Ajebutter Problems

Let me level with you here. Problems are like housewives, they’re always home when you get there, serenading you with what if this and what if that. You can’t get rid of them because you know, it’s for better or for worse, and all those mistresses may distract you, but your problems never go away, they remain, hounding you. I read recently that you would care more about your toothache than a tsunami killing millions in China.


Problems are relative, like the argument that there is no greater sin and no lesser sin, all problems are equal. But how could that possibly be? How could I get upset at the fact that there is no money to butter my bread while some rich man’s son is throwing a tantrum because his maid used mayonnaise instead of peanut butter to make his sandwich?


Doesn’t sound fair does it? Well it goes on and on. Killing a Chicken to accessorize your Christmas rice may seem trivial to you but to the vegetarian or animal rights activist is outright cruelty.  There are however, those obvious distinctions of problems. Killing a person’s child would certainly be considered a bigger problem than killing their pet dog, having AIDS or cancer more perilous than a cold or headache. These are universals, we may sit at a round table, twelve of us and come to a unanimous conclusion that yes indeed, a person having AIDS is in a deeper pit than a person having a cold and catarrh. Yet still imagine no round table, no conceit of intellectual discussion hanging in the air. You run into the AIDS patient at the pharmacy, trying to get a similar drug as you. At that moment there exists only one pill, you don’t know the other guys plight, and in that ignorance you figure you’ve got bigger problems to deal with, so the Lagos fever takes over, and you get to that last pill first.

The truth is, even the AIDS patient may think it’s the end of the world, but there are worse things than AIDS, and an anomaly often arises. You may have gotten through a traumatic experience, and shrugged it off like an insect on your shoulder, meanwhile a considerably irrelevant occurrence-say someone rolling their eyes at you-could send you over the edge of depression.


So problems bear the weight we attach to them, they are self-defined and self-magnified, sometimes they are adopted, but they are all of them Ajebutter problems  (problems that are only facilitated by privilege, no matter how little), they are Ajebutter problems because when you consider that universal alternative, that life without meaning, without a God who came to die for our sins and deliver us from an eternity of hellish pain, a God who gave us grace so that no matter how far we fall, it’s never too far, when you consider all of that, you come to see, things are never really that bad.