BARACK OBAMA HUSSEIN II - RISE FROM GRASS TO GRACE

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By Apostle William Korir

  “Fear thou not, for I am with thee:be not dismayed;for Iam thy God: I will strengthen thee;year, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness (Isaiah 41:10)… For I Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee (Isaiah 41:13 When God desires to bless you he will even if the society do not recognise you. When God picks you as his servant in whatever destiny of the society – he will create a whirlwind of events and the world will be turned upside down for people the people of the world to have common sense and see the worth and leadership gift inside you. Who )”. Showers of blessings.ever thought that Barack brought up in the ashes of a broken family would be world leading torch bearer. Barrack has its origins linked to Africa mostly looked down upon by the west, but God took Barack's hand and placed him in the world’s powerful seat to be in charge of the world’s affairs. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, tyo them who are the called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28)…He that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Romans 8:32) The world needed Obama and God did just that …….He chose a man from unlikely source; from a glaringly unpleasant background – and gave him the power of speech and demeanour – that moved the whole world. The world just gave a nod and supported his election into the high flying Office. When God opens doors no one can shut it ………. It will remain open for as long as God desires it to be open. “ I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no one can shut it; for though hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name (Revelation 3:8)”. God has proved to the world through the elevation of Barrack Hussein Obama II – to the helm of a Super Power - that His WILL will be done anytime, anywhere and whenever he desires it to be done. God can change you destiny too! He can elevate you from your present status. It may not necessarily be to Positions of leadership, but as you know in life some are going through tough times – financial or health. But there is a God who created you who is watching over you in secret. He saw you before you were born and has lined up the blessings assigned for you. “ I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from you when I was formed in secret…how precious also are your thoughts unto me O God …great is the sum of them (Psalms 139:14-16)”. You are God’s chosen child and you need to claim His promises as stated in the Bible. God wills well for you and he desires that you live happily and without pain. He waits upon you to call his name and tell Him your needs worries. “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time. Casting all your care upon Him; for he careth for you.. (I Peter 4:6,7)” “For I know the thoughts that I think towards you, saith the Lord,thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end (Jeremiah 29:11).” God loves you and he cares for you. He gently invites you to follow Him and he has assured you of His protection 24 hours 7 days a week. May God bless you as you draw near Him and seek His face, praying in subligation and totally surrendering your heart to Him. Give your heart to God through Jesus Name and your life will never be the same again. God Bless you! Below find the sequence of events for Obama Junior leading to His rise from Grass to Grace! Barack Hussein Obama II was born on 4th August 1961.He was a junior United Stated Senator from Illinois and he pronounced his interest to vie for USA Presidential post and when elected became the first African American to hold the post. 

He is a graduate of Columbia College of Columbia University and Harvard Law school, where he was the President of Harvard Law Review. He worked as a community organiser and and practised as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003, won a primary victory in March 2004, and was elected to the Senate in November 2004. Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he helped create legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. 

During the 110th Congress, he helped create legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel. On February 10, 2007, he announced his candidacy for President of the United States, and on June 3, 2008, he was named the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party after a 17-month-long primary campaign. He became the President-elect after defeating Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the general election on November 4, 2008, and is due to be sworn in as the President of the United States on January 20, 2009. OBAMA TOURS THE WHITE HOUSE Despite their sharp political differences, it was a warm and strikingly symbolic moment as the 43rd US President George Bush greeted the man who will be the 44th. The rite of passage sets in motion US President-elect Obama’s historic transition to power in 70 days as the first African-American inhabitants in the slave-built White House. As President-elect Obama shook hands with Mr Bush, soon-to-be first lady Michelle Obama leaned in and gave First Lady Laura Bush a kiss on the cheek before touring her new home.

