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Conquer - Thoughts and Stuff

Conquer

shikungigi

How are you guys? So today, we’re all about conquering. When I was young, like primary school young, my dad took out a foolscap and wrote down something for me with a felt pen and made me stick on my bedroom wall. It was about Julius Caesar and what he said after a certain victory. What I remember most about that passage is the last phrase, “We came, we saw, we conquered.” When you Google that, you find the actual phrase was in Latin, “Veni, vidi, vici”.

By now you might have guessed why dad wrote that for me. Every day, I saw that writing on the wall. Literally. And every day I strived to conquer in class. I also had a newspaper clipping next to that foolscap, I remember. Betty Gikonyo was on it. I don’t know why I don’t remember the other lady on that paper. Actually I do know. I remember Betty because for half the years I have existed, I wanted to grow up to be a doctor. Yes. Didn’t we all? I’d like to say that I changed my mind easily. I didn’t. It was a combination of teenage indecisiveness and JAB’s decisiveness. But I still went ahead and conquered whatever came through. My dad says “conger” btw, like every other person of his generation. So for the longest time I was confused on the pronunciation. It made no sense to me. Like why do old guys decide a q should be pronounced as g? Anyway, that’s beside the point.

Now, there are a lot of scenarios where we’re obviously supposed to think in battle mode. The reason I thought about this today is because of a tune I love. Conquer – Propaganda ft Theory Hazit. This track is from Propaganda’s album, Excellent from 2012. Every once in a while, I refresh my music and replace it with albums from my past life. This is an example. So I remembered how much I loved this track because of the words. They make me think. I don’t even like Propaganda’s verse that much. It’s Theory Hazit’s. Sample this:

Faith come by hearing too many deaf though
Clinging onto static let God and let go
On your mark let go on sin, we make war

A lot of folks want to make peace within
But it makes no sense
They make peace with sin
And when I talk war I don’t mean Athena save your long-winded arguments step in to the arena
And see Christ conquer
….
Battle my flesh when it gets in the way
Die daily I commit suicide every day, killa
That mean he lives in me
I live in him he’s the conquering king
War wounds to prove him when you thought we lost him
He’s the very reason that we can conquer
I’m sick and tired of people blaming the devil
When we need accountability
Growth, and never settle
For your maturity levels like filthy rags
And when he conquer everybody wave a white flag

Here’s the thing. Every day is a battle to make the right decisions. To hold on. To do the right thing. Doing the right thing is almost always harder than doing the wrong thing. That is, if you are human like me. You wake up in the morning and want to take breakfast but can’t. Mostly because you have completely refused to ever accept that you can be a morning person who wakes up with enough time to spare for thinking/meditating/praying and a healthy breakfast as opposed to jumping from bed to vehicle in a haze, trying to keep up with the rat race. That unhealthy living follows you to the office where the first thing you do is open your computer to be bombarded by myriads of unnecessary information in tens of tabs and loads of coffee. Before you know it, lunch is here, loads of carbohydrates to make up for the missed breakfast. Then it’s time to go back home and repeat the cycle. Block out all work email or Slack. Cook. Do a lot of nothing. Chat till you drop. Weekend, do a lot of nothing mostly. Or do a lot of stuff you shouldn’t be doing. Middle class problems?

Sometimes I ask myself, what would I rather be doing other than what I am doing? Why am I watching this? Why do I eat what I eat? Why do I do what I do? Am I really just here for the ride to get off whenever the world decides I should? Do I only fight the things that are easy to fight and try rationalize about the rest? Do I blame the devil when I need accountability? Do I make time for things that matter? Am I always distracting myself from the real things with series etc by claiming I deserve the rest when I don’t? Rest from what? What happened to that discipline from when we were kids? Back when we were not too interested in things that didn’t matter? Complicating things that shouldn’t be complicated?

Let’s not cling to the static. Make peace within. Battle the flesh. Especially when what the flesh wants is doing nothing beneficial for you. I am talking the little things. The little victories. Conquering the world of too much information. Conquering the urge to overfeed just because you have the resources. Conquering voyeurism. I know I have admitted here before that I do feel nice watching steamy scenes in movies. That is so voyeurism, whether I like it or not. And there’s no point blaming technology or any other thing that did not exist in the past. Conquering distractions. Why go for distractions when you should be fighting the real thing? Let go and let God. Never settle for immaturity. If you know what you’re doing is messed up, you’d better step up. It might not be easy to stop, but, here goes a cliche, the first step is acceptance. We all struggle with something(s) but how we come out of it is what makes the difference. Let Him conquer. Some things, you cannot do on your own anyway. You can only do so much. Conquer.

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. Isaiah 64:6

 

6 thoughts on “Conquer

  1. I had not read this and I am glad I have now.

    The battle of the flesh, its real.. too bad a lot of us don’t know it. our degenerate bodies don’t even let us realize it until we are in too deep.. the most encouraging thing though is we can always let go and let God… He makes the battle easier..
    Only then do we conquer..especially because we can do nothing by ourselves(even we think it is by ourselves it really isn’t) because it is not by our own might.. and I am learning to accept that.

    PS: I love your pieces unajua hio.. but this one is by far my fave…. because it hit so close to home.

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