₦airaland Forum

Learn to Sacrifice

One of the consequences of Adam’s fall was the necessity for work. Adam woke up to the reality that if he did nothing in the present, much suffering will be waiting for him in the future. Work is what you do today so as to gain something in the future. When it comes to work, you sacrifice now to gain benefit later. The word “sacrifice” is of much importance in the last sentence. In this context, there is little difference between sacrifice and work.

Can you bargain with the future? It seems you have a chance. If you do whatever you like whenever you like without regulating your impulses or behaving properly, the future will most likely not smile at you. So what do you do? You control and organize your impulses so that it could be well for your future self. You delay gratification. When you work or sacrifice, you essentially delay gratification.

The bible records that the people of old were into sacrifice. They offered something to God – sacrifice – so that God can bless them. Before understanding can be articulated in words, it is often acted out. Our ancestors acted out what they understood but probably were not able to articulate. A child is not able to articulate what being a mother is but she can act out or mimic being a mother. The ritual sacrifice of our forefathers, on some level, seems to be an extension of the logic of work – sacrifice now, gain later.

To solve a small problem, a small sacrifice may suffice. To solve a bigger and harder problem, a larger sacrifice may be required. You can decide to play video games all day rather than going to class or going to the library to read. But you should know that doing so will be costly to your degree. You sacrifice the pleasure of playing your video game much of the time so you can have a good degree which can be much helpful when you start looking for a job. The discipline of a law school will interfere with a licentious lifestyle full of partying. Giving the partying up is a sacrifice. But a successful lawyer can be of much good to his family and his community. It is necessary to sacrifice to improve your future and larger sacrifices, depending on the situation, can be better.

If you are sacrificing for a better future, what could be the best sacrifice and what could be the best future? The best sacrifice is the sacrifice of yourself for the highest good. If the highest good could be made manifest in the future, then that future will be the best. Our highest good is God. Jesus sacrificed himself completely for God. We may not be called to sacrifice ourselves exactly the way Jesus did but in some way, we are all called to sacrifice ourselves, in various degrees, not for nothing but for good. Our collective sacrifice for good can bring about a world we may not have conceived.

Have you observed what happens when two people who are aligned in purpose come together to do something good? They achieve what each could not have achieved individually. What prevents us from sacrificing ourselves or cooperating with others to realize something good? Our selfishness. Selfishness may get you short-term gain but it denies you long-term good. In this regard, the selfish may think she is smart but in her short-sightedness, she fails to see all she is losing. Selfishness is what leads you to a life that seeks impulsive pleasures or hedonism; selfishness is what brings you a wrong sense of entitlement; selfishness brings you a lack of empathy; selfishness is what deepens your need for admiration. The extremely selfish person could be called a narcissist. Go check the meaning of narcissism.

I dare say that the antidote to selfishness is the practice of voluntary sacrifice for good. So, take care of yourself. Yes. But learn to sacrifice when necessary.

Problems. They just don’t seem to end as much as you try to solve them. In one way or another, they are there or around the corner. Even when you solve a problem, the solution itself can create a situation for another problem to arise. He gives his best to his tertiary education and finally graduates. One year later he is through with his National Youth Service Corps programme. What a thing of joy! But what problem does he have when he wakes up the next day? Unemployment. And even when he gets a job, his very place of work and the people he works with will eventually present their own set of peculiar problems. Problems!

The sort of things you hear when morality is thrown to the winds. But we do so at our own peril.

How exactly will this cushion the effect of subsidy removal?

When it comes to naira devaluation, I don't trust US.

So where has the budgetary allocation being going to?

Do you want to have a life in which you have less to regret and are less ashamed of your actions? Choose to do what is right. There are occasions when some people seem to make a life of immorality attractive. We may see them sometimes on social media or around us. Don’t fall for it. They are telling a lie with their life. All things considered, your life is better and at peace when you choose God and his commands. That is not a promise. That is a guarantee.