President-elect Obama has been to the White House but not into the Oval Office. This traditional visit of a president-in-waiting to the White House has happened much earlier than usual because of the sense of urgency surrounding the transition. Mr Obama will take power on January 20, inheriting the worst financial crisis since the 1930's Great Depression, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also the first handover of power since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. Mr Obama's spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, said the two leaders had a "productive and friendly meeting that lasted for over an hour". "They had a broad discussion about the importance of working together throughout the transition of government in light of the nation's many critical economic and security challenges," she said. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the talks were "good, constructive, relaxed and friendly". "They spoke about both domestic and international issues, though since it was a private meeting the White House will decline to comment on specifics," she said. "I don't think any of us can understand what it's like for two people who are now going to be in a very small club who understand what it's like to be the commander-in-chief." She said the transition teams were working "through joint exercises through providing briefings so that when we hand the baton to them they are able to move forward and continue to protect the country". 

 Mrs Bush's chief of staff, Anita McBride, said Mrs Obama was delighted when she saw the bedrooms for her daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7. "She thought the rooms were beautiful and would be perfect for her two little girls, and that they could decorate in a way that would be appropriate for young children. "And it is a historic room. "The Kennedy children lived there, the Johnson girls lived there, Chelsea Clinton as well, and Amy Carter. "So it has historical significance yet it can still be perfect for children, so I think that she was very happy to see that," Ms McBride said. Before flying from Chicago to Washington for the meeting with Mr Bush, President-elect Obama began his day by dropping his two daughters off at school. He lifted them out of a large black four-wheel-drive vehicle, and kissed them both goodbye, surrounded by his Secret Service guards. It was a sign that life will never be the same. 

 The tour came on the day Mr Bush became the most unpopular US president. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll showed 76 per cent of Americans believed Mr Bush was not doing a good job. It even topped the 67 per cent disapproval rating President Harry Truman copped in January 1952. OBAMA’S VISIT TO HIS ROOTS IN KENYA - KOGELO A barefoot old woman in a ripped dress is sitting on a log in front of her tin-roof bungalow in this remote village in western Kenya, jovially greeting visitors. Mama Sarah, as she is known around here, lives without electricity or running water. She is illiterate and doesn’t know when she was born. Yet she may have a seat of honour at the next presidential inauguration in Washington — depending on what happens to her stepgrandson, Barack Obama. Mama Sarah cannot communicate with Mr. Obama, who calls her his grandmother, because she speaks only her Luo tribal language and a little Swahili. Senator Obama’s Luo is pretty much limited to “musawa,” meaning “how are you?” People around here are giddy at the prospect of a President Obama. “I’m up at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. to listen to BBC news and get the latest on the campaign,” said Nicholas Rajula, who describes himself as a cousin of the senator. “By the way, what’s the latest news about the superdelegates?” You might think that all Kenyans would be vigorously supporting Mr. Obama. But Kenya has been fractured along ethnic lines in the last two months, so now Mr. Obama draws frenzied support from the Luo ethnic group of his ancestors, while many members of the rival Kikuyu group fervently support Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Obamas are better off than most in the area, for Mama Sarah’s house has a tin roof — a step up from the mud huts with thatch roofs that are common in the village. Mama Sarah also has a cellphone, which she charges from a solar panel, and a radio that she uses to follow primaries in America. But the poverty is unmistakable. Jane Raila, who says she is another relative of the senator, was hobbling barefoot with a homemade crutch, for she had been crippled by polio as a child. “We’re all very excited by the news from the U.S.,” she said. “We stay up late to listen to the news bulletins.” Mr. Obama’s late grandfather is said to have been the first person in the area to wear Western clothes rather than just a loincloth. For a time he converted to Christianity and adopted the family name Johnson. Later he converted to Islam, taking four wives. Senator Obama’s father, who apparently converted to Catholicism while attending a Catholic school, was also polygamous in keeping with local custom, taking an informal Kenyan wife who preceded Mr. Obama’s mother but remained a consort, according to accounts by local people and the senator himself. The father, also named Barack Hussein Obama, was as much of a pathbreaker as his son. He went from herding goats in Kogelo to studying in Hawaii and at Harvard, even if his career as an economist was frustrated in part by ethnic rivalries. Senator Obama barely knew his father and does not know his Kenyan relatives well. He has visited Kenya three times, most recently very briefly in 2006. On his last visit, Mr. Obama visited two area schools that had been renamed for him. The intention in renaming the schools seems to have been partly to attract funding. One person after another noted pointedly that it was a shame that a school named for a great American should be so dilapidated. Some of Mr. Obama’s innumerable relatives also see him as a meal ticket. They have made arrangements with a tour group to bring buses of visitors to have tea with Mama Sarah. They are also trying to raise money from interviews with her. I had made arrangements to visit Mama Sarah weeks ago, and she had agreed to speak. But when I showed up, she said that her children had told her to keep quiet. Frantic phone calls. 

