Excellence

How excellent is your name oh Lord, how excellent is your name oh Lord, how excellent is your name, how excellent is your name, how excellent is your name oh Lord!! 

Am singing this old school song, which just goes with every season! and as I did, I asked myself, what is excellence? We’ve all gone through school, college or university and anytime we encountered our teachers comments terming our results as excellent, we knew we had done very well! Excellence is the quality of being outstanding or extremely good! Obviously we can’t compare the excellence of God with our very own excellence It’s preposterous! But think about it, imagine God as the only outstanding person who is extremely good to you and everyone else around you.

Ad like to say that for me, the excellence of God is perfection at its very best. Perfection means that nothing that He does is ever wrong! Absolutely nothing, every single thing falls into place according to His will and purpose over our lives!! As I continued to sing this song, I cried and wailed to God, it actually dawned on me like never before how excellent God was! However, as a man there were days where I questioned Him, asked Him questions simply because I didn’t understand why He allowed what had happened, happen into my life and that of so many people that I knew. Did that cause Him not to be excellent? No absolutely not! Nothing that ever happens on earth can cause God’s character to change! So why then do we get angry at God when things don’t go our way?

Many years ago, while I was still a teenager straight from high school I got pregnant! It was a really embarrassing moment for me because I was a youth leader and majority of people looked up to me. But I had failed and sinned against God and because of my embarrassment I left church, I didn’t want to see church folks! Some talked really ill of me, and as a human being it hurt a lot. I blamed myself for every negative word I received! I decided to keep the pregnancy, and 9months later, a handsome baby boy was born 3.7kgs! He was perfect to me. All the shame and every negative word that anyone ever spoke about me went out of the window! A new life was here and I had to take care of him.

This special gift from God continues to grow, but the morning he turned exactly 3months he never woke up! They said it was cot death; I didn’t understand what that meant, infact this was news flash to me. How does a baby sleep and never wake up, they ain’t old folk so why should it happen to babies? I was crushed, I was in shock! I was in denial, I had so many questions that needed answers, but no one could answer me. I cried, I couldn’t even pray; pray for what? Pray to who? To a God who gave me a gift and then takes it away? I couldn’t understand that! In fact I hated God, yes hate is such a powerful word but that’s exactly how I felt! I told God I wasn’t perfect but reminded Him that I kept the baby! It’s like I was justifying my case before Him. I changed churches, I thought to myself, maybe if I changed churches, it would be different! Ad stop seeing people who knew me and have a new leaf of life! But no! It didn’t solve anything. I eventually stopped going to church, for a whole year I didn’t step into any church, Sunday’s was the day I used to sleep in and just relax! Did that solve anything? Nope! It only made me bitter and angry.

One day I decided this wasn’t working and decided to give God another shot! I know right? Who was I kidding? How dare I put Jesus on the spot like that? But guess what, I was desperate, I was empty, I was lonely and I had tried walking on all other avenues but nothing worked! Everything was empty and worthless without God! But I hated admitting that I needed Him, I wanted to just be on my ‘own’ and see if I could do it all without Him! I was stupid! I was wrong! Like the prodigal son, I decided to come back home and just as expected, He welcomed me back home with arms wide open.

Slowly by slowly I have learnt that His ways aren’t ours, nor His thoughts our thoughts! Every single day I align myself to His will over my life. But truth be told, to come to the place of complete and total surrender isn’t easy? But once you do it, your life will never be the same again. Does it mean that I haven’t suffered any loss or pain ever again? No offcourse not! But what happens is this, even in the pain and struggles? He makes it easier, He gives His peace that surpasses all human understanding! In circumstances that you would have lost your mind, you find yourself totally sane!! That is not our doing! That is the Spirit of God that is at work within us!!

This world isn’t our home! Our prayers should always be that God’s will be done in our lives, in our families and in our country! That said, we are just coming from an election process that left some people happy and others disgruntled! That’s expected obviously, in a race there is always a winner and a looser. But weeks before we voted, I changed my prayer & I stopped praying for my preffered presidential candidate, and I told God to let His will and only His will be done! Sometimes His will may not be in line with what we want, but He knows why He allows certain things to happen. It’s beyond us! What we need to do is not fight His will, but rather ask Him to align us into His will and purpose over our lives!!

God is love! God is perfect! God is excellent! Nothing that He ever does is wrong! He is the epitome of excellence!!