Bon Apetit

“So, I’m all for just going ahead and having a good time—the best possible. The only earthly good men and women can look forward to is to eat and drink well and have a good time—compensation for the struggle for survival these few years God gives us on earth.”-King Solomon




So a while back, a rich friend (by rich I mean, Mummy and Daddys money) and I thought it would be cool and morally gratifying to open something of a soup kitchen in school. Free food for all! It was brilliant! Unprecedented, and we more or less had the disposable income to pull it off. And why not? We were off in our middle class comfort-by student standards-living in our mansions-by student standards- having feasts (Mishai with suya, Indomie with suya etc,etc.) when there were those who hadn’t eaten the whole day long, with their last meal being cold, probably unmilked garri.

The soup kitchen wouldn’t be for everybody, and it would have to be severely rationed, but it would provide for those who needed it. It was a noble gesture, until we began to think:





Wait Till After School

This benevolence would make us mildly famous, feeding those who did not possess the wherewithal to feed themselves. But fame does have it's attendant demons. Like Christ it would be better to offer our salvation only after we had died, resurrected and ascended to the position of graduates, where no one still in school could see us. Because handling gratitude is almost as difficult as giving. And surely there would be those who would want more, and just because we wanted to do a nice thing didn’t mean we were nice people. My friend in particular could be distastefully mean, and I being introverted, could appear snobbish at times.




Would People Use It?

I wouldn’t. Call it pride, call it arrogance, call it whatever. I don’t do handouts! Not from my peers. There would be those who would not need it who -out of general evil –would make use of it, and there would be those who would need it who-out of general dignity-would refuse to use it. No one likes to feel like a charity case. Who knows, maybe that gratitude we didn’t know how to handle would probably be displeasure.


So anyway, we ended up with no intentions of doing it. And now, looking back, it was the right call. You see it’s the same mistake we all keep making, we want to stop a flood with a mop stick, give a man a fish and feed him for a day, stem the obvious flow of problems but ignore the root-the causality of it all.


That’s what Solomon meant by my earlier quote. We do the best we can by men’s standards, and it leaves us nowhere in the grand scheme of things. I believe that life and life more abundantly means exactly what it means. So yeah, I’m a Christian, and this is my soup kitchen. With all its attendant woes, and its rationed supply. But make no mistake, my emotions range the whole gamut from cynicism to faith, but my convictions are set in stone. So I can go wherever your heads at, and show you how go from there to where your heart needs to be, whether you be Newbie, Should be or Cynic, rock with me, you know I got it!