Fierce arguments. Hints that money might make an interview possible. I didn’t pay. I didn’t get the interview. That’s O.K. Having seen the poverty in Kogelo, I’m less offended by the outstretched palms than awed by the distance that the Obama family spans. Frankly, I worry that enemies of Senator Obama will seize upon details like his grandfather’s Islamic faith or his father’s polygamy to portray him as an alien or a threat to American values. But snobbishness and paranoia ill-become a nation of immigrants, where one of our truest values is to judge people by their own merits, not their pedigrees. If we call ourselves a land of opportunity, then Mr. Obama’s heritage doesn’t threaten American values but showcases them. The stepgrandson of an illiterate, barefoot woman in this village of mud huts in Africa may be the next president of the United States. Such mobility — powered by education, immigration and hard work — is cause not for disparagement but for celebration A LOOK AT BARACK OBAMA’S LATE PARENTS: HIS FATHER OBAMA HUSSEIN SNR Early years Obama Sr. was born on the shores of Lake Victoria in Alego, Kenya. He was the son of Hussein Onyango Obama (c. 1895-1979, buried at Alego by his second wife, Akumu Habiba. His family are members of the Luo ethnic group. Obama Sr. was raised as a Muslim, but later became an atheist. He grew up in Nyang’oma Kogelo, and was married at the age of eighteen in a tribal ceremony to Kezia, with whom he had four children. Education From 1950 to 1953, Obama Sr. studied at Maseno National School, an exclusive Christian boarding school that is run by the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK). The head teacher, B.L. Bowers, described Obama Sr. as "very keen, steady, trustworthy and friendly. Concentrates, reliable and out-going" in his records. Obama Sr. received a scholarship in economics through a program organized by nationalist leader Tom Mboya. The program offered Western educational opportunities to outstanding Kenyan students. Senator Obama said of his father's scholarship, "The Kennedys decided: 'We're going to do an airlift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama [Sr.] got one of those tickets and came over to this country.” An article by Michael Dobbs in The Washington Post, however, states that the Kennedy family did not become associated with the educational airlift until 1960, a year after Obama Sr. was studying in the United States. Initial financial supporters of the program included Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poiter, Jackie Robinson, and Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, a literacy advocate who provided most of the financial support for Obama Sr.'s early years in the United States, according to the Tom Mboya archives at Stanford University. At the age of 23, Obama Sr. enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, leaving behind a pregnant Kezia and their infant son. He had already turned away from Islam and become an atheist by the time he moved to the United States. Barack Obama Sr.'s daughter Auma has commented that her father "was never a Muslim although he was born into a Muslim family with a Muslim name." 

 On 21 February 1961, Obama Sr. married fellow student Ann Dunham in Maui, Hawaii. Their son, Barrack Obama II, was born on August 4, 1961. Dunham left school to care for the baby, while Obama Sr. completed his degree. He gradu ated from the University of Hawaii in June 1962, leaving shortly thereafter to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would begin graduate study at Havard University in the fall. Later that summer, Dunham and the year-old baby Barack stopped to visit her friends in Mercer Island, Washington, the Seattle suburb where she had grown up, before joining Obama Sr. in Cambridge. However, mother and son soon returned to Seattle, where she enrolled at the University of Washington. Dunham, missing her family, then moved back to Hawaii. and filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964. Obama Sr. did not contest, and the divorce was granted. He spent time with his son on only one more occasion, in 1971, when Barack was 10 years old and Obama Sr. visited Hawaii. While at Harvard, Obama Sr. met an American-born teacher named Ruth Nidesand. She followed him to Kenya when he returned there after he received a master's degree (AM) in economics from Harvard in 1965. Nidesand eventually became his third wife and had two children with him before they divorced. 

