Food for thought from Pastor Samuel Adeyemi LESSON NO 1 WORRY WON’T SOLVE ANY PROBLEM “When you worry, you are paying interest on an overdraft you never took! Does it make any sense?” While I was working as a site engineer on a project, I remember the day my director criticized me for something that went wrong on the site. What he said that day hurt me and I went up to the roof of the building which we were constructing and I began to think over my life. I wondered what I was even doing on that site in the first place. My conclusion was that I had made a costly mistake by accepting to work there. My dad is a building contractor. He had registered a business when I was in my second year in the high school and made me a director. In fact that was why I went to study civil engineering so I could work in his business and eventually take it over. Unfortunately, by the time I was done with school there was no business anymore. The business had crashed. That was why I had to go searching for a job. It took me 20 months after graduation and the mandatory Youth Service in my country Nigeria before I got this job. And now I was on the job and my director criticized me. I was moody, I felt sorry for myself and I began to blame my dad. If not that his business did not work out, what business did I have searching for a job somewhere. Tears welled up in my eyes as I felt bad for myself and I went to sit at the site office. Then I heard the still small voice in my heart and I knew it was God’s voice. He said, “Write down all the things that are working positively in your life right now.” I took my pen and I wrote, I am 23 years old. I am a site engineer on a multi-million naira project. I am associate pastor in the fastest growing church in the city. My parents are alive, and my siblings are alive. I am healthy. As I went on and on, it dawned on me that God was trying to get a message across to me. My mind was focused on what was not working in my life and God wanted me to realize there were many things that were working positively in my life. Then I heard that voice in my heart; “There is no amount of worrying that you will do today that will make me do today, what I have decided to do tomorrow.” Oh my God, that was a blast. In other words, my worrying was not going to solve any problem. It was not going to force God to do what he was going to do eventually. He had destined to promote me, to bless me; my life was planned by God. Things were going to work out but I was allowing the present experience to colour everything. Let me confess to you that I am an introvert and I have discovered the tendency for moodiness. It began when I was young. I didn’t realize it. In those days, there were not many places where you could watch television in my country. Where I lived with my parents, nobody could receive any television signals. For the first time, I visited an uncle on holiday when I was seven years old in a city where you could watch T.V. Oh, my God, I couldn’t wait for the T.V to start 4p.m every evening. Then this particular day, it was 4p.m and we waited for the T.V to come on. Nothing happened. It was all shadowy flakes on the T.V set. 30 minutes later we tried. One hour later, the TV refused to come on. I just sank into this mood. It was a negative mood. Everybody became concerned for me. They were asking me, “What is the problem, who hurt you, who offended you?” And then, “oh, is it because of the T.V that didn’t come on?” I was ashamed to admit that it was the T.V because I was not the only one in the house who was disappointed. That was when I became aware that I had the tendency to be moody, to sink into negative moods where I just had those dark clouds hanging over my emotions. Overtime, however, I have realized that our emotions make us magnets; living magnets. Our emotions create magnetic fields around us. Magnets throw out radiation, they have magnetic field and they have the power to attract and the power to repel. I discovered that as a human being, the kind of radiation you send out will determine what you attract and what you will repel. If your attitude is negative, if your emotions are negative, you will repel miracles. You will attract problems and you will attract the wrong set of people to yourself. So I discovered that I needed to exercise discipline over my emotions. That is where I began and decided I am not going to be depressed, I am not going to be sad. I fought those emotions, I fought them with prayers, I fought them with confessions, speaking over and over again to myself. I learnt to break free whenever a negative mood wanted to hang around me. My life changed. It changed radically. I began to attract the right set of people. I began to attract opportunities I had never attracted before. I began to attract resources I had never attracted before. Let me say this to you, it is not because things are bad that you are sad, it is because you are sad that is why things are bad. Break free from sadness, sign into joy willingly, and I guarantee, your life will change for the better. LESSON NO 2 SUCCESS IS NOT A DAY’S JOB I remember during those 20 months when I was trying to get a job after graduation. I had begun to learn lessons on faith as a spiritual force for creating whatever you want and I decided to try it out. I read a magazine from the largest church in the world in South Korea and I saw that they would have a conference some months later. I said, “That’s what I am going to do with my faith. I believe that I am going to travel to South Korea to attend this conference.” I went to a travel agent to ask for the cost of the ticket to Seoul, South Korea. At that time, twenty –three years ago, he said it was twenty-one thousand naira (N21, 000). Today the equivalent will be about one hundred times that amount. I had no clue, no idea where I would get such an amount of money from. And I was saying it, “I am going to South Korea.” I was rehearsing for it. I was persuading myself that I was going. As the date approached and got closer and closer, I could not even get five hundred naira, (N500) not to talk of twenty-one thousand naira (N21, 000). Eventually the date for the conference came and passed. I did not get anything close to that amount of money, I did not go anywhere. That got me frustrated a little bit. I said, “Hold on, are you sure these principles really work?” I wanted to go to Korea, but looking back now I smile at myself. Why? I did not even have a job. If I had twenty-one thousand naira (N21, 000) at that time, my priority should not have been to go to South Korea; to go and do what? They were not inviting me to speak. I did not even have a church to pastor. What was I going to do? I needed to get a job first. The lesson that I learnt; success is not a day’s job it is a daily job. It is not a destination, it is a journey. Success comes through the law of process. You need to calm down and give yourself time. Make sure you are in alignment with principles. Do you know what happened eventually? One day I saw an advert again from the church in South Korea for the same conference. This was twelve years later and it occurred to me that I could now afford to go but it was no longer my priority. What am I saying? Give yourself time. There is no amount of heat that can make a block of ice to melt instantly. I know sometimes when we have experienced