HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Feb. 25, 2007 Love was in the air! The wonderful season of love and loving was here with us once again. This annual occassion of amity and sharing of love tidings among compatible characters is celebrated the world over on every February 14th. This year's event was marked some days ago and lovers and potential lovers were bracing themselves up for a love cannival of some sorts. Love is the greatest gift God gave to mankind! "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son ..." is one of the best quotations in the Good Book emphasizing the significance the Most High God placed on love. There's a big difference however between Agape love (which the Bible speaks about) and the carnal love which is being celebrated. Loving someone or being loved by someone makes one feel good within indeed. With true love the world would have been a better place than what we presently have. The power of both love and women can neither be under-estimated here nor over-emphasized. History is replete with the demonstration of women power as exemplified by their cradle-bearing gift of nature and their imposition of feminine potency and potentialities perculiar to these breed alone. The story of Samson, the strongest man in ancient Biblical account rings a bell. Many men are victims of the power of women. Some internet fraudsters pose as women or use women to woo their victims into submission. The beauty of a woman lies in her very nature primarily. The guileful serpent knew the gullibility of women and it exploited it to the fullest in the Garden of Eden episode in which a forbidden fruit was eaten by the first man and his companion to their eternal damnation in disobedience to their Maker who was monitoring their every step. Eve ate first the barred fruit and fell from glory and then passed it on to her husband who, charmed by love, forgot the commandment of the garden's Landlord in His celestial despotism. The definition of true love finds expression in the way and manner such fondness and emotional attachment is exhibited and not mere platitudes to that effect. Today true unaldurated love is hard to come by, it's in scarce supply! We daily here "I love you, you're the love of my life" being expressed by all and sundry but it goes beyond simple expression but practise. Practising true love that's not found wanting therefore is somewhat difficult because true love gives all and expects no reward. True love tolerates all and shows no anger or boredom. True love is never hidden but open; it makes two worlds meet and go jolly round. True love abhors conflict which sometimes leads to war and destruction; true love preaches against arrogance, racism, injustice and wickedness. St Valentine Day is marked with open bravado of affection by some mortals confused about it's true concept and deeper meanings. The day is manifestly abused by most people celebrating it because hypocrisy or outright incomprehension or mischief is at display. Debauchery becomes synonymous with St Valentine. That is why a man who profess 'love' to a lady may be an already married man with settled family. The ultimate question here then is: can the heart of man accommodate two true loves? The answer is a woeful no! Some men have chains of girlfriends to whom they owe 'love' and out of the buck of whom he's expected to choose one to celebrate St Valentine with. The pervasive promiscuity of today's men and women go beyond the ravages of HIV/AIDS (the fear of the pandemic having not swayed people's attitude to sex) or the altruistic reason and sacrifice which true love bears. What primarily leads to promiscuous pedestal with which men and women of today are measured in their majority is the penchant for money and reckless pleasure which love-making guarantees. Here in Africa prostitution finds space and pace when young girls and ladies are confronted with needs that should only be met by money whose lack necessitates debasing of womanhood and it's virtue. To be sure prostitution is not Africa's problem alone; it's tantalizing tentacles are spread the world over. Poverty in the main is to blame but sometimes sheer search of inner emotional satisfaction provokes dangerous instincts in some men and women. Love is today for sale in many parts of the world and this has little or nothing to do with the changing world with the advent of internet or emancipation of gender. The internet has helped in no small way to advance the course of prostitution and prostitutes who ply their trade openly in the net or use the channel as 'hooking points' for randy fellows. Yet it goes without saying that prostitution has a long history, one that met even Jesus the Christ in His brief redemption sojourn in our sinful universe. When a certain woman, the Bible teaches us, was brought before the Son Of Man accused by a partisan crowd of committing adultery these hypocritical crowd out on a lynching mission had thought that Jesus would give them express support in their efforts to stone the woman to death. But when Jesus passed His wise judgement by declaring that whoever knew that his hands were clean should cast the first stone as he closed His eye, He discovered on opening His eyes in a brief interval that one after the other the accusers were no where to be found burdened by internal guilt perhaps worse than the woman's they had sought to summarily execute through jungle justice. A good friend of mine once told me never to fall in love because love could be a dangerous emotion-wreaking adventure. Love could make one stupid; it could make one mad; it could even kill someone! Love is a potent weapon for good of mankind or for ill. Families have been destroyed when love dies in the family. And families have on the other hand been made haven where love exists in the consciousness of both the breadwinner, his spouse and their children. Loving one another entails tolerance of opinion and religion; when one loves another he sees any difference in thought or worship as surmountable challenges. Bitterness or betrayal cannot be part of love ditto lying and overbearing masculinity. Love has no complex; it understands all languages. It could be said to be blind sometimes but it's import could only be discerned by those gifted with it's spirit of appreciation and reverence. As minkind marked another St. Valentine's Day whose origin dated back to time immemorial it was to be expected that carnal expression of love is not all there's to love. It demands more and calls for more reflection in the context of it's true place in the divine perspectives. In conclusion let me say without equivocation that the best love one can ever give is the one one gives to his wife or vice versa. The love between a man and his better half, the proverbial 'missing rib' apart from the heavenly sanction is the one worthy of being addicted to. Anything less is more or less mere deception bordering on ignorance or self delusion. Beyond showering of gifts like flowers and other ornaments to the opposite sex, beyond bouts of sexual intercourse, beyond empty love rhethorics and beyond carnal show of being in the love mood which characterized this year's St Valentine event we must strive to show true love to one another; with love in it's purity and honesty our world would be made a better place for us all. Happy more St Valentine's Day to every Adam and Eve out there. ------------ About the author: Sunny Chris Okenwa is a new U-K contributor based in Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire. Email: soco_abj_2006_rci@hotmail.fr Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
