Broken promises and fulfilled resolutions - this time of the year reminds many of the kind of things they promised to do for themselves the previous year. The reality check time and a period to refresh the list of promises is here again.
If you are like me, New Year resolutions mean very little and so I never bother myself with any such list. There is nothing new about a new year apart from a change of date. Otherwise, to me, the first day of the first month of a fresh new year is just a continuation of December 31. The only new thing is how I apply the opportunities God gives me each new day. That is how I see it.
However, a friend in South Africa last week sent me an excited message which simply said: “15 means a lot. This will be my year of rest, feasting and joy and I know it will be so for you too”. Did my friend turn a prophetess?
At first I thought my South African pal had some expected good news to share and that she was only dropping hints. But no. When she called me over the weekend, she asked me to read the Book of Esther, Chapter 9 verse 18. The New International Version of the Bible reads: “The Jews in Susa, however, had assembled on the thirteenth and fourteenth, and then on the fifteenth they rested and made it a day of feasting and joy.”
Sounding philosophical, the Bible verse meant a lot to my friend who happens to be very religious. She has no specific celebrations planned for 2015. However, her strongest of hopes is in that verse and so transposing it to her life and, of course, to mine, she has a sense that this year of ’15 will be better than the years ’13 and ’14.
With an optimistic mind, 2015 will be a year of rest from the attacks of the enemy. It is hoped to be a year far from curses and abuses. In this New Year of ’15, economic enslavement will change to financial emancipation; a previous year of hunger and deprivation will metamorphose into bumper harvest and abundant surpluses. I know for sure that if my friend was to open “The ’15 Feasting and Joy International Miracle Centre” in the middle of Accra, she would become rich overnight with the crowd that will line up for her “pray for me” sessions.
So 2015 is here and if you are a believer in numbers, your sure banker for staking the lotto is a permutation of 15 and 2015, definitely not 13 and 14.
We are exactly one week into the New Year but even before we began, our President was seeing signs of a year of “rest, feasting and joy” for Ghanaians. He was specific and touched on something every Ghanaian is looking forward to in ’15 – banishment of darkness, as he put it. And what a coincidence. The “prophetic” revelation came to him in a chapel.
At a watchnight last Thursday at the Perez Dome of the Perez Chapel International in Accra, he is reported in the Daily Graphic’s January 2 issue as saying: “The year 2015 will be one filled with fruitfulness, joy, peace, good health and development.” He went on, “Now this is the interesting part. It will be one in which we banish darkness from our land and put an end to ‘dumsor’ forever”. This “interesting” prophetic declaration made by the President, which the congregation at the Dome applauded loudly is welcome.
So who are we to doubt the President’s words? From where he sits, he definitely sees a bigger picture than what we all see as citizens. What he told us as he stood on that platform at the Perez Chapel is perhaps what Esther 9:18 should mean to Ghanaians. We are to take it that 2013 and 2014 were just years of assembling; 2015 is definitely the year when the people of Ghana will rest-assured, cross our legs and make it a year of feasting and joy as “dumsor” is banished because the Akosombo Dam will be full; Bui, Osagyefo Barge, additional supplies from near and beyond shall all come to pass.
I am certainly one Ghanaian who wished 2014 never repeated itself. The coincidences were simply too tearing into our pockets and our social lives. The Perez Chapel Declaration and my South African friend’s Esther Chapter 9 are my assurances into 2015.
A very fulfilling New Year to all my readers.
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