Shannon Sharpe is an American football hall-of-famer, media personality, and talk show host. Last week, the host of Club Shay Shay was caught playing stupid games. And now he's winning stupid prizes through the nose.
Shannon is rich and famous. But he's also every man. Classmates, below are four lessons every man should take from our brother's fortuitous dalliance with Ms Fate.
In the 2000s, I worked at an HIV-themed non-governmental organisation. A bulk of our work involved caring for and supporting persons living with the virus. The hardest nuts to crack were male clients.
“It is only when your employer knows your health status that he will act right by you,” I counselled a brother who was about to lose his job because of too many unexplained sick-offs.
“If I reveal my status, they'll stigmatise and discriminate against me,” he said.
Well? The light at the end of the tunnel wasn't one of an oncoming train, but one that heralded a new dawn. Talk about a revelation.
Here's the lesson. Sometimes God allows the lid to be lifted, not necessarily for a man to be exposed, but, most importantly, for a blind soul to see the light.
Big Man got his high when he took high risks. To him, these risky habits were just games. But Big Man didn't know that, with each risk, he was courting death.
“No one has ever died from this game,” Big Man told himself as he squeezed the life out of his partner, and, ostensibly, gamed the system.
Big Man's blood boiled as his partner turned blue. Then he released the pressure. And life returned to his partner.
“We'll finish him,” his unseen enemies plotted. “He'll never come back from this. We'll make him so high he'll commit an unpardonable crime.”
However, when Hades lifted his dagger, Mercy interceded and said, “Heaven, no”.
Lesson: Sometimes God orchestrates events so that, instead of a man committing murder, he loses face, fame and fortune. Hence, what would have been a funeral wake becomes a wake-up call.
Demons masquerading as fetishes
Every person in my ‘hood knew Gadarenes Man. For as long as we all could remember, Gadarenes Man did things that other normal men didn't do. Things like cutting himself in broad daylight. Not to mention living in a public cemetery.
Those were his normals. His truths. And we sanitised his abnormalities by giving them politically correct names. “It is a harmless fetish.” “He is just a little freaky.” “That is how he identifies.”
One redemptive day, The Son of Man commanded the demons to leave Gadarenes Man. That's when we realised there was more to the fetid fetishes than met our naked human eyes. And it was only after the demons entered and drowned 2,000 pigs in Nairobi River did we perceive
We learnt our lesson: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 14:12.
In primary school, our English teacher told us the cautionary tale of the boy who was playing with marbles inside their glass-walled home. Like we all did back in the 80s, the boy loved hunting birds with his slingshot.
“As fate would have it, several birds perched on the trees outside his house,” our teacher narrated. “What did the boy do?”
Yup. We got the lesson: A cat that lives in a glass crib can throw all the stones in the world, albeit on three conditions. One, he has nine solid lives. Two, he has a 10-figure life insurance policy. And three, a boy living in a glass house should never lose his marbles. Ever.
