If Only We Can Live Before The End Comes -By Kehinde Oluwatosin Babatunde

Kehinde Oluwatosin Babatunde

It was the morning after, it began well, but it ended in sobriety, in all it was a day with memories that will not be forgotten in a hurry. Woke up to the bizarre putting away and dumping of all things, from televisions, to sound systems, money, cars and all that were thought belonged to the world.

I was a kid, however a kid who asked questions, on inquiry I was told a denomination of the Christian faith were putting their belongings away as it has been received the end of the world beacons in some few days.

It’s been years now and memories flood through the grey mist of time as the world has not only remained in existence but has created more ground breaking innovations although with its attendant evil too. Memories helps us to codify history, the putting together of history however leaves at our disposal the abuse and amoral use of memories.

Today we fondly remember the coming to the end of the world both in sobriety and reflection, if you think my submissions are too assuming take a walk into any hospital or burial site and have a first hand glimpse of what the end or the expectation of it can do to a man.

Given our hostility to reflection the message of the end has not only become one of the central messages of the Christian faith but also a message deliberately preached as a scare mechanism to lure people into our faith and belief systems. Many times poor Christians see the other faiths especially when they are rich as hell bound because of their riches for it shall be easier for a horse to enter into the eye of the needle than for a rich man to see the kingdom of heaven.

If there is a set of people that perorate glowingly about the end of the world, it’s Nigerians, even non Christian faithfuls have their own consciousness of the world after ,our reflection of the end is often spontaneous and momentary, hence a going back to our ways immediately that moment escapes.

I got thinking recently that, if there is a people that should stop or mildly preach about the end of the world it is Nigerians. My submission premised on the following: let us assume the world would end in fifty years time, 2068 precisely, will Nigeria have transcended into modernity in 2068? will Nigeria have become Singapore or Malaysia in economic prosperity? will those things we dreamt of as young people become a reality? Will children ever become leaders? Would we have transcended beyond making manifestos that boarders only on basic things of life to electorates ? Think on these things and find out why the excitement of an ending world does not belong to us.

Yet because of our selfishness and the believe in the superiority of our faith path above others we dance and wine over the coming to the end of the world thinking we have found our own route to paradise.

How can a people who haven’t lived or found paradise on earth desire that the world they have never lived in to end?. The typical Nigerian has known no better life than that of deprivation and lack, in 2018 he does not have electricity as a given, bathing with shower is still a luxury to him, he still pay to get water, and still dies of meningitis, the education he went to school for takes him two centuries below modernity, yet these zealots desires a world he has not lived in to end.

Citizens of the first world can desire the world to come to an end, they have aspired, invented, innovated, affected humanity, not us. A people who are condescended so much by her politicians to be given three onions to solicit for their votes , this happened in 2018 and not in the stone age.

I blame not the Nigerian, he has never lived hence the possibility of a better life in paradise easily raises his expectations. The life God promised us in heaven is spiritual and transcendental, to miss the life of the earth because of heaven is short changing one’s self ,yet a people as premodial as us desires the world we have only existed in and not lived in to end. Well-done hun.

Kehinde Oluwatosin Babatunde is a Prolific writer and public speaker based in Lagos.

Email: kehindeobabatunde@gmail.com