read a lot. But I allow God to lead me to the information I need instead of pursuing my basic curiosities.

This message has the capacity to become massive so I think I will stop here with the simple instruction.

Be aware of curiosity. It is addictive. It is ensnaring. It can easily head one to damnation.

Seek to know God’s word instead and use it as the gauge for any other information you may pursue or even come across.

 

God Speaks Today

For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; (Job 33: 14, 15)

That God speaks is not in question.

That He still speaks is controversial. Some think He stopped speaking after the Bible was completed while others like me insist that He still speaks.

The question following my confession that God speaks today is always, how does He speak?

That is probably the question I have been asked most frequently over the years as a teacher of God’s word.

I do not know whether you have realised as you study the Bible that there are very few instances where the method God used to speak to His people is stated.

Apart from Moses who spoke with God face to face and young Samuel who heard God’s voice audibly, most of the other incidences are subject to conjecture. They could be argued or explained away as the musings of a fertile mind.

Allow me to ask a simple question.

Do you think Joseph had other dreams prior to the one he had instructing him to take Mary as wife?

How can you explain an angel, a being that can pass through closed doors, especially the fact that you are the only one who sees him?

How do you explain a vision? What is the difference between one and a daydream?

You see, God speaking to us can be very subjective.

But even worse, a wrong interpretation of the source has the capacity of misleading whole communities.

Researchers say that we dream several times in one sleep cycle. And it this is because our brains do not completely sleep when we do. Allow me to give us another verse.

For a dream cometh through the multitude of business; (Ecclesiastes 5:3a)

How do you differentiate between this type of dream and the one coming from God?

Now a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ear received a little thereof. In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up: It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and I heard a voice, saying, (Job 4: 12 – 16)

How valid was that spiritual experience? Wasn’t it as real as any other?

But was it from God as Eliphas claimed?

I doubt so. Because a spiritual experience cannot be used to rebuke God’s choice and (even to God) innocent servant.

Allow me to put in another verse as well.

But Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah went near, and smote Micaiah on the cheek, and said, Which way went the Spirit of the LORD from me to speak unto thee? (1Kings 22:24)

How does one distinguish from which spirit a voice comes?

This is a simple yet very complicated topic to handle.

It is complicated when we get into the nitty gritty of the hows. It is easy when we get into the why and to whom God speaks.

What kind of person does God speak to?

That is the first question we need to tackle.

We need to distance ourselves from the notion that God is like a broadcaster who will speak universally for any person with the right ‘decoder’ to intercept.

That is why Joseph’s brothers were furious with his dreams; not because of them, but of their inferences. His dreams could have been innocent, even laughable had he not occupied the special position with their father. They thought that Joseph was using (probably creating) the dreams to curry even more favor with Israel.

Though we can say that God speaks universally, only persons who are attuned to His ‘frequency’ can be able to access that voice.

That is the context of ‘whoever’ or similar words we see in the Bible.

Who does God speak to? That is our question.

… but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word. (Isaiah 66:2 b)

Trembling is not speaking just about fear. It is speaking about reverence. It is speaking about anticipation.

Ever seen a relay race? Have you ever looked at the person waiting to receive that baton?

That in my understanding is what this word is implying. It is the person who is rearing to go once he receives the word.

And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. (Habakuk 2:2)

God does not release His word for information. He releases it for action. Here you see the word run and not walk or muse for the same reason.

It thus means that He releases that word to the person who is ready to run with it and not the one who simply has ears to hear it.

What then do I teach when I am invited to teach people the dynamics of hearing God?

I teach raw obedience. I teach radical obedience. I teach lordship, the Lordship of Christ.

How God speaks is as diverse as the people He speaks to.

I have said elsewhere that I have never seen God repeating Himself in the miracles He performs, whether in the Bible or my personal experience.

He is always doing a new thing. And as the creator of everything He is not at a loss for new things to do or new ways of doing them.

But who God is; His attributes, His nature, never changes.

It is therefore more important knowing Him than knowing His methods because they are new every single moment. They are always as fresh as the morning dew and will vanish as fast.

Many people get misled because they constrain God speaking or doing to the tried and tested methods. This is because those methods expire immediately they are used, that is if they are from God.

We recycle revivals because we have no capacity for God’s move in our comfortable conventions. We recycle and copy worship because we are scared of God crashing through our carefully structured systems.

In short, we want to continue being in charge, which is the opposite of how a worshipper should behave in God’s presence.

We even invite God into our ‘worship’ instead of pleading to be allowed into His.

And we still expect God to step into our experiences. We still expect God to speak to us under those conditions.

The truth of the matter is that whatever voice you hear and whatever experience you have do not come from God.

God calls all the shots. He is the Lord of lords and King of kings and so is not subject to anything or anybody. He does things as He wills.

That aspect of surrender is the prerequisite to being able to hear from God.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to hear from God on your terms.

I tackled that when I wrote about rebellion.

It is absolute surrender to His Lordship that gives us access to fellowship with Him. It is the thing that enables us to hear from Him. It is the magic key to His storehouse of wisdom and guidance.