For Pleasure or For Better

Before God kicks Adam and Eve out of Paradise, he first tells Eve, “I shall give you intense pain in childbearing, you will give birth to your children in pain. Your yearning will be for your husband, and he will dominate you.” Then he turns to Adam, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat, accursed be the soil because of you! Painfully will you get your food from it as long as you live. It will yield brambles and thistles, as you eat the produce of the land. By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it. For dust you are and to dust you shall return.” That passage tells me that suffering is part of life and God has a hand in it for reasons best known to him.

What do we do about that? I can tell you what some people actually do. They are like, “God I am not in for that suffering you are talking about. As for me I choose to live for the moment.” And by that they mean, “I will follow my impulses. I will pursue pleasure. I will lie, cheat, deceive, manipulate, and do whatever is expedient not to get caught.”

Here is Wisdom 2:1-9: They who said among themselves, thinking not aright: “Brief and troublous is our lifetime; neither is there any remedy for man’s dying, nor is anyone known to have come back from the nether world. For haphazard were we born, and hereafter we shall be as though we had not been; because the breath in our nostrils is a smoke and reason is a spark at the beating of our hearts, and when this is quenched, our body will be ashes and our spirit will be poured abroad like unresisting air. Even our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will recall our deeds. So, our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and will be dispersed like a mist pursued by the sun’s rays and overpowered by its heat. For our lifetime is the passing of a shadow; and our dying cannot be deferred because it is fixed with a seal; and no one returns. Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are real, and use the freshness of creation avidly. Let us have our fill of costly wine and perfumes, and let no springtime blossom pass us by; let us crown ourselves with rosebuds ere they wither. Let no meadow be free from wantonness; everywhere let us leave tokens of our rejoicing, for this our portion is, and this our lot.” The point is that people started living for pleasures a long time ago.

But why not live for pleasure? Why not choose pleasure over the suffering of this life? Why not grab all you can get whenever? Or is there a better way to live?

Prof. Jordan Peterson says something about this in his book, 12 Rules For Life.

Our ancestors worked out very sophisticated answers to such questions but we still don’t understand them very well. This is because they are in large part still implicit – manifest primarily in ritual and myth and, as of yet, incompletely articulated. We act them out and represent them in stories, but we’re not yet wise enough to formulate them explicitly. We’re still chimps in a troupe, or wolves in a pack. We know how to behave. We know who’s who, and why. We’ve learned that through experience. Our knowledge has been shaped by our interaction with others. We’ve established predictable routines and patterns of behavior – but we don’t really understand them, or know where they originated. They’ve evolved over great expanses of time. No one was formulating them explicitly (at least not in the dimmest reaches of the past), even though we’ve been telling each other how to act forever. One day, however, not so long ago, we woke up. We were already doing, but we started noticing what we were doing. We started using our bodies as devices to represent their own actions. We started imitating and dramatizing. We invented ritual. We started acting out our own drama in these stories. We coded our observations of our own drama in these stories. In this manner, the information that was first only embedded in our behaviour became represented in our stories. But we didn’t and still don’t understand what it all means.

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The ten commandments in the Bible are very helpful when it comes choosing a morally upright life. The seventh commandment says: You shall not steal. For the purpose of clarity let me employ fiction. God offers Godwin and Chigozie two options saying, “I command that you work and make a decent living and avoid stealing. But I will not force you to obey me.” Godwin from the start decides he is wiser and knows better than God (sin of pride) and chooses to disobey God. He refuses to do noble work and decides that stealing is his chosen profession. He is a programmer and because he lacks morality, he uses his programming skill to hack into people’s accounts to steal their money. He steals one hundred thousand naira from his first victim. From his second victim he steals five hundred thousand. From the third, one million. By the mere act of stealing Godwin has unknowingly configured himself as the sort of person who finds noble work difficult and stealing attractive. This configuration messes up his psyche such that he justifies what is wrong. If Godwin is able to steal ten million naira with the click of a mouse repeatedly, you may go ahead and offer Godwin a chance to repent with five million naira for free to stop stealing and do honest work but Godwin will reject your offer. Something in Godwin has shifted. He has conformed himself to be a thief. He is his own first victim. To stop is now difficult. His life is worse just that he doesn’t know that yet. His family finds out what he does for a living and they are in pain. Godwin is not having so much of a good life and now his family is in pain. Everyone whom Godwin has stolen from is having a hard time as well their families because Godwin emptied their life savings. Some of them decide that the world is unfair and decide to revenge by stealing from some other people. Godwin gets caught and after it was discovered he has stolen a total of five hundred billion naira from people he is sentenced to life imprisonment. His action of stealing has made his life bad for today and tomorrow and at the same time bad for his family and his victims and his victims’ victims. By stealing and shunning a morally upright life, Godwin made the world a worse place.