Return to Kenya On his return to Kenya, Obama Sr. was hired by an oil company and then served as an economist in the Ministry of Transport, and later became senior economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance. In 1965 Obama Sr. wrote a paper titled "Problems Facing Our Socialism," published in the East Africa Journal, harshly criticising the blueprint for national planning, "African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya", which had been produced by Tom Mboya’s Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. As President-elect Barack Obama describes in his memoir, his father's conflict with President Kenyatta destroyed his career. Obama Sr.'s life then took a tailspin into drinking and poverty, from which he never recovered. His friend, Kenyan journalist Philip Ochieng, has described Obama Sr.'s difficult personality and drinking problems in the Kenya newspaper The Nation, Obama Sr. lost both legs in an automobile collision, and subsequently lost his job. He died in 1982, at the age of 46, in a car crash in Nairobi. Obama Sr. is buried in Alego, at the village of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya. HIS MOTHER: Photo of Ann Dunham Soetoro, circa 1971 Ann Dunham Soetoro (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995), born Stanley Ann Dunham, later known as Ann Obama, S. Ann Dunham Soetoro, and finally Ann Dunham Sutoro, was an American anthropologist who specialized in rural development. Born in Kansas, Dunham spent her teenage years in Mercer Island near Seattle, Washington, and much of her adult life in Hawaii. Her son, Barack Obama, is the President- elect of the United States and the Junior Senator from Illinois. In an interview, Senator Obama referred to his mother as "the dominant figure in my formative years... 

