TITLE: Hello, Is This God Speaking?
AUTHOR: Felix Oboagwina
PAGES: 214
PUBLISHERS: Inspired Communication Limited, Lagos
In Hello, Is This God Speaking? Felix Oboagwina, the Author, has successfully blended the art of story-telling with the pontificating authoritativeness that should thunder from the preacher’s Pulpit about biblical morals, truths and principles. The result is a light-hearted book with great depth.
Essentially a spiritual book, Hello, Is This God Speaking? nonetheless holds contemporary lessons for Christians and those of other faiths. This 214-page, 27-chapter, multi-illustrated volume is a product of “God’s inspiration and man’s perspiration,” to quote Oboagwina’s promo in his FACEBOOK page. The book opens with a Foreword by Mr. Jimi Agbaje, the 2015 Lagos State Governorship Candidate of the People Democratic Party (PDP), whom the Author served as Director of Media and Publicity.
This book paints the Author, a Journalist who has worked as a Reporter and former News Editor and with many of the country’s renowned newspapers, as a great story-teller, a captivating narrator. His plots are tight. His dialogues are racy. And each plot unfolds through the tenseness of suspense that sustains the reader’s curiosity until it breaks into the expansive shore of enlightenment. Virtually all chapters in Hello, Is This God Speaking? open with anecdotes, each anecdote illustrating a vital scriptural principle. There are over 20 anecdotes, and every story is a prop for a biblical or spiritual principle that the Author sets out to teach. The subjects are varied and include: Love, sex, marriage, relationship, courtesy, anger management personal dignity and demonology.
An easily comprehensible book you will love to read, it sandwiches Bible principle between the anecdote and Bible references. If the objective of Felix was to use a catchy story to lure and trap reluctant readers into learning biblical principles that they would otherwise have shunned, then he succeeded in this book. He has achieved a creative marrying of science, arts and scriptures. And the product is a very enjoyable book that both Christians and unbelievers will find difficult to put down. The Author teaches without necessarily pontificating. He convinces without driving. His words are like swords, tearing through the conscience, leaving the scar of very practical teachings.
Beginning at Chapter 1 with the title, “Captives of the Mighty,” the book is divided into a total of 27 chapters. Its uniqueness lies in Oboagwina’s dexterity to comfortably blend prose, narration and analysis with poetry. Chapter 2, headlined, “Hello, God, Why Would You Bless a Man Going to Hell?” is essentially poetic, just like Chapter 11, “Departing Saint” and Chapter 24, “Like Nation, Like Church.” Felix shows no reluctance borrowing anecdotes from Islamic or idolatry sources. In fact, Chapter 4, “Companionship Lessons from an Islamic Tale,” is pegged on a story told by a Muslim cleric at a gathering in which the Author was present. So is “Fiwakesin: When Faith is not Enough,” whose takeoff is the name of a mosque in Idi-Araba area of Lagos, where the Author partly spent his youthful years.
Ironically, Chapter 4, “Companionship Lessons from an Islamic Tale,” has a parallel in the following Chapter 5, titled, “Companionship Lessons from Two Flies.” Other captivating titles include: “Does ‘It’ Matter?” “Must You Celebrate Every Testimony?” “For Sale: Man of God,” “My Wife Made Me a Polygamist,” “The Commandments for Gifts,” “God’s Lesson on Anxiety,” “The Okada Man’s Last Test,” “The Anger of a Fool” and “A Lesson in Giving.”
“Adam Clarke’s Exposition on the Curse in Genesis 3:17-18,” Chapter 15, rehashes verbatim a 19th Century Bible Commentary by Adam Clarke, a renowned British Bible Scholar. It is an astounding mathematical analysis of the repercussion that man’s fatal fall has inflicted on nature and the earth. With this 19th Century reproduction, Felix has done well to reproduce an otherwise lost lesson from a most critical episode in man’s history.
Other titles in the book are: “Destiny Hijackers and a Drunkard,” “God Blows His Horn Too,” “The Matter of Trust,” “Sagging and My Personal Biblical Anthropology of Clothing,” “Dignity,” “Are You Sensitive to Your Nightly Dreams?,” “Worshippers in the Temple of Luck,” “The Rich Also Cry” and “Bewitched Houses!”
Every book has its down side, and this book cannot escape its own. One of its weaknesses comes from Oboagwina’s background and fundamentalist Christian orientation. Some will charge him with parochialism. For example, in discussing dressing, Felix displays intolerance for ladies in trousers and loud make-up, same for males and females in the practice of sagging skirts and trousers. In fact, he dedicates the entire Chapter 19 to this subject, tagged, “Sagging and My Personal Biblical Anthropology of Clothing.” Here he refers to the book of Genesis where God replaced with fur clothing the leaves that Adam and Eve pieced together to hide their nakedness after their misadventure with the Forbidden Fruit. For him, this meant that, “Going by this godly remedy to Adam and Eve’s inappropriate dressing in Genesis 3:21, should God take a walk through the streets today, just as He did when He saw Adam and Eve clothed inappropriately, is He not likely to take steps to re-dress the public show of nakedness common to us these days? No doubt, God would reorganise the wardrobe of many of those He would find inappropriately attired.” Many will disagree with this view as too fundamentalist, too narrow and grossly incompatible with modern trends. But an Author is entitled to his licence, isn’t he?
Felix has brought his calling and vocation as a Journalist to bear on this work. His nose for news has enabled him to elevate mundane, everyday events to spiritual heights. Readers will find his book dripping with invaluable spiritual benefits.
