Category: Motivational

SOS, Songs of Solomon in the Bible?!!

Let’s picture this scenario in our minds’ eye: You pick up your Bible, flip through the pages and then your eyes happen to fall on the this short book of the Old testament. You start reading the 1st Chapter and before you finish the second verse, you see it. You shout ‘Yikes!’ in your mind and you might start wondering out aloud what a book like this is doing in the Word of God. You decide to give yourself a benefit of a doubt and continue the Bible passage. At the end of the entire book, you are awestruck, dumbfounded and spellbound…. And you ask yourself: ‘WHAT IS SONGS OF SOLOMON DOING IN THE BIBLE?’

I’m not a pastor, neither am I so much of a Bible scholar, but I have come across articles that have tried to explain why Songs of Solomon is found in the Bible. Of all the reasons I saw, the ones I felt were most plausible were:
1. God is interested in all facets of our human existence, even up to the love lives of married Christian couples.
2. It is a shadow of the type of love that Christ has for His Church.

However, in my relatively short Christian life, I’ve come to understand that when one’s dealing with God, or His Word (the Bible), one must avoid stereotypes. When dealing with God, or His Word, you have to be ready to drop any religious prejudices, sentiments and personal beliefs and just depend on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Now, the vivid picture I painted in the 1st paragraph was quite similar to my exact feelings when I first came across Songs of Solomon (funny, eh?). I was amused, bemused, ‘ceemused and demused’. But when I dropped my own human thoughts and decided to depend on the Holy Spirit for interpretation, I found ‘platinum’ NUGGETS that were even totally unrelated to love or something of such. The interpretation was so applicable to present day situation. Now, that’s sublime! What’s more, I’m going to share what I saw with you. Huzzah, right?

Well, if you were patient enough the first time you read Songs of Solomon, and you were able to get to the 4th Chapter and the 12th, 15th and 16th verses, you’d come across something poetic as follows:
‘A garden is inclosed in my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed…..
A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.
Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out…..’

The 1st portion of the passage above shows a case of untapped potentials, a case of what COULD have been but is NOT, a case of unseen glory in an individual. Notice the phrases, ‘a garden inclosed’, ‘a spring shut up’, ‘a fountain sealed’. Can’t you see the sadness and pity oozing out of those words? ‘A garden inclosed’ could imply that the potential available in an individual that the individual has failed to tap into as a result of ignorance. Every person has a hidden treasure embedded within him or her. It would be the highest form of selfishness to deprive humanity of that treasure in you, just because of ignorance! Well, as the Greeks would say, ‘Gnosthiseauthon!’ which means, ‘Search yourself!’. The other phrases in the first portion of the passage, ‘a spring shut up’ and ‘a fountain sealed’ typifies the case of individuals who were initially on the road to maximizing potential but as a result of one mistake or the other (usually sin or delving out of one’s purpose) they become stagnated and are unable to maximize their full potential. All isn’t lost, however.

Now take a look at the life and excitement found in these phrases fron the 2nd portion of the passage: ‘a fountain of gardens’, ‘a well of living waters’, ‘streams from Lebanon’. See the joy and almost touchable happiness that is leaping from each word of these phrases. This is a vivid picture of fulfiled purpose and maximized potential. Also note the God’s ultimate plan for you: OVERFLOW TO IMPART OTHERS. Would a fountain of gardens be meant for just one person to eat all on his own? Or would a well of living waters be used by just one person? No! No!! No!!! Your maximization of potential is meant to lead to an overflow in your life that would impart sporadic impacts in the lives of all you come in contact with. This is the joy of it all- Nurturing others to tread the paths you tread to attain potential.

Finally, in the last portion of the passage, there’s a kind of climax to all the build up of the previous portions of the passage. ‘Awake O North wind……blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out’. This is the work of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes, just knowing what to do isn’t enough. Knowing that you have to give yourself to others without having any fears of losing in the ‘competition’ can only come via the extra nudge from the Holy Spirit. Once that extra force is there, there is the facilitation of events that would leave one with no choice but to joyfully impart lives.

