The powers of the sand

BY WALE WILLIAMS

I listened to a well learned Muslim cleric on the 11th of November and I was transfixed with his sermon at the 70th birthday event of one of my mummies. As humans, we have never been grateful for what the sand that we walk on has given each and every one of us. But let me take you through part of his message.

“Do you know why the world is still standing even in all our imperfections? It is all to the glory of the almighty Allah who has decreed to the sand on what it should do for us. It should allow us to live on the land, till the land, receive our food, our waste, reenergize us through a renewal process so we continue to live and most importantly receive us when we die and blend us with the soil to be regenerated again. God worked perfectly with the sand to form us and breath into us to give life. The sand becomes the custodian of our breath.”a

Now, can you imagine if the Lord had not given the order to the sands and they also act as we humans? They would have been opening up the ground and swallowed families, towns, cities or even countries for all the atrocities we have bestowed this world. In the past, we have had very powerful clerics and leaders in the Bible and Quran who had used the powers of the sand to fight supposed enemies ordering the ground to open and swallow people. From time to time too, the ground rages against the world when it spews fire, sandstorm or even earthquakes. Yet, one tenth of the power of the sand can never be revealed.

The world is at the threshold of man-made destructions littering every corners of the world. We are no more our brother’s keeper. The theory of the world is now survival of the fittest. Many in leadership positions have no consciousness and conscience and have lost total fear of tomorrow or even of the soil that we all walk on and we will end up in. The sand grows the food that we eat, the houses we live in, the trees that shades us, the plants that gives us the oxygen we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide that the plants also need. The food takes the oxygen and continues to grow, the cycle continues. This is the cycle of life as ordained by God.

Today, even with the full knowledge that stares us in the face about the need to resuscitate and maintain what the world needs to remain alive, we have continued to shelve the theory of the cycle of life. We have the political cycle, the rich cycle, and the powerful cycle. All three have been able to work singularly to destroy the world but always find members from the three cycles sharing ideas, maintaining the hold on power, causing more destruction and even taking lives! The rest of us around the world not in any of the listed cycles are the Lazaruses of this world waiting for crumbs, slaving for them and becoming their tools of mounting the necessary destructions in every sphere. From time to time, when few of our Lazarus members enter one or all of the cycles, they naturally blend to continue the destruction that their cycles unleash on the world.

As we go in life and wither in age, gradually preparing to take our place deep within the confines of the sand, when we shall decay and become firstly foods for ants before fully becoming sand ourselves, shouldn’t we be working hard to restore the cycle of life that has been bestowed on us freely to its full potentials and stop the destruction of the world with the creation of cycles that can only lead to destruction? Can you imagine if God just instructs the sand in two words — take over! Do you know what this will mean? Have you pondered on the strength of these two words? Let us live…and let live!