God will always speak if we are ready to move IMMEDIATELY we hear His voice and not before. He will speak once our hearts are set to do exactly what He wants us to do.

Our willingness may seem noble to us. We might even pride ourselves at the state of our hearts.

But unless we can go beyond just willing to rearing to go it becomes a no show to God.

Why am I saying that willing is not enough?

Excuses will always come. Actual obstacles will also come in greater frequency and fervor.

The willingness can easily be doused by a million reasons, even genuine ones.

And he said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God. And another also said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house. And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. (Luke 9: 59 - 62)

That trembling at God’s word must guide our obedience since willingness enough can accomplish very little. In fact, it could be equated with hypocrisy, if not rebellion.

Being willing is therefore not the way to be accessible to God’s voice. It is the complete surrender of self to the Lordship of Christ that can open that portal, if I may call it that.

Once I am settled that I will do everything He orders me, He then can release His voice for me to hear.

It is instructive for me to say this.

God will never let such a person hear wrong since that will then be His fault.

A sold-out heart will always clearly hear God’s voice.

That is why a terrorist going to bomb ‘infidels’ gets in contact with the resurrected Christ. That is why a Hindu with no contact with the Bible can connect to the saving power of the Gospel. That is why a seeking atheist can see the follies inherent with their arguments and come to Christ.

God created everything and everybody and can see the innermost parts of each heart He created.

He therefore can know the heart that is trembling at His word and will speak to him in a way customised to the way He created him.

Establishing in your heart that you will obey God whatever it takes is the surest way to hear His voice.

Because He is actually seeking such people to glorify Himself with them

For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. (2 Chronicles 16:9a)

I pray you understand what I am saying.

Recycling Seasons2

I want to put my past post in context. And I will say things that many may not be comfortable. But as God’s minister I do not have much choice.

Treat me as a social commentator, an observer.

I read a book with the title Healing of Memories several years ago. I must look for it to get their message afresh. I need to state that it is research based.

One thing I remember is the finding that a child in the womb is shaped by what the mother experiences.

They shared incidences where pregnant mothers witnessed a suicide and the children became suicidal in their adulthood.

We know that the first seven years of a child imprint more than experiences. They imprint values. They imprint goals. They shape their whole lives.

This cycle I have shared confirms that.

Allow me to say that even the freedom struggle was itself shaped by the second world war.

One reason the cycle repeats is that the perpetrators become so traumatized that they never want to speak about their experiences.

My father was in Mau Mau with his brother, the one I was named after.

Yet they never even once wanted to say anything about their struggle.

It was very recently that my aged aunt, who was also a mother in detention, told me that they are the ones who dug what we thought was a natural river. And my uncle also told me what drove him to the forest.

New generations therefore can only remember the adventure of war.

As I stated, I was a child in those tumultuous seventies and, apart from those clandestine records, knew nothing about the struggle since I was far from the action and there were no radios.

But yesterday I spoke with a brother and mentioned that time. He was of your age and was also informed and told me that those times were bad. It was no show time.

I was of your age in the nineties and can confirm to you that it was bad.

People walked to and from Kiambu to work in Nairobi because Matatus were part of the resistance. Many lost their livelihoods.

I do not even want to talk about lives.

But there was not much information about the sufferings of the common Kenyan.

Again, the pain was so bad that nobody who was bitten then wants to hear about it except the leaders who benefitted from the blood that was shed and the resultant suffering.

2007 is closest to us and we have some records.

But the Gen Z do not have that experiential association with the happenings then.

We are reminded of the gains and told to forget the pains.

But ask the people who were displaced and had to start their whole lives afresh.

Ask a victim of those clashes about them and the common refrain is,

Do not remind me of those times.

The pain is still smoldering almost twenty years later.

When Gen Z therefore talk about revolution, they have no context on which to base it.

That is why they are calling everybody but themselves cowards. That is why they are the only patriots since they think nobody else fought for anything they are enjoying.

But that is a delusion, a very damaging deception.

They think their parents are being docile and cowardly because they have refused to join them on the streets without knowing how paranoid the parents become looking at their children demonstrating with the hindsight of experience.

Let me get to the conflict at hand and offer a word of advice to these our children.

I think you have started overdoing it.

You asked the president to reject the bill and he did it.

You asked him to meet with you and he agreed.

Why are you still on the streets?

It is cowardly of you to continue hitting someone when he is down.

You enjoyed the support of the populace when you were making your statement. Nobody complained when you were having peaceful demonstrations.

But someone with hindsight knew that there was bound to be infiltration. There were bound to be opportunistic elements joining your protests, even young people like you with a different agenda.

Let me give an incidence to hopefully to make you understand me.

One time I was walking along River Road when a small demonstration passed along the road.

One guy came out of the group snatched the phone of a man walking ahead of me and quickly went back to the crowd.

What do you think the victim will feel for the agenda they were pushing?

That is what I am saying.

Your protests no longer belong to you, especially since what you were advocating for was granted.

You do not change the rules of the game midway.

Another thing I will respond to you is the assertion that you are leaderless.

