As Ghanaians we often worship doing the wrong thing. We turn up late for meetings and blame traffic, litter our streets and bemoan the rising filth level in our cities, and more often than not people would spend a fortune just for an ostentatious display at a public gathering despite several daily struggles. It’s like we were wired wrong in the God factory before he sent us down here.
Another symptom of this ‘wired wrong’ syndrome we suffer from is the penchant to often not take situations head-on, but rather feel that the God in heaven is going to have everything in hand, what I call the ‘Fama Nyame’ philosophy.
It recently hit me the levels we take this philosophy during an interaction with a family member. Now this guy has been unemployed for a while now, and had just returned from a job interview. I asked him how he did, he said he did okay.
When I asked if he thought he’d get the job, he said everything is in the hands of God.
Nah, I don’t think so; everything is in the hands of whoever is in charge of hiring at whichever company he interviewed at. If we worried a little more about making the right impression on those who actually matter and a little less about the impression we make on God we might actually get some things done down here.
How is it possible that churches hold services in the morning during the week and still manage such great turnouts? I’m yet to find the church that was populated entirely by the unemployed, yet Tuesday, Wednesday, and other weekday morning services are held regularly and people keep filling the seats.
Where is the work being done during these church services, where is the productivity? Yet God is in control at those times so everything must be all right…right?
In over 50 years of independence what have we ever gained from this little philosophy of ours? We have barely added any layer of economic or infrastructural development since 1966, yet we continue to bawl our throats out at any given opportunity to a deity that seems to have little interest in our development as a nation.
The United States of America went from a little gathering of scattered settlers to world superpower in a little over a hundred years, and you can bet your last cent it was not by feeling everything should be left in the hands of God. A passive mentality is required for the ‘Fama Nyame’ philosophy, and whilst America can be described in many ways, most of them unflattering, passive is not one of them.
On an individual level this mentality can lead to the best effort not being put in, yet somehow unrealistically expecting optimum results.
I think if we went into tasks feeling the outcome, either positive or negative, depended entirely on our efforts-we would probably triple the effort we put in because God does not have your back in this scenario.
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