failure, when we have experienced deprivation, we want things to happen all of a sudden, but it just doesn’t work like that. It takes time. Will I say that God did not answer my prayer that he should give me the capacity to go to South Korea? Oh no, he answered the prayer but the answer was a postdated cheque. Do you have the capacity to manage what you are asking God to give you? That is important. God doesn’t want to give you a promotion that will destroy you. My encouragement today is that you hang on, hang in there and take one step at a time. You need to hang around long enough to see your breakthrough happen. If you set the target, you set the goal and you believe, and you work daily towards it, it is inevitable, it is coming to pass. Don’t be in too much of a hurry. If you eat this fruit before it is ripe, the taste in your mouth will be a sour one and you will put your teeth on edge. Give your goals and your dreams time to come into fulfillment. That is the lesson that life taught me. LESSON NO 3 MORE MONEY WON’T MAKE YOU RICH WITHOUT DISCIPLINE Several years ago, when I was a student in school, something happened. A friend asked to use my bank account to keep his money. The Federal Government at that time had decided to change the currency for the whole country. Everybody was required to take their cash and to dump it in their bank accounts. Then the bank would give us new notes. My friend didn’t have a bank account so he gave me his money to keep in my account and that became one of the greatest temptations that I had experienced until that time. The money was in my account and I began to loan my friend’s money without asking him. It was with the intention that I would return the money somewhere along the line. But I was borrowing money that I had no capacity to pay back. Eventually it became a big issue, a big source of embarrassment to me. Anyway, I have learnt my lesson. You don’t spend money that is not yours. You don’t spend money that you don’t have. You may feel good temporarily when you are spending the money. However, it will catch up with you and the embarrassment will be enormous. I have learnt that temptation is for you to have something within your reach and not have the permission to take it. When I read the temptation of Adam and Eve, I see exactly that that was what happened. They had somethings that were within their reach but which God didn’t give them the permission to take. That is the real temptation; that is a test of character. It took me a long time to forgive myself because my weakness and my indiscipline showed up through this experience that I had with my friend’s money. And it became very difficult for me to pay him. It put my parents under pressure because eventually when they got to know, even they could not afford to give me the money for some time. Of course, they understood with me a little bit because they had not been able to send me pocket money. However, that was no excuse whatsoever for me to spend somebody else’s money without the person’s permission. There are many excuses that we give ourselves especially when it comes to the issue of money. We have those excuses that seem to be genuine for breaking the rules. The truth is, if you don’t have character, you don’t have anything. Don’t lose your character in the bid to make some small amount of money. Now having discipline with respect to money, being able to see money without spending it has put me in good stead. That is why I have now come to realize that if I cannot look at my own money without spending it, if I can’t hold myself back, I can never become rich, whatever the amount of money I may get. It is not even about other people now. I have learnt through knowledge that if I spend everything, I will become broke or poor. We never rise beyond the level of our knowledge, which is why you must keep reading. Wisdom is knowing what the consequence of an action will be before you take that action. When you know the consequence, it helps you to know which action to take. So today I am able to develop discipline in my finances simply because I know the consequences of spending everything. I have discovered the essence of discipline in the management of money. LESSON #4 LOCATION WON’T CHANGE WHO YOU ARE Archbishop Benson Idahosa once said that a lizard in Nigeria will not become a crocodile in America. He was trying to address a mindset that many of us in the third world have. We say that if only we could go to the western nations, if only we could go to the countries that look so beautiful in the movies and in the magazines, then our lives would change. There are many who assume that if they could just land at the airport, they would just change instantly. Their fortunes would change if they arrived in a developed country. There are many who have acted on that idea and who have been shocked. Why? They got to those places of which they had seen beautiful pictures. May be relations of theirs or even their friends had taken beautiful pictures and sent those pictures to them. When they got to those places they realized you also had to work there before you could make money. You have to give out value before value can come back to you. The principles that govern finances in the country where you are, govern finances in the place where you want to go. Money does not grow on trees there, neither do you pick gold on the streets, the same principles apply. They realized that without the capacity to solve problems for people, the money won’t come. Without the capacity to offer products and services, the money won’t come. Therefore location won’t change who you are. Now the lesson; if you really, really want to change your life, change your thinking. You can change your thinking right where you are. There is no where on earth where there is no opportunity as long as there are people around us who have needs in their lives. When we develop the capacity to meet their needs, then we realize that we have the capacity to create wealth and to succeed. I encourage you; don’t be like the man in the story told by Russell Cornwell in “Acres of Diamonds.” The man sold his farm because somebody told him that in some distant land, there was abundance of diamonds. He sold his farm and went to that distant land. He went up and down the whole country and out of frustration jumped off a bridge and drowned in the river. While he was being frustrated, the person who bought his farm saw this shiny stone by the stream that went through the farm. He took it and discovered it was a diamond. The whole farm was sitting on acres of diamonds. Right where you are, you are sitting on acres of diamonds. There are phenomenal opportunities around you. I wanted to run away from my country but when my mindset changed and I began to look for opportunities to add value to people’s lives, to identify their needs, I became an asset, no longer a liability to the community. I did not realize that people needed what I had so much. And the more I have committed myself to adding value to people’s lives, all the dreams that I had, cars that I wanted to drive, the places I wanted to go, they have come to pass. Let me remind you of this lesson, changing your location may not necessarily change who you are.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 07:15:28 +0000
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