Write the Vision Down

“… Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it.” – Habakkuk 2:2

            A few years ago, I began to realize that if I must move from the level of mediocrity to excellence in my life, there are few things I must not compromise.  One of such few things is the habit of constant reading.  I began to develop a crazy culture of reading and this led me to begin to build a personal library unconsciously.  This realization that a reader is a leader made me to begin to spend about 25% of my monthly income on books of various subjects ranging from leadership, management, biographies, history, motivation to religion.   As I read these books, my worldview began to expand, I began to also get exposed to new levels of knowledge I would otherwise not get from my small circle.  As time went by, my environment began to look small for me to operate – I became restless and my purpose became clearer and people thought I was getting mad when I started practicing at my new level of knowledge which they could not relate to.

            The brief experience I shared above came into being because I came in contact with a host of written materials.  Many of the people I read their books live thousands of miles across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean.

            I was never in contact with them and may never meet some of them in person.  As a matter of fact, some of them are dead yet what they wrote spoke to me and changed my life.  There is power in the written material.

            Many people have a picture of what they want to do in the future but have not yet developed the discipline of writing down what that picture in their mind consists.  A Chinese proverb says “the faintest pen is sharper than the brightest brain”.  The item that is written down except deliberately destroyed or erased has the potential to speak to someone thousands of years after the writer has ceased to exist on planet earth.

            Anytime you write down what you have in mind, it takes a life of its own and it has more power and potential of becoming a reality.  Even Divinity writes down His thoughts.  Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai so God can write the 10 Commandments on the tablets of stone for the children of Israel.  The Bible records that these Commandments on the tablets of stone were written down by God Himself.  If you cannot develop a culture of writing down things, you will not go far in realizing whatever vision it is you have.

            In the quote we have at the head of this chapter, God asked his prophet, Habakkuk to write down the vision he had even so that those who will pursue the vision can have a road-map.  Once writen, a direction is established and a focus is in view.  If you can capture your vision in a written format, the vision is half achieved.  How do you pursue what you cannot constantly see?  What you have written is a living testimony of the dream in your heart.

            In Africa, writing is always seen as a boring activity.  It is the reason why development has been slow in coming to our clime.  We have the tendency to operate without clues.  No road-maps, no guide or governance – just clueless, disorganized lifestyle.  No tangible and reasonable success whether at the personal or corporate levels can be achieved that way.  Write down your vision!

            I challenged my Wednesday class in Church recently to develop individual 10 year plans for themselves and begin to work towards it.  Very few people have an idea of how their lives will end.  It is always because they have no blueprint.  Like I mentioned earlier, we abdicate that responsibility to God and expect things to be dropped on our laps.  Forget it, nothing will fall from the sky that way.  You have to create a platform for such occurrences.  Write down your plan!  It gives you focus and reduces stress.

            With a written plan for a year, for instance, you can say for certain what you need to get done in January; what’s on the card for February and what you should be doing in June.  With such a blueprint, you can have a daily “to-do-list” for how to work towards your monthly goals which should work you up to achieving the annual projections.  Without a plan, you will be rudderless, like a ship without a sailing plan and a pilot without a compass or a flying route – you will be lost in the race of life.

            Can you imagine entering a shopping mall without a shopping list?  Whatever you see becomes interesting to buy.  Why?  You did not establish a focus before you ventured into the mall.

            In our vision orientation practice, if you do not have plans in your life, other people’s plans will influence and dictate how your life will be run.  Written plans make you proactive about running your life – people without plans react to life.  They act only when circumstances trigger them to act.  That is a very frustrating way to live.

True Love

Love as a concept in Christian parlance is not a new fad.  The love which our Lord Jesus Christ has for the world motivated Him to be subjected to all the indignities He suffered on the cross and died.   John 3:16 is about the most popular scripture known to all Christians.  It is a verse of the Bible that summarizes the mission of Christ to the earth and its accomplishment. 

            It is against this backdrop that a critical look at the way love is perceived and practiced today is worrisome to me and many other concerned observers.  The idea of love is either completely misunderstood by majority of Christians or when understood, is not practiced possibly because of the selflessness and sacrifices that characterizes its true expression.

            The advent of the information revolution has also done a great damage to a balanced understanding of love.  A vast majority of today’s youths see love from the perspectives expressed on TV screens and fictional love books.

            This book is born out of a sincere desire to bring sanity to bear on the varied and skewed understand people have about love and its true expression in line with the purpose of God.  True love possesses the greatest potential to bless humanity when expressed in its true form because the entire purpose and plan of God is hinged directly on it.

            On Saturday, September 2, 2006, I honoured an invitation from the Youths of The Open Christian Assembly (TOCA) in Kano to speak to them during a breakfast Seminar during their 2006 Youth Week.  I am yet to forget one crucial statement I made that also surprised me.  I said “I have a strong desire to affect people in ways that may not be conventional.  You may not like it and you don’t need to like it.  It is my passion and I can’t be stopped but even if you want to stop me, then you need to kill me!”

