The majority of us drift through our time in the space where we are. It begins with how we are conceived. Not many of our parents had anything concrete or special in mind when they were sowing us.
At best, they were merely enjoying themselves; not making babies they want to nurture deliberately along the specific lines of purpose discovery, development and service.
You know how it was with Moses, the Testator. His parents knew that he was a special child and so they hid him for 3 months. They took the grave risk to ensure that the divine purpose of God for the redemption of Israel was manifest through the child. That was the meaning of the child being a goodly child.
If our parents sowed us with a definiteness of purpose, they would impart into us specific information; they would program our minds differently; they would write in us programs that would not need shifting in adulthood because we would have been raised knowing “the why” for our being here.
Find the purpose for your being. If you believe that your parents did not do much in this regard, then you have the opportunity to do so for yourself for the purpose of service to mankind because that is the only reason you are here; for mankind.
Yes, you were made to serve the Maker, but you do that through serving mankind. Nothing was made for itself. Nothing was made for its self-purpose. Everything was made to serve the purpose of another.
The sun does not shine for itself. The rain rains to bless the earth. The wind provides air working in unison with the waters of the earth, which provide the coolant for the earth. Everything in its order.
You must find the purpose for your being, and be that purpose. Now, you have the opportunity. Let necessity be upon you to be and do that, this day!
How do I know my purpose? You will find the passion for it. The passion is the fuel that carries you on. However discouraging things get, you will often find the courage to go through.
You enjoy doing it even if it doesn’t give you money yet. You always get re-direction each time you get rejected. You know the Abraham Lincoln and Jack Ma stories. You do have your own little story too; just that you don’t appreciate it. You think it’s worth nothing because you are yet to be famous.
Your mistake is that they were unknown too till they became known. They earned acclaim from being tagged failures. Try and simulate the frustrating experiences they went through. You will learn something about yourself.
Sometimes you just may detest the place that the compass within you is pointing you towards because it’s not showing you promises of instant financial success. You aspire to do what your neighbour is doing for the obvious financial rewards he or she is raking in.
Do realize that concepts, products and services are always up for disruption in the space you occupy and what you have been given will become relevant if you develop it. It’s your gift that will make way for you; nothing otherwise.
Find your gift. It was given for a purpose. Skill your gift. It’s development. And development is a continuous process. Serve with your skilled gift and you will find and create opportunities to get you to living your purpose.
Doing these will earn you things invaluable. It will give you peace and contentment that comes from acceptance. It will keep you passionate and hungry. It will grant you fulfillment. It will have a ripple effect of value on those you are ordained to impact.
All of these are in the template within you. This template holds the gift and the timing for everything if you are deliberately raised in alignment with it. If not, then you must take it upon yourself to shift your paradigm that your parents and the environment have programmed in you.
Our biggest challenge is to know our why. And we don’t know it because we were raised with a completely different mindset; one of often civil services mentality, the earn-a-college-education and then get-a-job mentality.
This condition is not labelled purpose. It’s just survival and it’s an enslaving or mediocre mentality because it never gets us to explore our depth for the raw value that’s deposited therein.
It’s the same reason schools kill creativity in children because they are not educated based on their strengths, which is their gifts. In their gifts, they find resonance and all the deposits to attain purpose are locked in. These must be unearthed.
A formal education that does not focus on the discovery and development of the innate potential of the learner, and make it actual is not only obsolete, but a crime against God.
An Igbo language teacher in one of the oldest secondary schools in Nigeria, in Lagos, precisely, told a Yoruba boy to write 1 to 1000 in Igbo Numerals. A failure to do this means punishment. He had been punished previously for failure to meet up. This is not playing a tribal card.
The boy is in the boarding house. He had to beat security and found his way out of the school to earn rescue for himself through his father whose workplace was not far from where his school is situated.
My question: Of what value is the assignment to the development of the creativity in the boy? How does this help develop the gift in the boy? What has the school done in concert with the parents to find the child’s gift?
Our education is in crisis. It’s put us in a mess, and we do not know it. It’s in childhood that the human strength is easily discovered, but adults are too busy to pay attention at this critical stage till the child loses it.
We must either individually or holistically begin to address this problem, through government policy thrust. Our relevance in every sector depends on it.
