Have a little Faith

Let me introduce you to my friend Brenda... a charismatic, sweet and extremely energetic young woman pursuing a degree in business and physical education at the University of Nairobi, which is allegedly the best University in Kenya. I choose to reserve my comments on this one. Brenda will make a great P.E. teacher, I can bank on that. Why you may ask. Well...one, she is in a great school, and two and most importantly, no one I know is more suited for the job. Stay with me, it will all make sense. So Brenda has an extraordinary capability to draw inspiration from the weirdest circumstances. A few days ago, Brenda goes outside to unhung clothes from the clothesline, she is wearing these huge pink crocks with absolutely no grip on them...and off she goes onto the wet grass. Guess what happens next...BINGO! Our sweet Brenda slips and falls and all she can see are her legs flying high above her head. So she gets up, walks into the house, sits at the desktop, gets on YouTube and searches, for how to do a backflip.

Obviously, there are tutorials for practically everything nowadays. I am happy to inform you that Brenda found one that would enable her to do a backflip in merely five minutes. There are YouTubers, assuming they are not intentionally filling their viewers with unrealistic expectations, who believe that you can learn to do a backflip in five minutes. And so does Brenda, or rather, so did Brenda. She believed that she could learn how to do a backflip in five minutes, she was confident that those videos could get her where she wanted to be and for the next hour or so, actually it was more like ten minutes, she followed every instruction to the latter, gave it her all, and eventually...almost two weeks later, she still can't to a backflip. I know it's not your typical fairy tale ending, so let's focus our energy on the good vibes, those few moments when we were all hopeful, those first ten minutes that Brenda knew for sure that she would be able to do a backflip if she followed the instructor to the latter. Those few moments when she had faith.

So what is faith? Yes, you at the back... ….. …true …Faith is my name but that's not what I'm looking for. Does anyone else want to try? Anyone...going once...going twice...okay... I'm dropping the teacher act now... let's leave that kind of stuff for Brenda. I bet this is where I give you the meaning of faith according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but this is Wambui's diary, Wambui is me for those of us who are still lagging behind. Come to think of it, I do sound like a teacher, maybe I could pull this off after all. Okay...before you all start to lose faith in me and bail out...let me get straight to the point...

Whenever you sit in a chair, you are fully confident that the chair will be able to hold you. You don't get home after a long day of work and stand in your living room for around five minutes or so trying to assure yourself that your couch is going to hold your weight when you sit in it. You just sit. But where did this confidence in this chair, come from? What makes you so sure? Well...there are two ways we can look at it, one, you have had this chair in your living room for ten solid years, and every single day of those ten years, the chair has held you. so, why not today? and I know, chairs get old and break, but your experience over the ten years gives you confidence regardless. The other way to look at it is this, you know that the chair is of great quality, it is made from hardwood mahogany and you sure paid good money for it, you are sure the chair can hold your weight because it is strong. I'm sorry if I have lost you...in short, what I'm trying to say is, that we can base our confidence in something or someone on either past experiences or on true proven facts about that particular thing or person.

Now, from my understanding, confidence based on past experiences is trust. As they say, trust is earned. On the other hand, confidence is based on who you know someone to be, that's faith. I have faith that Brenda will make a great P.E teacher, not because I have seen her teach P.E before, but because I know her, she is charismatic, energetic, always willing to go the extra mile, and that is why I'm sure she'll do an excellent job. Anyway, forget Brenda, who knows, she might not even become a P.E teacher, which will be a bummer because some of us can't wait to see her teach a bunch of ten-year-olds how to do a backflip.

Now with that in mind, the next few blog posts will revolve around the topic of faith. And no, I will not be teaching about faith, I wouldn't even know where to begin. This being Wambui's diary, I will be sharing my faith. I don't expect you to trust me to post next week, I obviously don't have a very good history as far as consistency goes, but you can choose to have a little faith in me...