lhordspy:
Outrageous and very disgusting.

From the look of things, you will know it is state-sponsored. Directly from the government. They are grooming kids into LGBTQ, and the first stage is this, by first sexualizing them. Then next, they start manipulating them at young age into believing they are in the wrong body.

Sometimes i just dont getit. What is the hidden agenda behind this evil movement called LGBTQ? And why is the western leaders so keen and serious about enforcing it on anyone and everyone. They claim it is not by choice but they were born that way, so why trying so hard to convert others who werent born that way, why trying to push it down the throat of our kids into being like them? I thought they said they were born that way, but they are trying to groom others not born that way to be like them. Why always trying so hard to publicised themselves, to force it down our throat, to display themselves right into our faces. For group of people crying about denial of right, don't they think they are encroaching and trespassing on our right too?

I pity those who see these foreign countries as heaven. Especially our politicians that love running to them for validation and political endorsement. Soon enough, they will start forcing our government to allow our kids here in Africa to start wearing opposite gender clothes. Boys will start wearing skirts and girls will start dressing like boys. And if we refuse signing it into law, their usual sanctions will rain down on us.

You ask why.

You cannot see why at the surface level. You have to go deep to understand and when you go deep you land in the spiritual domain.

This movement is an evil movement. It is a rebellion against God and his creation.

So when I say this is a spiritual war you can have an idea of what I am saying.

God has created order and the diabolical wanting disorder is using this as one of its means to chaos.

Evil.

You want the best for yourself or at least you want your life to be better. Morality comes into play here. You want to act right today so that it is good for you today. You want to act right today so that which you do today ends up being good for you today and tomorrow. But we are just getting started. The good you do over time compounds. So let me put it this way: You want to act right today so that what you do today is good for you today, tomorrow, next week, next year, five years from now…and at the same time be good for you, your family, your group, your community, your country, and the world at large. A morally upright life is good and beautiful precisely because it helps you choose actions such that what you do is good for you today and tomorrow and good for those around you and the world. It is therefore not crazy to say that morally upright actions can make your life and the world get better. You may not see the link between your actions and their consequences but your actions are for good or for ill.

Saint Obi.

Been years since I last remembered him.

May they all rest in peace.

Please go ahead and improve the power supply.

I hope this does not turn out to be a witch hunt.

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How To Create A Sense of Order in Your Life

Many of the problems we face in life can be traced back to a lack of order and structure in our environment and our habits. In other words, we need to "clean up our lives" if we want to achieve our goals and live a fulfilling life.

So what does it mean to clean up your life, and how can you do it?

1. Start with your physical environment

The first step in cleaning up your life is to take care of your physical surroundings. This means keeping your living space clean and organized, getting rid of clutter, and creating a sense of order and structure in your environment. A messy and chaotic environment can contribute to feelings of stress and overwhelm, which can make it harder to focus and be productive.

To get started, try setting aside some time each day or each week to declutter and organize your space. Start with small tasks, like clearing off your desk or organizing your closet, and work your way up to bigger projects. You might also consider getting rid of items that no longer serve you or bring you joy, whether it's old clothes, books, or other possessions.

2. Develop a routine

Another key aspect of cleaning up your life is developing a routine. Structure and order in our daily lives, as it can help us stay focused, reduce stress, and achieve our goals. This means setting aside time for work, exercise, leisure activities, and other important aspects of your life, and sticking to a consistent schedule as much as possible.

