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Stephen Mpofu
If snippets from radio and television interviewees are anything to go by, some much-ado-about-vanities small minds are livid about the effects of the current Covid-19 lockdown on them.

Die-hard socialites must for instance be bickering about the lockdown tethering them at home and in that way affecting their gallivanting forays. Similarly, ladies of the night are no doubt chewing at their painted fingernails in protest at the lockdown virtually curtailing their income-generating capacity. But the measure by our Government and other governments around the globe are meant to contain the Covid-19 pandemic.

To be sure, the worldwide lockdown has important health and spiritual derivatives for all of humanity and so for anyone to thumb his or her nose at this well considered life-saving measure is not only the height of folly but an act tantamount to courting disaster upon oneself.

Health-wise, how many people, for instance, remember from their Health Science lessons at school or have always known that the surfaces our hands touch at workplaces, on public transport, at home and practically everywhere crawl with disease germs such as those that cause flu or more dangerous ones like the coronavirus and that by touching our eyes, nose, mouth with hands that have not been thoroughly washed with water and soap or sanitised, the viruses are transferred into the body to cause illness?

Also, is everyone aware at all times that it is an important safeguard to be separated by at least one metre from a person coughing or sneezing to avoid droplets that may contain disease germs including the more dangerous coronavirus?

It is no exaggeration to suggest in this discourse that some people may be aware of the precautions above but are wont naturally to ignore them with disastrous consequences for themselves or other people with whom they get into contact.

People in rural communities should particularly feature in awareness campaigns against Covid-19 as well as other diseases caused through human contact.

This is particularly so because not many rural-folks own radio or television sets or have easy access to the communications media unlike their urban counterparts, to be educated about the health precautions they must take to prevent infection by various diseases through contact with other people.

For example, due to money being a scarce resource for many of those people to buy beds for individuals, a whole tribe or clan, apart from father and mother, sleep on reed mats under one blanket so that if one member coughs, the germs are transferred to everyone else under the same blanket and disease becomes a veld fire for them, as it were.

In this communicologist’s view, teachers in rural schools in particular, might seriously wish to make their young charges in particular, learn to sing the tunes composed during the current lockdown about washing hands thoroughly before touching food or one’s mouth, nose or eyes and practise social distancing.

Crooned to their elderly, probably less educated, relatives at home these sing-alongs will promote health practices in the home setup.

Should our Government see it fit, indeed imperative to deploy health inspectors to ensure that rural communities abide by safe health practices, the country will have gone a long way in fighting communicable diseases.

On the spiritual life derivative God says in His word in Romans 8:6 “For to be carnally minded is death but spiritually minded is life and peace.”

The Bible warns here all those who patronise places of carnal activity such as brothels, gambling houses and such like, that these areas are gateways to death that is, in the lake of unquenchable fire or hell and must flee from them by being spiritual, that is, becoming born-again Christians so that eternal life and peace in Heaven becomes their destiny.

All those who are against the lockdown because they believe that it disrupts their feasts on the fat of the carnal world should stand warned that God’s own lockdown will make the Covid-19 lockdown look like child’s play.

The Great Tribulation will amount to complete annihilation of life as humanity knows it to be like, and with Jesus’ Church raptured, or taken away, those steeped in carnal life will only blame themselves for not becoming spiritual.

For example, God’s lockdown will not be defied by human beings in the same way that the current lockdown was for instance wilfully been broken by some New Zealanders playing rugby, according to press reports.

Nor will powerful presidents like America’s Donald Trump express reluctance to have New York, for instance, or other parts of that great nation under the mother of all tribulation, as he is reported to have done in the current Covid-19 pandemic.

The continuing global lockdown should probably be likened in a way to a very, very, very tiny reflection of the shadow of God’s own lockdown for one to try to figure out just how globally effective the mother of all tribulations will be like, so that people may form bee lines to the Church of Jesus targeted Christ while its doors remain open to receive them for everlasting life.