That is a lie.

The truth is that your leaders are cowards.

If I joined your twitter space for a few hours, I would be able to easily spot your leaders. But they are afraid of taking the bullet at the front.

This has played flash in the opportunist’s court since he can then take leadership from those scared leaders.

Politicians and paid activists have since taken over your cause because your leaders refused to take their positions and nobody else was willing to take charge of your cause.

For those looking from outside, it is not Gen Z that is on the streets. And I am sorry I have to be the one to say it. Someone has seized your momentum and is running with it to pursue his goals.

And that plays you very badly because the nature of the confrontation has changed.

When in the beginning you were fighting for Kenya, now you are fighting for the interests of a few who are not even Gen Z.

What is my advice then?

Pull the rug out of the opportunists by calling off the demonstrations.

Then have a meeting with the president in that twitter space you sought and he agreed.

Nobody whose business has been brought down or can’t pay the loan for his matatu will support your cause if you continue bashing a person who has ceded ground. Nobody whose phone and money has been stolen will continue being sympathetic to your cause if you continue playing hard ball.

Whether the president is honest or not is not your business. Find out the genuineness or otherwise of his concession after you meet him.

Finally, let your leaders take charge. It is cowardly to lead from the shadows.

Otherwise, it will be another Babel in those meetings.

I write this as a father to five Gen Z children.

But the decision is yours

God bless you

Recycling Seasons

People think that these demonstrations by our children are a new thing.

But I want to demonstrate to us that this is a recycling thing that has been growing with the changing times.

I have looked at Kenya from the fifties and realised that a similar thing has been happening in cycles of between fifteen and twenty years.

But allow me to start with one thing.

Young people are not scared to die. And they love adventure, any adventure.

The truth is that to many young people, death is desirable to living; and that not because of a hard life.

I have severally talked with young men leading normal lives, even holding jobs, who have told me that they would not like to live to be forty.

The dare devil spirit runs in young people. Adventure of whichever shade is desirable to a vast majority of young people than the status quo.

How many die because they must test the limits of a fast car or bike?

You see, a young person has no baggage. They have no responsibilities beyond self. They have no dependents.

This means that they are really living for the present, and nothing else.

Create a cause for them and they will fling themselves headlong.

The fact that they are demonstrating is therefore not a new thing. It is only that times have changed, opening them to new methods of pouring their lives to a cause.

Let me now go to the cycles.

The fifties saw young people dare the British empire with pangas and homemade guns.

Fast forward to the early to mid-seventies.

There was a movement that led the government of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta make some people disappear.

There were very few radios then and of course almost no TVs

In any case there was only one broadcaster belonging to the same government.

But I remember some young people produced vinyl records that were of course banned. But they still got to the villages. And it was fun listening to a song the government would arrest you for listening. I was a child then.

I will jump the coup because it was the product of greedy ambition.

In the late eighties there was the clamor for the scrapping of the infamous section 2A that culminated in the famous Saba Saba in 1990

Then more people had radios. There were also TVs since that was the time Greatwall had made TV accessible to the wananchi. We also had another TV station, KTN, that gave another perspective though it was owned by KANU. The same station also broadcast CNN since it did not have adequate content for the 24 hours broadcast. VoK, later named KBC, only broadcast between 4 and 10pm on weekdays.

Fast forward to the mid-2000s and we have the infamous post-election clashes.

Then we had mobile phones. We also had internet, but only in cyber cafes. Even then, the calling rates were high for anything but essential communication.

The battle increased in intensity and scope.

Remember what immediately happened after the clashes?

Students burnt schools until it almost appeared as if that will not end.

It is the people who were children under ten then who are the engineers of this new thing we are seeing.

Why is it new?

In the past, due to the paucity of information, there needed to be a leader or leaders to guide the boiling blood.

Today they have all the tools in their hands; a phone that can do everything all the other generations combined could not even dream of, and social media.

They can simply and quickly talk to people they have not and may never meet and plan things.

A million can hold a meeting without the need of any meeting place with the logistics of the same as easy as getting the phone connected to the internet.

In the past, you could disrupt a meeting by simply blocking a venue. But how do you block a tweeter meeting?

One could very easily buy a few leaders of the movement to kill the momentum as has happened in all those cycles I have described. But is it possible to bribe people on social media?

Due to the nature of their interactions, they have no leader and may not need one since they are one humongous kamukunji.

Even the tribalism leaders talk about was a creation of the leaders of those movements for their own ends since young people are not bound by such shackles.

I just pray for wisdom for our president that he will accurately and wisely interact with this community since there are no precedents as it has never been done anywhere.

And the whole world will be taking notes because it is a first in the whole world.

But young people have always been like that. It is the dynamic that has changed.

Earlier generations were not cowards as I see many saying. It is their circumstances that were different.

Unless you tell me that taking a panga to confront a fighter jet and automatic machine gun is cowardice.

When people are as young as you are, they will behave just like you behave, but in their space.

I also pray that God will raise leaders from this young blood for the church of Christ since we are about to exit the scene.

God bless you