To create a routine that works for you, start by identifying your priorities and the activities that are most important to you. Then, try to schedule these activities at the same time each day or each week, and build your routine around them. You might also consider using a planner or calendar to keep track of your schedule and stay organized.

3. Take responsibility for your life

One of the most important aspects of cleaning up your life is taking responsibility for your actions and your outcomes. This means recognizing that you have the power to shape your life, and that you are responsible for the choices you make and the consequences that result.

To take responsibility for your life, start by setting clear goals and developing a plan for achieving them. Take ownership of your mistakes and learn from them, rather than blaming others or making excuses. And remember that you always have a choice in how you respond to the challenges and opportunities that come your way.

4. Cultivate positive habits

It is important to cultivate positive habits that support your goals and your well-being. This might include habits like regular exercise, healthy eating, meditation or mindfulness, reading, or creative pursuits. By incorporating these habits into your daily routine, you can create a sense of structure and purpose in your life, and improve your physical and mental health.

To cultivate positive habits, start by identifying the habits that are most important to you and that align with your values and goals. Then, try to incorporate these habits into your daily routine, even if it's just for a few minutes each day. Over time, these habits can become a natural part of your life and help you achieve your goals and live a more fulfilling life.

Cleaning up your life requires effort, discipline, and self-awareness. By taking care of your physical environment, developing a routine, taking responsibility for your life, and cultivating positive habits, you can create a sense of order in your life.

Periodically Examine Yourself

There is a pattern with the travails of the Hebrews of the Old Testament. They enter a covenant with Yahweh. Under the leadership of a great man, the Hebrews organize themselves into a society. As their fortune rises, pride begins to set in. Arrogance and corruption raise their ugly heads. They forget their agreement with God, forget their duties to widows and orphans, and overindulge their impulsive pleasures. A prophet arises and courageously criticizes the arrogant king and the wayward people about their failure before God. He warns them that if they do not repent, doom is around the corner. The king and the people ignore the warning of the prophet and soon they experience a horrible defeat in battle and generations of subjugation. The Hebrews at last examine themselves, recognize their failure to adhere to God’s word, and accept they could have done better. They repent and begin to rebuild for good. But the cycle repeats itself.

That is our experience in life. We build families, states, and countries as structures to live in. God gives us the principles to ensure that our structures are stable and our experience is not hellish. We make some progress but soon we allow our achievement to breed pride in us. We turn a blind eye to God’s commands and take what we have for granted. We stop paying attention and don’t notice that corruption is taking root. Things fall apart. Whose fault is it? God’s or ours?

In 2022, flood devastated parts of some states in our country. Reports have it that billions of dollars were lost in properties. People died and a lot more were rendered homeless. Was the flood a natural disaster? Or was it that willful blindness and corruption prevented us from building the structures we should so that our country does not experience such tragedy? When preparation is necessary then failure to prepare is a sin and every sin has a consequence.

After things went haywire, the ancient Jews finally blamed themselves and got their acts together. They acted with the belief that God is eternally good and took responsibility for their failure. The alternative is what we do today. We blame everyone else including God for our failures. That is the height of irresponsibility.

Part of what we should do as Christians is to pray. We are taught that prayer is the raising up of our hearts and minds to God. But prayer is not only, “God give me this…God give me that…God, why are you not answering me…God don’t allow us to quarrel…” Prayer is also when you raise your heart and mind to God and say, “God, show me where I am going wrong.” If you pray that sincerely, you will receive an answer like a revelation. Jesus said, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” He who prays, “God, show me where I am going wrong,” is asking, seeking, and knocking. Vocal “radical” prayers may not take the place of your own examination of your actions and inactions. I may not completely agree with Socrates but I can understand why he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

We find it hard to beam a searchlight on ourselves to see our failures but we are so eager to look for other people’s failures, quick to see them and quicker to castigate them for their failures. You see that person condemning Buhari, criticizing Sanwo-Olu, and shaming all politicians for embezzlement of funds, give that same person an office that makes him the one in charge of funds for your group and association and come back in six months. You may come back to find two things: one, abracadabra is happening to your association’s account; two, money can fly.