            At the end of the programme, the Executive team of the Youth Fellowship gave me a gift.  As expected, it was a book (I wonder why I rarely get other kinds of gifts besides books!).  The title of the book si Romancing the Divine by Don Nori and it is a story about True Love.  Before then, I had completed the manuscript of this book.  The thoughts shared by Don Nori in his book is as radical as the life of love that I have always desired to live out both with people around me and with God.  It has caused more conflict than I had bargained but I have stuck to it because I believe in it and I see results.  I want to share a few of such thoughts as I gleaned from the first few pages of Don Nori’s Romancing the Divine:

How noble true love is!  How invincible!  How pure!  How innocent!  Love simply comes, often undetected even by the one overtaken by its mysterious powers.  True love.  The lonely covet its reality.  The arrogant flaunt its presence.  The ignorant snub its wonder.  It is as illogical as anything can be.  It is hopeless to describe it and folly to shun it.  The greatest philosophers have sought to define it.  Religion has tried to buy it.  Many have tried to elude it.

Love is as hopeless to understand as it is impossible to deny.  Yet reason and logic are helpless against love, for it is a most formidable foe of the mundane and the average.  True love, you see, dares to go places where reason cannot thread.  Love sees realities about which philosophy can only hope to dimly speculate.  True love knows what tradition can only distantly remember.

            True love draws the least lovable.  It can make anything a hero.  True love is the sustaining power of the universe itself, yet is so lovely that it abides fully in the hearts of those foolish enough to respond to its rapturous invitation to come.

            Love without legalism; commitment without control; fullness without fear; relationship without religion – the very mention of such possibilities brings feelings of exhilaration and hope, for they are the deepest yearnings of our souls.  They are the essence of true love.

            Love practiced like stated above frees you to reach out to the best in God and reach the deepest soul of any man or woman you interact and relate with.  That is the aspiration I desire to fulfill in my life; what about you?

            As you read the thoughts expressed in this book, I implore you to open your heart and dedicate your life to the Love of God and Love for fellow human beings.  Real life revolves around this and desiring to live otherwise will leave you with many regrets.

            I desire to see lives changed as a result of this message.  Do not read only for gathering more information because the driving force behind this inspiration is beyond that.  Read for a revolution of love in your life and you will never regret doing so.

What Can You See?

 

“Eyes that look are common but eyes that see are rare…” - Myles Munroe

            In the world, there are two basic types of people.  People who look at things and others who see.  Those who look are many while those who see ae few.  The story was told of two men who traveled to China for holidays one summer many years ago.  One of them noticed that a vast majority of people who were in a particular town were without shoes.  He simply remarked “wow! What poverty! My wife must surely be surprised that 90% of an entire city were walking bare footed!”  His companion looked beyond poverty and saw riches.  He made contact with shoe manufacturing companies back home and today, he runs a shoe manufacturing plants in China, producing shoes for these people who were walking barefooted years back.  He saw an opportunity to add value and earn money while his friend saw poverty and that was all.

Your Purpose Determines How You See

            In chapter one, I dealt in detail with the subject of purpose.  What you see is about vision and that is the crux of the subject I am dealing with in this book.

            The way we see our future is diverse from person to person based on our basic wiring in terms of purpose.  However, the general principle of vision applies to everyone who must live with that orientation, irrespective of the uniqueness of that person’s purpose.  Someone with a passion for great speaking that energizes and encourages people would want to picture a future of him standing in front of thousands of people listening to him.  A man with a desire to help others through what he writes will picture in his mind many books with his name on them as an author.

            If the concept of seeing a future of our dreams is that simplistic, everyone of us would have been great visionaries and life would have been a lot easier.  Many people with clear and glaring abilities do not seem to be able to lift themselves to visualize a future they want to feature in.  As such, as they desire a great future, they are stuck in the present with all its difficulties and obstacles.  They are kind of blinded by today’s issues as their future his unfertilized with ideas, concepts, and plans.

            I have said it in many places and to many people that vision is a conception in the imagination.  Standing alone, that definition is shaky.  It is the future of your life conceived in your mind based on known purpose.  Let us imagine I run a building contracting firm and have just been commissioned by an oil and gas company to build an estate for its staff members.  That becomes the purpose of my commissioning.  An estate will not pop out of the ground just because I was contracted to build it.  No estate has ever been built by mere wishful thinking.  I must sit down with a team of architects to put on paper a blueprint for the estate.