So, do you still have any reservations about Songs of Solomon (SOS)? I didn’t think so too…..

Waiting for the good weather.

A couple of hours ago, I was lying down on my bed in my room at the topmost floor of Block D, Sultan Bello hall in the University of Ibadan. The weather was cold and chilly and I was trying to get some sleep but couldn’t, so my mind drifted back, floating in the recesses of my memory to a time when I was a young lad. I was wearing the blue and white stripes of my primary school uniform. I looked ahead and i saw a fair-skinned young man who happened to be the school’s newly recruited music teacher. He was teaching us something about the aesthetic values of music before he stopped abruptly and told us that he wanted to teach us a song. Up till this present moment, I still cannot fathom the circumstances that made him teach us this song. But what I do know is that, over a decade on, that song still plays itself over and over in my subconscious and has an impact on me one way or the other. The song went thus:
‘Whatever you can do today,
Don’t leave it for tomorrow,
Whatever you can do today,
Don’t leave it for tomorrow.
For tomorrow has it’s own problems,
And they would surely come.
Whatever you can do today,
Don’t leave it for tomorrow’

The reason why my primary school music teacher might have sang the aforementioned song might have been in order to curb laziness and procrastination in his young proteges. To think in this direction is very much proper and even plausible. But in my little experience in life, I’ve come to understand that the factors that militate against doing what is expected of you, when it’s expected of you is much more grave than Procrastination and Laziness. Oh yes, these two play their parts in not getting things done….and yes, they are the most important reasons why we don’t get things done. But how could we ever forget about the syndrome called, ‘WAITING FOR THE GOOD WEATHER’!

We are all guilty of ‘waiting for the good weather’. For some, this syndrome is mild, while for others it’s moderate while for some others still, it’s so severe and deeply ingrained into such individuals that they don’t even know that they are sufferers of the syndrome. ‘Waiting for the good weather’ is characterized by the desire and willingness to have all variables swinging in one’s favour before one decides to make any move in getting things done. The truth remains that no matter how much we want an ideal world similar to our worldview of how things should be, there is nothing that’s going to change the way things are-the real world-except we make moves NOW to create our ideal world. Many of us know what we do, in actions and thoughts, that typifies the syndrome of ‘waiting for the good weather’, so I’m not going to spend any more time on that. However, I have some recommendations that could be helpful for us in our bid to break away from the syndrome of ‘waiting for the good weather’. My recommendations are:

1. Don’t be afraid of trying new things. This might be difficult when all the resources you need are not in place. But you just have to start the new thing first. Remember, ‘To begin a task is to have half completed it’
2. Challenge yourself. You want success, don’t you? If yes, the fact that you want success in a task should provide enough drive for you to prevent you from ‘waiting for the good weather’. If conditions are not favourable, make them to be.
3. Reach out to others. Don’t sit still within your area of comfort and wait for others to meet you, as if they are owing you or something. Step out of your comfort zone and you’d be surprised at what you’d find.
4. Before you get into something, make sure it’s God’s will for you. Even if you wait for the ‘good weather’ and God’s hand isn’t in what you want to do, you are asking for frustrations and disappointments.
5. Expect criticisms and move on. Someone quipped that, ‘the only way to avoid criticisms is to say nothing, be nothing and do nothing’. Unless you have plans to remain a nonetity in life, I don’t think you will still want to wait for the ‘good weather’ just to avoid criticisms. Hear all criticisms, learn from the constructive ones and discard others.
6. Accept mistakes as the price of progress. Because you want to avoid mistakes is no reason to wait for the ‘good weather’ before performing tasks. A benefit of making mistakes is that you learn an additional way NOT to perform a task. A mistake every now and then won’t kill you. Learn from them and move forward.

Don’t ‘wait for the good weather’, but in your thoughts and actions, make the ‘weather’ how you want it to be!
YOU ARE A WINNER!!!