Unaware Humanity

A certain country in Africa produces an immense amount of electricity. The shimmer of the lights in its homes and shops has earned it the sobriquet of ‘Showcase of Africa’.

One day, the electricity supply was badly disrupted and the country went under total darkness. It had to do with limited rains that year and the drying up of the dams. The prolonged power failure meant that industrial production plummeted to some 35 per cent of the normal level.

A rich businessman in the country described his predicament thus:

For years, I had gone from my air-conditioned villa to my air-conditioned car to my air-conditioned office. I never realized just how hot it really is here.

Obviously, this businessman had all this while lived in an artificial, air-conditioned world of his own, because much of Africa is a hot place. And it was only when the electricity supply broke down that he came to know the reality of the place he was living in and how different it was from what he had all along thought it to be.

On a larger scale, this is precisely the case with every person. In this world, we have freedom of action. We also think that we have the ownership of whatever we possess. But when death strikes, we suddenly come to know that this was all simply a deception, that we mistook our freedom, which is a means for us to be tested by God, for a right to do whatever we please. We also then realize that everything we assumed to be ours actually belongs to God.

While in this world, we forget that we will be accountable for all our actions before God, imagining that no one will question us about what we did while we were here.