            The client company might have specified they needed 200 units of 3 bedroom apartments with detached boys quarters of 2 rooms, a restroom and kitchen.  The blueprint sketches out the details on paper showing the quantity of land required, the road-network inside the estate, the basic facilities like electricity and water and all he other infrastructure required in a typical estate.  The plan then moves to the stage of modeling.  At that stage, a clear picture emerges where a pictorial model is submitted for the layman to view.  In the model, it is always difficult to convince a layman that the estate does not yet exist.  Why?  The picture captures every single detail.  Cars parked in front of each apartment, people walking around, kids riding bicycles and the flowers standing in front of each house.  A picture of the estate is ready before any equipment moves on site!  The contractors and the client see the estate before the building process starts.  They conceive the estate in their imagination and put it to paper.

            It is true you are born to be a man who should provide leadership to others in life.  Have you sat down to figure out what area of life you may want to serve as a leader?  There are leaders in every field of human endeavour.  What kind of leader do you want to be?  What can you see? What you see is what you become.  You can never operate beyond your capacity to see.

            A whole lot of people see nothing.  They never sit down to look beyond the present.  They are too pre-occupied with today that they are stuck.  The future belongs to those with visions.

The Power to Imagine

            Imagination is one o God’s best gifts to the human being.  The ability to think forward and conceive in your mind’s eye what you want your future to look like.  Ignorantly, a lot of religious folks tell you to forget about tomorrow and that it belongs to God.  That sounds right as long as it is within the realms of not trying to worry about what you cannot control.  When you are overwhelmed with things that you can not handle by worry, hand it over to God in prayers and take your break (Matthew 6:25-34) but no where in God’s word were we discouraged from planning or preparing for the future.  As a matter of fact, the scriptures encourage us to practice vision orientation.

            Proverbs 16:1 talks about “the preparation of the heart …”, Mark 11:24 says “… whatever things you ask …”.  Whatever you ask is a desire and “the desires of the righteous shall be granted.”  Ignorance keeps people away from using God’s best to make their lives meaningful and result oriented.

            God’s blessings are available to those who want them and attract them through the principle of desire, asking and getting.  A desire is connected to purpose and when your heart yearns for it, your mind must go to work to create a picture of what you want and the process takes root towards actualization.  What can you see?

SEEK PERSONAL FREEDOM

I started this discourse on simplifying your life in my last blog.  I am continuing with one major points for your consideration in this particular piece.  Pay close attention.

Seek Personal Freedom & Pay the Required Price

For nearly half a century, South Sudan were in conflict with their Arab northern countrymen.  The late John Garang led the South black Sudanese to resist the repression of the Arab north.  As I write, the Republic of South Sudan was born on July 9, 2011 as thousands gathered in the Southern Capital of Juba to receive Africa’s 55^th nation.  John Garang was not on ground to experience the freedom his fought and died for, his countrymen will never forget his sacrifice for their independence.

          When you fight for freedom, you face challenges and these challenges releases your potentials that you thought never existed.  You discover you could plan, strategize and the realities of your organizational abilities come into the full glare of the world.  In adversity, your best becomes obvious.  Therefore, be thankful for every adversity you face in your march towards freedom because if well utilized, they can stand you in good stead to manage your life well.

          What are your dreams and aspirations in life?  Where do you see yourself headed in life?  Those are your visions and they are a part of the freedom your soul longs for.  What are you ready to give up to get there?  There is going to be a fight and you must fight it.  The truth of the matter is this:  you will have few choices in the future if you do not make the necessary sacrifices and pay the needed price today.  Are you looking forward to financial freedom?  What are you doing to increase your streams of income in the nearest future?  Do you want to rest and be at peace as a parent in the future seeing your children established and standing firm in their various vocations?  Then you must brace up to purposeful parenting.  Do you want a virtual queen for a wife?  Then you are not going to just look well but be a king in your character and attitude.  Besides knowledge and understanding in the issue of marriage, you must prepare yourself from within and be a real man.

          I am appalled by the rate of purposelessness in today’s young men.  Many young men at 26 – 30 years of age do not have a single clue as to where they are headed in life.  Without a purpose, you are a finished person.  What are you called to accomplish in life?  You are not just here to complete the number of over 6.6 billion people on this planet.  You are significant and important.  You were crafted for a reason and a cause.  Have you located it?  Time ticks away every second and every day.

          It is very easy to blame the government, institutions and others.  But, let me assure you today that what you become is what you make of your life by yourself!  What do you think about?  Until your thoughts line up to a particular purpose, there will never be any accomplishment in your life.  James Allen says “a man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it”.  You are supposed to be a creative force.  You are supposed to be somebody higher than where you are now; stronger than a bundle of wavering thoughts and fluctuating sensations.

          You may just be realizing this enormous potential that lies dormant within you which has not been tapped all the while and may be asking “Please help me!”  I have a word for you.  A strong man cannot help a weaker unless the weaker one is willing to be helped.  You must by your own deliberate and conscious efforts develop the strength which you admire in others.  Only you can alter your condition and navigate your way through life for great accomplishments.  That is where Barack Obama emerged from as the first Black President of the United States, overcoming personal obstacles and institutional barriers.  You too can overcome your challenges and get to the topmost place in your life.