I am not saying you should never criticize constructively but could you please consider removing the wooden beam from your eye first so you can see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye?

The Value of Personal Responsibility

Let us look at that story again – the story of Cain and Abel. Cain and Abel bring their sacrifices to God. God accepts Abel’s sacrifice but rejects Cain’s. Cain is outraged and he protests. God responds to him, “Why are you angry? Why are you dejected? If you act rightly, you will be accepted; but if not, sin lies in wait at the door; its urge is for you, yet you can rule over it.” God tells Cain that the outcome he got was as a result of his action but Cain was not in the mood to hear that. Cain essentially abdicates personal responsibility. In his rage, he kills his brother Abel.

I see two reasons why Cain kills Abel. First, after God’s rejection of his sacrifice, Cain was full of hate. He hated life, he hated existence, and he hated God himself. Cain no matter how bitter he was cannot hurt God so he turns his attention to what he can hurt – God’s creature. Cain kills Abel in order to spite God. His action was satanic. That is what Satan does. Having lost his place in heaven and not being able to hurt God, Satan makes war with man, God’s beloved creature. Satan attacks man to get at God. But back to Cain. Cain’s failure to look at himself and see where he has gone wrong leads to being possessed by a satanic spirit which leads him to murder just to “teach God a lesson.”

The second reason I see why Cain kills Abel is that Abel is a constant reminder of whom he should be. Abel, just by living and breathing judges Cain constantly. The ideal is always your judge. Cain, not wanting to change, was also not ready to keep seeing him who constantly reminds him of his “deficiency.” He kills.

Sometimes life is joy and sometimes it is pain. When life is pain, before you blame God or fate, look inwards. Don’t make Cain’s mistake and end up in bitterness and suffering. I am not in anyway saying that all the pain you experience is your fault. No. There are many things beyond your control so sometimes, undesirable things just happen. A mother can try all she can in taking care of her little daughter and that child can still get sick. Neither the mother nor the child is to be blamed. You may be a good employee at your place of work and before you know it, your company is sold to a new owner. The first thing your new boss does is to lay off some workers and you are one of them. You don’t have to blame yourself; it just happened. He is driving his car carefully on his lane but the truck coming opposite him with speed is being driven by a man who is high on drug. Accident. The man in the car is not to blame. He just does not have the capacity to control all things. In the final analysis, we are all susceptible to despair, disease, aging and death and we are definitely not the architects of our own fragility.

But are there some things that lie within our limited control? Yes. And it is a good thing that this could be the case with respect to some form of pain we encounter in life. First, do away with bitterness or vengeance no matter what. No matter how you try to justify those negative emotions, they remain enemies of productive thoughts. The American/English poet T.S. Eliot explained why in his play, The Cocktail Party. One of his characters is not having a good time of it. She speaks of her profound unhappiness to a psychiatrist. She says she hopes that all her suffering is her own fault. The psychiatrist is taken aback. He asks why. The woman who has thought about this tells him of her conclusion: if it is her fault, she might be able to do something about it. If it is God’s fault however - if reality itself is flawed and hell-bent on ensuring her misery – then she is doomed. She couldn’t change the structure of reality but she could change her own life.

A reduction of pain or an improvement of an undesirable situation by fifty percent is better than remaining the same. And if this will come about if you could take personal responsibility and see where you could change things for better then it will be something reasonable and worthwhile to do.

Don’t be a Cain.

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If You Must Compare Yourself

You think to yourself, “Look at that guy. He’s got a good job, a fine car, a beautiful wife, a stable life… Everything is working out for him… But look at me, everything is wrong about me.” And so, you feel terrible. And maybe you should feel terrible for that kind of comparison. The comparison is simply unfair to yourself. Why?

