The mother of new year resolutions

Stephen Mpofu

If resolutions which Zimbabweans and other people across the global village make to mark the beginning of each calendar year were the life-saving liquids such as water, for example, many if not most of the declarations would find their way for storage into vessels with perforated bases and out through the holes into evaporation.

It is small wonder then that by the end of the year in point individuals, some private companies as well as some public institutions find themselves mired in square one situations of the previous year with little or no achievements made on projects planned and so they hold their shaking heads in their hands, bemoaning financial resources, time and energy deployed but which now appear to have needlessly been frittered away.

Now, some of the people who find themselves in such quagmires will consult witchdoctors on the way forward and are given charms for a fee to tie around their forearms under shirt sleeves or hide in their pockets, in the case of men, in order to coerce luck for success to be their portion in the plans the following year.

Others brew beer to appease their demonic ancestral spirits, which they believe to have somehow angered resulting in the failure of their resolutions to bear desired fruits.

But lo and behold these people and institutions aforesaid discover that the same challenges that rode on the back of the previous year cling on into the following year, drawing more blood to the extent of almost nullifying any initiative to achieve progress in whatever is planned.

Yet little do the individuals or representatives of other bodies desirous of making advances on their plans realise that their new year resolutions were wrongly premised, for if instead of consulting humans for medicinal empowerment, or imploring ancestral shades to smile on them, they had gone to church to be born again to find Jesus and become devil proof they would have come up with declarations similar to the following example of the mother of new year resolutions:

“Whether the weather be good, whether the weather be bad I/ we shall weather the weather under the Lordship of Jesus Christ who is the way, the light that illuminates the way and the truth.”

But a declaration or resolution akin to the above is however still not the be-all-success-and-end challenges.

Far from it. One still has to focus on goals set and ensure that what remains to be done and other intentions dovetail into the goals set.

Which also suggests that one should not sleep on the job either at home or at the workplace in the vain hope that the resolutions imploring God to oversee the implementation of plans will work miracles.

At the workplace in private and public institutions satanic influences such as pilfering or other acts of corruption and laziness must be stamped out with unmitigated relentlessness as they eat on any intended achievements for broader benefits to the company and the community it exists to serve.

Next in importance, any officials in intra-party conflicts must swap olive twigs for amity between them while leaders embroiled in inter-party cutthroat conflicts must be compelled to wave olive branches in order for the cumulative love born out of consensual politics to feed and nourish an otherwise kwashiorkored national unity into a powerful engine that drives national politics, the economy and social development with the three aggregating into peace, calm and national stability for fractured nations elsewhere on planet earth to emulate.

When the conditions enumerated above in this discourse, including unseizing prayer and fasting are fulfilled by an obedient people invigilated by God, the windows of Heaven will be flung open for blessings to inundate His people with a bonus to some nations for exemplary commitment to His commands, while the devil and his entourage of disgraced and demoralised demonic forces are rusticated from the Lord’s loyals and away into oblivion.