HomeOpEdOpEd ColumnistsMuniini K. Mulera

Muniini K. Mulera

Posted Monday, June 27 2011 at 09:49


Dear Tingasiga:
Thirty years in Canada! What a journey it has been! And how gracious and patient and loving my Lord and Saviour has been! What blessings he has showered upon us since that Thursday of June 18, 1981, when I set foot in Canada! Like King David asked: “Who am I, O Lord God!”

The Bible tells us in 1 Chronicles 17 the story of King David who was eager to build a suitable dwelling for the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. However, after Nathan the Prophet had revealed the Lord’s message to David, in which the king was reminded of the blessings he had enjoyed, and great promises for him and his offspring, David asked:

“Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my family, that you have brought me thus far? And as if this were not enough in your sight, O God, you have spoken about the future of the house of your servant; You have looked on me as though I were the most exalted of men, O Lord God.”

Who am I, Muniini, a sinner to whom The Lord Jesus revealed his saving grace on Sunday, January 26, 1975? Who am I, who walked away from Christ in the 1980s as I struggled with deep questions of my faith and man’s injustice towards fellow man? Who am I whose faith was deeply shaken by the hypocrisy of those whose lives were diametrically opposite to what they preached?

And who am I that the Lord continued to love and guide me through those spiritual struggles until I returned to him safely?

I am humbled every single day as I recall the many times that the Lord protected me from premature death. I nearly drowned in 1963, survived multiple motor accidents, and narrowly escaped death in Idi Amin’s prison at Makindye in 1976, where I endured physical and mental torture that could have well driven me insane. The Lord spared my life when the soldiers came to pick me up from Nsambya Hospital on August 30, 1977. He guided me to safety in Kenya and has since provided for us well beyond our entitlement.

These and other challenges in my life were often difficult to understand at the time. Yet my God, always in control, had his plans for me. The Lord’s unfathomable plans and purpose are well illustrated by the story of John Newton, the composer of the marvellous hymn Amazing Grace.

Born in England in 1725, Newton was a stubborn young man whom today we would have probably put on some drugs to control his behaviour. He eventually became a sailor, was captured and held captive as a slave by an African in West Africa, then freed from slavery, became a slave trader, all the while blaspheming the Lord’s name and professing an atheism that many of today’s intellectuals would be familiar with.

On one voyage in the North Atlantic, Newton and his crew came perilously close to being drowned by a violent storm. He later wrote that with the terror of the storm, Newton the atheist, had found himself saying: “Lord, have mercy upon us.”
The Lord had mercy upon him, and soon Newton began to awaken to the grace that had been his to accept all those years. However, though he became a Christian, he continued to engage in the lucrative slave trade.

He persuaded himself that all that his faith demanded of him was to treat the slaves humanely. “I will treat them with humanity while under my power,” Newton confided to his diary, “and not render their confinement unnecessarily grievous.”
True, his slave ship became a little less terrifying than it was in his pre-Christian days. Yet, Newton the Christian, though kinder and gentler, was a slave trader all the same.

Fortunately for him, something happened that would free him from the slave trade forever and set him on a course that would turn him into one of the two best known abolitionists of the slave trade in England. (The other one was William Wilberforce.)

As he was about to set sail once again sometime in 1784, Newton had a major epileptic seizure that ended his sailing career. That seizure, I believe, was part of God’s plan not only for Newton but for the British Isles where he would become one of the best evangelists and hymnodists of his day, and for the world where his sermons and great hymns have ministered to millions and led many to accept the Lord’s amazing grace.

One can imagine Newton feeling awful and disappointed upon hearing the doctor’s advice against sailing. But listen to this. Captain Potter, the man who succeeded Newton as the ship’s captain on the very voyage that the epileptic fit had interrupted, was murdered by the slaves.

In an excellent illustration of the paradox of human pain, Nicholas Owen, another slave trader wrote: “Lately we have the melancholy news of Captain Potter’s being cut off by the slaves at Mano and the ship driven ashore. The captain, second mate and doctor were all killed in a barbarous manner. The slaves are all taken by the natives again and sold to other vessels.”

Any doubts that Newton might have had about the Lord’s big plans for him were almost certainly erased by the “melancholy news” of his successor’s murder.
I never read Newton’s story without replaying my own story and the manner in which God has done things, most of them unclear to me at the time, but clearly saving me for a purpose I do not know even now.

I am imperfect. No, that does not describe me really. I am a flawed person, a sinner of some distinction. Jesus and I have walked a long journey now. I have stumbled and he has steadied me. I have fallen and he has picked me up. I have questioned and doubted and opposed and even blasphemed his name, yet he has continued to love me and to protect me with his boundless grace, freely given to me.

And here I am, 36 years later, still alive and serving the Lord who chose me long before I accepted his offer of salvation. I do not know what the Lord wants me to do in the remaining years that he has allotted me on this Earth. What I know is that I have a duty to do two things.

To be continued…

Dr Mulera is a consultant pediatrician and neonatologist
mkmulera@aol.com