When you are 13, there is much about you that is similar to other children who are 13 years of age. Social comparison may be appropriate at that age. But as you get older and clock say 30, you become quite unique and your life becomes quite idiosyncratic. There are multiple dimensions to your life as well as to everyone: family, friends, work, health, intimate relationships, and so on. All of these dimensions place you in a unique place in life such that your life is unlike any other’s life. And so, you see someone else and think he is doing better than you. Really? You are probably seeing and comparing only one dimension of his life to your entire life. You take what you consider the best of him and compare that to the worst you think you have. Both the comparison and the very manner in which you make the comparison is unfair to yourself. That is not reasonable. You don’t have the whole picture. The bitterness and resentment you get as a result of the unfair comparison are emotions that signal to you that there is nothing good about that.

Before you say to yourself, “I will definitely trade places with him if I can without thinking twice,” consider this: Everybody is carrying a cross and you don’t know the cross that person is carrying. Look at celebrities, with all their fame and money why have a number of them given in to drugs and even suicide? You don’t have the insight into the tragedy of another person’s life. You may think he is rich and successful but you may not know that his relationship with his wife or children is terrible. You may not know he is having a serious health challenge. His son may not even be communicating with him.

Now, are you who you should be? Are you the best version of yourself? Are you all you could be? Probably not. If that is true then there is something you have or need to do. You have to improve yourself. So, you may say to yourself, “Here is my position and situation in time and space right now. Here are my virtues and my faults. There is probably something I can do today that can either strengthen my virtues or at least limit my faults. If I can do that little thing today, perhaps my life can be a little bit better tomorrow.” What you have just done is to compare who are you are today to who you could be tomorrow. If you must compare yourself, that is a good comparison you can make.

What is that “little” thing you could do today that can help make your life a bit better? You could tell less lies, be more sincere, work more diligently, be more faithful, stop the manipulation… The point is, you yourself know what you can do to improve yourself. If you are honest to yourself, you know. If only you could do those “little” things every day, the positive effects on your life compounds over time. Doing this for three years may transform your life in ways you presently don’t see. Aim for the highest good and attend to the day.

You should be better than you are not because you are the worst of all but because you are not everything you should be. There is definitely more to you. You have to make the right comparison. That is ennobling and makes you hopeful. There is definitely no doubt that you can be slightly better tomorrow than you are today. Attend to that. Movement towards the good increases exponentially. That trajectory can make your life experience better. It can make your cross lighter.

Stop comparing yourself to who someone else is today. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday. If you have made any progress, be grateful for that. And then continue the movement.

Confront the Chaos

Problems. They just don’t seem to end as much as you try to solve them. In one way or another, they are there or around the corner. Even when you solve a problem, the solution itself can create a situation for another problem to arise. He gives his best to his tertiary education and finally graduates. One year later he is through with his National Youth Service Corps programme. What a thing of joy! But what problem does he have when he wakes up the next day? Unemployment. And even when he gets a job, his very place of work and the people he works with will eventually present their own set of peculiar problems. Problems!

No matter how hard we try to get our lives together, things seem to get complicated. Problems emerge in our work, our health, our finances, our families, and so on. It is just as if nature herself wants us to have problems. This seems to be captured in The Second Law of Thermodynamics which basically says that entropy (a measure of disorder) in the universe is steadily increasing. In layman’s terms: when things are left to their own devices, disorder or chaos increases.

Given this reality, what do we do? We can decide to ignore the chaos that shows up in our lives, pretend they are not there, hide from them, deny them, or in short, run away from them. But every reasonable person knows that running away is a terrible choice. It only guarantees one thing – it compounds the chaos. So, if we rule out the option of running away from the chaos or problems that present themselves to us, we are left with the option of confronting them in order to potentially solve them. Now, that is hard work which some people run away from. Only that when you constantly run away from facing your chaos, you run deeper into a life of meaninglessness and irresponsibility. Hardly anything is good about that.