The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics." Early life Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas while her father was serving in the U.S. Army. She was named after her father, who gave his daughter and only child his name because he had wanted a boy. She was known as Stanley as a child and teenager and "endured the expected teasing over this indignity, but dutifully lugged the name through high school, apologising for it each time she introduced herself in a new town", However, "By college, she had started introducing herself as Ann". Her parents, Madelyn Payne and Stanley Dunham, met in Witchita, Kansas, and married on May 5, 1940. She had English and Irish heritage from her parents. She was a distant cousin of Vice President Dick Cheney, George Bush and Harry Truman. After the Pearl Harbor attack her father joined the army and her mother worked at a Boeng plant in Wichita. At the end of World War II she moved with her parents to california, Texas, and Seattle, Washington, where her father was a furniture salesman and her mother was a vice president of a bank. The family moved to Mercer Island, Washington, in 1956, so that 13-year-old Ann could attend Mercer Island High School which had just opened. There, teachers Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman taught the importance of challenging societal norms and questioning authority. Dunham took the lessons to heart; "She felt she didn't need to date or marry or have children." A classmate remembers her as "intellectually way more mature than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way." One high school friend described her: "If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would know about it first. We were liberals before we knew what liberals were." Another called her "the original feminist." First marriage In Hawaii In 1960, after she graduated from high school, the Dunham family moved to Hawaii to pursue further business opportunities in the new state and she enrolled at the University of Hawaii ata Manoa. She met Barack Obama, Sr., a student from Kenya and the school's first African student, in a Russian language class at the University. When they became engaged, both sets of parents opposed the marriage, with his father in particular objecting. Nevertheless, the couple married on February 2, 1961 in Maui, Hawaii. On August 4, 1961, at age 18, she gave birth to her first child in Honolulu, named Barack Obama. Dunham left school to care for the baby, while Obama Sr. completed his degree. He graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi in June 1962, leaving shortly thereafter to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would begin graduate study at Harvad University in the fall. Later that summer, Dunham and the year-old baby Barack stopped to visit her friends in Mercer Island before joining Obama Sr. in Cambridge. However, mother and son soon returned to Seattle, where she enrolled in the University of Washington. Dunham, missing her family, then moved back to Hawaiʻ and filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964. Obama Sr. did not contest, and the divorce was granted. Obama Sr. received a Masters degree (AM) in economics from Harvard in 1965 and only saw his son again once, in 1971, when Barack was 10 years old. Dunham returned to the University of Hawaiʻi, eventually earning a BA in mathematics on August 6, 1967, a MA in Anthropology on December 18, 1983, and finally a PhD in Anthropology on August 9, 1992. Second marriage A few years later, Dunham met an Indonesian student, Lolo Soetoro (ca. 1936–1987), at the East-West Center on the University of Hawaii campus. They married in 1967 and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, after the unrest surrounding the ascent of Suhato, where he worked as a government relations consultant with Mobil Corporation, the U.S.-based international petroleum company. Soetoro and Dunham had a daughter, Maya Kassandra Soetoro, on August 15, 1970. In Indonesia, Dunham enriched her son's education with correspondence courses in English, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She sent the young Obama back to Hawaiʻi rather than stay in Asia with her, despite the decision being painful for her. Madelyn Dunham's job as a vice-president at The Bank of Hawaii helped pay the steep tuition at Punahou School, with some assistance from a scholarship. In the 1970s, as Dunham wished to return to work, Soetoro wanted more children. She once said that he became more American as she became more Javanese. Ann Dunham left Soetoro in 1972, returning to Hawaiʻi and reuniting with her son Barack for several years. Soetoro and Dunham saw each other periodically in the 1970s when Dunham returned to Indonesia for her fieldwork. but did not live together again. They divorced in 1980, at which time she began using the name Ann Dunham Sutoro, with a modern spelling of her former husband's surname. Later life Dunham was not estranged from either ex-husband, and encouraged her children to feel connected to their fathers. She returned to graduate school in Honolulu in 1974, while raising Barack and Maya. When Dunham returned to Indonesia for field work in 1977 with Maya, Barack chose not to go, preferring to finish high school in the United States. Having been a weaver, Dunham was interested in village industries, therefore moved to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese Handicrafts. In 1992 she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii,under the supervision of Prof. Alice Dewey, with a dissertation titled Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving and thriving against all odds, Dunham then pursued a career in rural development championing women’s work and microcredit for the world’s poor, with Indonesia’s oldest bank, the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, Women’s World Banking, and as a consultant in Pakistan. She mingled with leaders from organizations supporting Indonesian human rights, women rights, and grass-roots development. In 1994, Ann Dunham was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and uterine cancer; she moved back to Hawaiʻi to live near her widowed mother. She died there in 1995 at the age of 52. Following a memorial service at the University of Hawaiʻi, Barack and his half-sister, Maya, spread Ann's ashes in the Pacific Ocean on the south side of O’ahu. Spiritual beliefs Maxine Box, Dunham's best friend in high school, said, "She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue. She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn't." Maya Soetoro-Ng, when asked if her mother was an atheist, said, "I wouldn't have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognise that everyone has something beautiful to contribute." "Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example. But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways." In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father Barack Obama wrote, "My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess... In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship... she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism. In his 2006 book THE Audacity of Hope. Obama wrote, "I was not raised in a religious household... My mother's own experiences... only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones... And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known." Religion for her was "just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives," Obama wrote. 

In 2007 Obama described his mother as "a Christian from Kansas." "I was raised by my mother," he continued. "So, I’ve always been a Christian." Also in 2007, he said in a speech, "My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptist and Methodist, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution." In September 2008, the University of Hawaii at Manoa held a symposium about Dunham. The is a story of a long journey full of patience, determination and hard work by the President-elect Barrack Obama Huessein –II of USA. Similarly, with your determination and hardwork you can equally achieve you goals.. May God bless you as start up and work hard to improve your life… No age limit.. gun for better things a head.