          Your way of thinking must change.  If you have to become free, you must first of all be free in your mind.  Your mind is the clearing house where thoughts (both base and high in nature) fight to take residence.  Do you remember the statement that says “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he?”  When you look at your life, who do you see?  As you stand before a full length mirror, who do you see reflected back to you?  Do you see a weak and a discouraged person?  Do you see someone worth nothing and who will not amount to anything in life?  Is that who you see?  If these represent who you see, then you must change your mind-set.  You must change your thought patterns.

          Do you really love yourself?  If you do, then you will fight to be a free man in the real sense of the word.  You must have what Reverend Martin Luther King Jr called rationale and healthy self-interest.  A great Jewish Rabbi, the late Joshua Leibman, wrote a book some years ago entitled Peace of Mind.  In that book, there is a chapter that had a title called “Love Thyself Properly”.  What he says in that chapter, in substance, is that before you can love other people adequately, you have to love your own self properly.  You do not need to go through life with a deep and haunting emotional conflict.  Part of loving yourself very well is accepting yourself and that will set you really free.

          Your rationale and healthy self-interest will drive you to focus on something in life and look forward to a period of freedom in your life when you can chose where to live, where to go for holidays with your family without restrictions placed on you for lack of finance and the means.  

SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE

The life we have been given to live should be lived in its basic, simple and principle-centered format.  There are many complications that exists in life and most of them are the result of people not following laid out principles by which life must be lived.  If you operate a vehicle outside the prescribed manufacturers' instructions, you should not complain when it malfunctions.  In the same vein, our lives are "fabricated" to function according to some basic simple but important rules. 

These rules of life are not profound and so there is a tendency for people to take them for granted and would rather prefer to follow some skewed rules that actually are toxic in nature to life.  In this piece, I want to identify a few of such things that we must do or not do to keep our lives simple, happy and to enjoy a longer life.

Don't Worry About Anything

The human body was configured not to live in anxiety.  Anxiety generates bitter and foreign fluids to your body and life.  When you worry about things you have no control over, you put the body under undue pressure and your health becomes threatened because it is made to perform functions that is beyond its capacity.

When I say we should not worry about anything, it is easy to misunderstand this for CONCERN.  There are a million and one things that we should be concerned about but concern should not to be taken to the level of anxiety.  When you are concerned, it should give you the inspiration to look for solutions.  Worry is agitation-driven where you sometimes lose touch with your own well-being.  In times of worry, you actually lose the power to do what is right.  Confusion attends the worried soul.  Keep your heart free from too much burdens by avoiding worry.  Take the burdens that are beyond you to the One who can change things.  That person is God Almighty.

Decide to be Joyful Always

There are things we do not because we feel like doing them but because we CHOOSE to do them.  There are a lot of things that naturally should keep us sad all the times in this life.  But if you have to respond to every issue with a heart laden with very many sad memories you would be allowing the memories of hurts in the past to bleed into the present and pollute your future. 

Joy is a choice you  must consciously, deliberately and intentionally make on a daily basis to keep your life simple.  Do you have money in your pocket?  Fine and good.  If you don't have cash, be joyful because the world will not end because you have got no cash.  Did someone just make a snide comment about you?  Be joyful because the person might just have expressed a personal opinion which should not necessarily be a reflection of the real you.  Joy creates an atmosphere where you are on a constant high.  Joy is what your life is configured to experience... decide to be in that state constantly.

Be Yourself

We put unnecessary pressure on our lives when we desire to be who we are not.  Being yourself is a conscious way of appreciating your Maker for making you the way you are.  Are you very tall, God wanted you that way.  Are you of average height?  Convince yourself that whoever is taller than you is too tall.  If you short, have fun because "... for all have sinned and fallen short of God's standards". 

Be yourself when you meet people.  God does not want two David Cameron on the face of the earth.  He created the one He wanted and made Him the British Prime Minister.  He then created a certain Barack Obama and made him the United States President while he created Godwin Ogwuche to be the President of Creslead Consulting.  I am happy with who I am and what God has made me.  I am where I am because of the role I have to play.  I am not inferior to anyone and no one is superior to me.  I am in a class all by itself.

I will not want to be someone else.  Identify your role and play it well.  It was Martin Luther King Jnr. who affirmed this assertion by saying:

If you can't be a pine on the top of a hill
Be a scrub in the valley but be
The best little scrub on the side of the hill,
Be a bush if you can't be a tree.
If you can't be a highway just be a trail
If you can't be the sun be a star;
It isn't by size that you win or fail
Be the best of whatever you are.

That is phenomenal all by itself.


... [to be continued]... stay in touch.