This issue of chaos presents us with a challenge in life: The challenge of building yourself into the sort of person that can confront and potentially solve problems. Problems that are yours to face. Come to think of it, that is why your parents raised you to become responsible; that is why you go to school; that is why you have that job. You can’t take on every problem. No. You are not omniscient or omnipotent. But you can’t run away from every problem especially if they are yours to solve. All this got me thinking about what exactly one can do to build one’s self into being able to handle problems. I can think of four. And let me emphasize that these are not what you do in one day or one week. These are what you do over time which will definitely span years.

First, seek knowledge. If that thing interests you or bugs you, you may want to seek more knowledge about it. In the process, you may acquire some skills. More skills in your skill set or less ignorance about it makes you better able to confront chaos.

Second, grow a network. You don’t want to go about this one in a manipulative way. There are people who only remember you exist when they want something from you. And even when they tell you what they want from you, they embellish their story with lies. If this is not manipulation, I don’t know what is. Use things, don’t use people. So, when I say, “Grow a network,” I mean, “Build meaningful and reciprocal relationships with sensible people.” I don’t see a relationship that is of mutual benefit as something bad. Now, I mean that in a good sense, not in a morally bankrupt sense.

Third, acquire resources. This one, to a large extent, depends on one’s peculiar situation and opportunities in life. All hands are not equal and all hands may never be equal. Notwithstanding, acquire the resources you can: money, business, property, and so on. I do not mean to say that you should become so materialistic that you worship your resources or become too attached to them. No. I mean, acquire them and be detached from them enough to take a risk with them and put them to productive use. As with risks, you may lose or gain, and so, the result may not tally with your effort. Having said that, acquiring resources and putting them to productive use can by itself solve problems.

Last, attempt to solve problems. A few months after birth, a mother begins “training” her child on sitting. The baby, with her yet-to-be-fully-developed body, really doesn’t know how to sit but the mother gets her in a sitting position and surrounds her with pillows so that if as a result of her position, gravity pulls her head, her head lands on a pillow. But what happens over time? The baby is able to sit. Somehow, the baby learns to sit by attempting to sit. So does she learn to stand - by attempting to stand (and falling repeatedly). So with walking. We get better at solving problems by attempting to solve problems. The capacity of the person who solves problems grows. You can even attempt to solve a problem, fail, and still grow. Say you want to solve problem A. You try all you can but you failed to solve it. What you may not have realized is that in your attempt to solve it you learnt a couple of things. So you didn’t solve problem A but sometime later, problem B shows up and just because of what you learnt from attempting to solve problem A, you avoided mistakes while confronting problem B and eventually solved it.

Be responsible to yourself. Be of help to your family. Be of service at your workplace. Use your leadership position in that group you belong to do good. In short, develop yourself into being the sort of person capable of confronting chaos.

Those are the sort of people God uses to create heaven on earth.

A

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The Goodness of a Morally Upright Life

Ever heard of relativism? Essentially relativism is the belief that right and wrong is not objective but subjective. The relativist therefore believes that the individual can use his personal situation to judge what can be right and wrong. Is that right?

A scientist with the knowledge of nuclear energy can use that knowledge to create nuclear power and possibly make the price of power used to run homes and businesses go down. Another scientist can use his knowledge of nuclear energy to create a nuclear bomb. There was a time in history when a group of people made plans to cross ebola with small pox and aerosolize it so that they can spray it on a population (probably during war) and inflict destruction on a large scale. This is not a conspiracy theory (ever heard of the KGB?). If I ever meet one who says, “You cannot say that spraying a population with an aerosolized form of ebola crossed with small pox is wrong. It is relative,” I will either recommend such a person to a psychiatric ward or categorize the person as being demonic. No kidding. Have you met a relativist who believes that right and wrong is always subjective? Scratch his Toyota Corolla car on purpose. Let us see how relativistic he gets.
There are things that are right and some things are clearly in the category of wrong. What helps us to navigate this terrain of right and wrong? Morality. Morality has to do with principles relating to right and wrong or good and bad behaviour. The aim of this write-up is to briefly make a case for the goodness of a morally upright life. I hope I am able to do so. It is challenging already trying to be articulate on this topic. Not that easy. But I’ll try.

