Kachaje: Malawi’s ‘empty’ prayers
If there are countries where people pray a lot, then Malawi must be among the top ten. Hardly do we start any meeting without prayer, including the political rallies where empty and vain promises and personal character assassinations dominate the speeches. It is interesting that before most politicians start lying, they invite a pastor to pray so that “everything they say should bring glory to God”. How ironic.
In Malawi there is an unhealthy obsession to “prayer” alone. In fact, the reason why very little is achieved is because the majority of the people think prayer is the “magic wand” that replaces thinking, strategizing and action. Here are my sober observations:
We pray for rains to grow crops while we wantonly cut down trees. Somehow we are convinced that God will always answer us regardless our violating the laws of nature he put in place to sustain a healthy rainfall cycle. We pray for a “financial breakthrough” to get money to pay school fees forour children, when in fact we had enough time to plan as we saw them grow up before our own eyes. We pray for “God’s intervention” to take care of our large families when we have no clue how to feed them.
We pray for our leaders to govern the country well, even when we clearly know some of the people we might be calling leaders are nothing but thieves, looters and visionless individuals. We believe somehow, God will use even stone hearts to be as kind as angels. We have so much faith that God will surely just miraculously work things out for us.
In developed European countries, people are not as prayerful as we are. But they have created systems that create checks and balances for those they elect into leadership. For example, a Prime Minister in Britain cannot lie to the nation about where he hires a private jet because they have clear and transparent processes to guide issues of national importance. Governance issues are not resolved through prayer.
In Europe, couples have just 2 or 3 children whom they can properly take care of. Usually, they will not have children unless they have stable incomes and sometimes, a house.When it comes to educating children, most families open an education fund account for their children the moment they are born and save some money every month until such a time the child grows up and is ready for college.
Why is it that we, the people that pray a lot seem not to be getting answers for our prayers, while those who are praying less or not at all seem to have the right formula for success and progress? Being Sunday today, this is a question I should probably ask my pastor at church.
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Mr Kachaje, I just want to remind you that everything goes with a season and the Europe you are mentioning has already undergone the period that Malawi is passing through today and they are enjoying the fruits of the prayers that were made by their fore fathers that is why Christianity reached this end. No beating about the bush, let us seek God’s wisdom on our nation.
Watson really does write the most ignorant tosh, does he not? No mention of Europe having signed up to the Treaty of Westphalia and its role in the creation of toleration of different beliefs across Europe. No mention of the long period of the European Enlightenment and its role in putting religious ignorance and superstition behind all civilized Europeans. No mention of the progressive development of science from the time of Galileo onwards and how this fed in to initially an agrarian revolution, then an industrial revolution and now a technological revolution., None of these developments – according to foolish… Read more »
You are being misunderstood Mr Kachaje
Pray for rains but what are you doing about it? Why not get ready in case the rains dont come again next year? Why are we not implementing irrigation schemes?
chemes? Whose idea was it to sell Press F farms to subsistence farmers? Malawi chonde!
From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. so that’s what lies inside you sir. kodi si mwana wa abusa a CCAP inu kapena ndikulakwitsa. Through prayer God can grant Malawians wisdom to operate even kuposa azungu mukuwagomerawo
Great read and well thought out consideration. But rather than attack our prayer life, perhaps we should consider the entire process of prayer and I take you to the source on prayer models. The bible is full of them, the great one being taught by the Master Jesus found in Matthew chap 6. But outlined so well also is God’s call for us to pray when desolation comes – desolation will come and it has come to Malawi. This is a call to pray as set out in 2 chronicles 7:14. Do we want our land to be healed? Then… Read more »
Are you really as deluded as your writing suggests?
Mr Kachaje Mwaphunzira sukulutu mwayiwala mawu amulungu.Go back to sunday school and read your Bible.Logic and science is not biblical.God operates at a supernatural level and most of the malawians who believe prayer can bring rain where all laws of nature have been violated are right because thats exactly how God works.About how many children and planning thats up to God to decide who should be born where and how.Some of us were born in rugs and its God who fought our wars.God was the only hope and indeed he did it for us.I know you are a prayerful man… Read more »
small voice is right – as well as small brain and small mind. How can you come out with such total mental rubbish? There is an acronym used in computing studies: GIGO, which stands for “Garbage in, garbage out”. You are the living human embodiment of the GIGO principle.
Human problems require human solutions, coz there is NO DIVINE HELP. Praying to any imaginary god (Yahwe, Shiva, Allah, Buddah, Thor, Zeus, Isis ad infini) is a useless exercise, you might as well pray to the Easter bunny or the maggots feeding on faeces in your pit latrine (at least these are visible in the real world) or jesus, its the same thing, no help will come! Pepani
I give credit to Mr Kachaje on the points he has raised. Only those who misunderstood him oppose his points. To understand what he has stated it requires someone who has Gods eye view of the entire nature. Indeed some of the things we ask God to help us on are the very things we have sinfully destroyed yet God had already put them in place to assist us naturally. In fact, before man was created, God created the hydrological cycle (whose destruction has now caused global warming and affected rainfall pattern) for mans survival; gave man a godly mind… Read more »
Your non-existent gods have nothing to do with the natural world, which has simply evolved to become what it is today. Think on this: life on the planet Earth has been around in one form or another for around 3.8 billion years. In full figures, that is around 3,800,000,000 years. Can you grasp such an enormity of time and can you grasp how slowly and how through many initially false routes life on the planet Earth has evolved over that period of time? Sometimes evolution an be glacially slow; at other times evolution can be amazingly rapid – just look… Read more »
mau mau
I don’t see any reason why any person in the right frame of mind would try to refute what Mr Kachaje(mtendere ukhale pa iwo) has said. Reading between lines, the article is not, in any way, denying the existence of God but it ably highlights the hypocrisy, and the irony on how we conduct ourselves as a society. The examples of situations cited reveal the oxymorons that characterize the manner we conduct our daily affairs. Thank you Mr Kachaje and I am just longing for the opportunity to give you a hand shake for this article of the year. Simple… Read more »
It’s unfair to get angry at Mr kachaje, he asked an honest and very objective question, and unfortunately most of the Christians are used at lies when their pastors answer this very genuine question and in this forum we have given them a genuine answer: every “answered prayer” is a coincidence there is absolutely no divine intervention whatsoever, because gods are imaginary l, they don’t exist. This is the reason why any of the million amputees in this world will never get their prayer answered (spontaneous limb regeneration) no matter how faithful, devoted to jesus there are.