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03.10.2014 Opinion

LETTER TO MY DEPARTED CHILD...TO WHAT END

03.10.2014 LISTEN
By Francis Williams Pinamang

Pin,
Your humbled and sorrowed dad writes to you. This is the second in the series of many more letters I intend to send you to express my affection towards you. They will make you aware how I felt the moment you opened your eyes and how life has been the very moment the Almighty allowed death to lay its icy hands on you. .

God has been good. He has always been and I hope he always would be although I should say I felt angry with him for allowing such a demise to befall you at such a tender age. 'The Lord knows best' they say, and I ask the question, 'Why should he not look into my heart to know that my grief would be unfathomable, why should he not look into the teary eyes of your mother and give her one daring chance to hold you and nurture you to adulthood? To be frank with both of us, I have always blamed God. I ask 'who punishes a child'...Well God does! I hardly worshipped 'cos for this one I thought He has been very very unfair to us. It's either he was powerful but not just as He could have stopped it but he chose not to or he was just but not as powerful so although he wanted to stop it, he could not.

Pin, you see, God sent the Israelites out of Egypt and brought them out of Egypt. And how did he bring them out? Moses asked pharoah and when he said 'No'..God sent the plagues.

First, Moses turned the Egyptians water to blood. Then God sent a plague of Frogs, next a plague of Mosquitoes, next a plague of flies, then he slew their livestock, next a plague of boils, next the hail which battered down their crops and even trees and structure everywhere except in Goshen (Where the Israelites lived). Still pharaoh did not agree. So he sent a plague of locusts, then the days of darkness and finally, God slew the firstborns of Egypt and led them out of Egypt.

You see, he struck down the first borns...from the first born and heir of pharaoh to the first born of the slave at the mill. He slew them all. Did he slay pharaoh? It was pharaoh that said no but God let him live and he slew his first born instead? All the children.

And then ultimately the promised land. It wasn't an empty new place uncultivated. As is written, when the Lord thy God should bring you into the Land, you shall cast out many nations before you, nations much greater and mightier than you are, you shall smite them and utterly destroy them and make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.

Then he gave them a king in Saul. When the people of Amaleck fought Saul's people, the Lord God commanded to crush Amaleck and put him under the curse of destruction, with Saul not to show mercy or spare anyone but kill man, woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camels and donkeys. So Saul set out to do this and met the canaanites and he had no quarrel with them so he urged them to flee. But God was not pleased with the mercy and justice of Saul. And when Saul decided not to slaughter all the livestock but to take it to feed his people, God was not pleased by his prudence and his charity. He was not. God said, ' because you have rejected the word of Adonai he has rejected you as king.'

When David took Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, the Hittite, by arranging to have him killed against the wishes of God, God was not pleased and He said, 'since you have sinned me, the child would die' and truly he spent seven days dying in pain.

Now, after all my blubbing, I ask 'Did that child find that Adonail was just? Did the Amaleckites think that God was just? Did the mothers of Egypt find that Adonai was just? And did he made them to punish them? To starve, to frighten, slaughter them?

Well, enough with the questions. I don't need to question God. He knows best. Man is never meant to live forever so let me say your time was due. In the end, we are all dead men. And i say...IT IS WELL.

What we need is to live to glorify the Lord, every second each passing moment of our lives.

Your passing has thought me a great value for life...It is to what end If a man gains the whole world and losses his soul.

Ours have been of pure love and bountiful sorrows!
Until the day we meet again, I remain yours

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