You are an individual. If you are psychologically alright, you went the best for yourself. On one hand, there are things that happen to you in life that are just totally outside of your control. You didn’t get to choose your family when you were born. You didn’t choose your country or your gender. Many things happened to you and keep happening to you that you are not able to control. On the other hand, there are some things that lie within your control. What you do and how you act are within your control. Since morality has more to do with what you do and how you do it, a morally upright life is something you can choose to aim for.

Once again, you want the best for yourself or at least you want your life to be better. Morality comes into play here. You want to act right today so that it is good for you today. You want to act right today so that which you do today ends up being good for you today and tomorrow. But we are just getting started. The good you do over time compounds. So let me put it this way: You want to act right today so that what you do today is good for you today, tomorrow, next week, next year, five years from now…and at the same time be good for you, your family, your group, your community, your country, and the world at large. A morally upright life is good and beautiful precisely because it helps you choose actions such that what you do is good for you today and tomorrow and good for those around you and the world. It is therefore not crazy to say that morally upright actions can make your life and the world get better. You may not see the link between your actions and their consequences but your actions are for good or for ill.

The ten commandments in the Bible are very helpful when it comes choosing a morally upright life. The seventh commandment says: You shall not steal. For the purpose of clarity let me employ fiction. God offers Godwin and Chigozie two options saying, “I command that you work and make a decent living and avoid stealing. But I will not force you to obey me.” Godwin from the start decides he is wiser and knows better than God (sin of pride) and chooses to disobey God. He refuses to do noble work and decides that stealing is his chosen profession. He is a programmer and because he lacks morality, he uses his programming skill to hack into people’s accounts to steal their money. He steals one hundred thousand naira from his first victim. From his second victim he steals five hundred thousand. From the third, one million. By the mere act of stealing Godwin has unknowingly configured himself as the sort of person who finds noble work difficult and stealing attractive. This configuration messes up his psyche such that he justifies what is wrong. If Godwin is able to steal ten million naira with the click of a mouse repeatedly, you may go ahead and offer Godwin a chance to repent with five million naira for free to stop stealing and do honest work but Godwin will reject your offer. Something in Godwin has shifted. He has conformed himself to be a thief. He is his own first victim. To stop is now difficult. His life is worse just that he doesn’t know that yet. His family finds out what he does for a living and they are in pain. Godwin is not having so much of a good life and now his family is in pain. Everyone whom Godwin has stolen from is having a hard time as well their families because Godwin emptied their life savings. Some of them decide that the world is unfair and decide to revenge by stealing from some other people. Godwin gets caught and after it was discovered he has stolen a total of five hundred billion naira from people he is sentenced to life imprisonment. His action of stealing has made his life bad for today and tomorrow and at the same time bad for his family and his victims and his victims’ victims. By stealing and shunning a morally upright life, Godwin made the world a worse place.

Chigozie on the other hand choses to obey God. He is also a programmer but he uses his programming skill to work for law enforcement. He is instrumental in the arrest of cyber criminals like Godwin. His family is proud of him. His morally upright work brings about good today and tomorrow and makes the lives of his family and society good. He is the first beneficiary of his morally upright actions as he is at peace with the consequences of his actions.

Do you want to have a life in which you have less to regret and are less ashamed of your actions? Choose to do what is right. There are occasions when some people seem to make a life of immorality attractive. We may see them sometimes on social media or around us. Don’t fall for it. They are telling a lie with their life. All things considered, your life is better and at peace when you choose God and his commands. That is not a promise. That is a guarantee.

A few times, I have had the opportunity to give talks to the young and I listen to them and attempt to answer some of their questions. My experience tells me some of them are looking for direction. They need to hear reasons why they should choose right over wrong. That is what prompted me to do this write-up.

I am quick to admit that I am not a model of the morally upright life. Many weaknesses. But at least we can see reasons why it is worth aiming for and actually aim for it.