HAVING made a strong case that you ought to strive to be wealthy in recent writings, I owe you a duty to also let you know the implications of being wealthy.
Wealth, like money itself, is not the problem and I can easily prove that. No matter who you are, and no matter your station in life, whether you are rich or poor, you’ll always come into contact with money.
Now, if I were to suggest to you that the paper money in your hand or in your wallet or in your trouser pocket can hurt you physically, would you agree? Chances are that you wouldn’t and you will be perfectly right to disagree with me.
This is because money itself cannot and does not hurt anyone.
I mean, physical currency (or coins) cannot hurt you physically the way acid can, for example. What hurts, in fact, what destroys a person, is their attitude towards money.
Let me illustrate this point. Two individuals had the same amount of money in their bank accounts. One of them, let’s call him Citizen A, found that the house he was living in was getting too tight. He needed more space. The only alternative he had was to look for another piece of land to build on, but he didn’t want to leave that neighborhood.
So instead he called in a building contractor and commissioned him to erect a building on an empty piece of land adjacent to his house, brushing aside all protests that the land belonged to a less privileged person.
“I’ll build on that land and nothing will happen,”
he insisted.
“I will spend whatever amount it takes to own that land.”
When the other individual-let’s call him Citizen B who had the same amount in the bank as Mr. A was confronted with space problem in his house, he immediately took steps to find a landed property that was not encumbered; paid the rightful owners of the land what they asked for and on it built a more spacious house.
Now, considering that they both had the same amount of money in the bank, why didn’t they behave the same way?
The answer is the attitude of each of them to money. Mr. A sees money as all in all, with money, he believed that he could acquire anything, including another man’s property, illegally.
This sort of wealthy people are those who would do anything, including kill, to acquire money. They will do it without any sense of guilt.
Because they are rich, they don’t give a damn about their actions. Any trouble they get into they believe their wealth would solve for them.
Compare this type of wealth to the one acquired by Mr. B. Despite his means, he was still compassionate. He did not set out to grab another man’s land by force.
You can see that to have money or to be wealthy is not the reason why people who have it do evil things. It is the negative attitude to it that makes the difference.
Let’s take another example. Two young men had just left high school and were looking for a job. One of them, call him Bold Face, got fed up looking for a job and decided to join a gang of armed robbers.
Eventually when he was caught, he accused the society for not getting him a job.
“If I had a job when I left school,”
he said without remorse,
“I would never have taken to robbery.”
The other young man was equally exposed to the temptation of robbing people so he could make a living but he stoutly resisted it.
“I’ll rather die in poverty than steal,”
he told himself.
The question is: Why didn’t the two of them take to robbery?
After all, they were both unemployed. The answer, still, is attitude.
To love money, as Apostle Paul observed in 1 Timothy 6: 10, is to bring all the evils money can attract to oneself. That is a wrong attitude; the one that hurts in the long run.
Let’s face it, some people do love money. Get the home video titled, Ija Agba Meji, by Peju Ogunmola and see what I mean.
Yomi Ogunmola, who acted the mean guy in the Yoruba home video, did a terrible job of showing how money can rule anyone’s life if they loved it too much.
Take note of this: To work hard for money is not the same thing as loving money. One example of loving money is to refuse to share it with others, especially those who should legitimately expect you to assist them because they had given you a helping hand at one point on your way to becoming wealthy.
The Bible speaks against wealth that makes people to misbehave and forget their Creator and warns those who will aspire to accumulate it to be careful.
Says Paul:
“Charge them that are rich in this world that they be not high-minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy.” (l Timothy 6: 17).
Believe me, if you are not careful, riches can make you to be high-minded. You can suddenly begin to put your entire trust in your riches, forgetting that the Almighty God is the one that gives you the power to become wealthy (Deut 8: 18).
You may say to yourself, I’d rather be poor than become rich so that I will not be high-minded and offend God.
You’re free to make that choice. But I can assure you that you are going to miss out on one of the greatest gifts that God bestowed on man, which is to have dominion over all the things He created. Gen. 1:26[1].
This is because you cannot have true dominion when you are lacking the basic necessities of life; and end up envying those who do.
By envying those who have what you don’t but could easily have had, you are going against God’s purpose for your life.
Wealth that you accumulate and you refuse to redistribute to others, that you do not direct to the common good of the community you live in, that you use to finance things that will bring misery and pain to others, is not good wealth and you should never acquire such.
But when your wealth helps to bring water to a community that had none; bring light to areas where they need it; build roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and other such things, then it is devoid of evil. And that is the one I ask you to go for with vigor. The more wealthy people who are ready to apply their wealth to these noble purposes the better.
This world will be a more conducive place to live in with many of such wealthy people around. I charge you to be one of them.
Blessing In Disappointment?
You Need To Search For It
EVERY disappointment is a blessing. That is what we say when we encounter unfavorable situations. But if, indeed, there is blessing in disappointment, why do most people stop short of looking for it?
But first, what is disappointment? Disappointment arises when we get something below our expectations. Or when we get something completely opposite of what we had hoped for.
For instance, you have told friends and neighbours that you were travelling abroad. On the appointed day, you take your travelling bag and set out for the airport. On arriving there, you learn that the airline had cancelled your flight. What you experienced, at that point, is a disappointment.
Another example: After chasing a debtor for nearly three months, he suddenly decides to pay up. It was a huge sum, large enough to buy you that car you have always dreamt about. As you caress the cheque on the way to lodge it at the bank, all sorts of thoughts of what you would do after cashing the money race through your mind.
Your mind is still throwing up different options as to what to do with the money as you approach the bank a week later to withdraw the money. As you get closer to the bank, you notice that a small crowd of people had gathered in front of the bank. And the door leading into the bank is firmly shut. Your mind tells you what may be happening. But you refuse to admit it. God forbid, you mutter, dismissing the wicked thought.
But you were right: the bank is showing early signs of distress.
You won’t be laying your hands on that money now. At least not in one lump sum.
That is disappointment, perhaps of a higher order than the first one.
You can always tell what a disappointment is. Some of them can hit you so hard you think it will knock you out completely and each time we experience it, we either tell ourselves, or someone tells us that the disappointment is a blessing.
How can a disappointment-something that gives us not just what we least expected, but what we don’t like as be a blessing at the same time?
Let me answer that question with some examples. Not long ago, a head teacher in one of the schools in Lagos, was suspended from duty because of what school authorities termed “disregard of laid down rules.”
This teacher had never been queried before in more than 20 years of service. So when this happened, it was like taking a Mike Tyson punch flush on the jaw. Devastated by the blow, the teacher almost went to pieces. Not a few acquaintances told the teacher that the disappointment was a blessing. But she just couldn’t see the connection.
After about three months, she was recalled and posted to another school. ”You know,” she said to me about a month after she resumed there,
“the place I was posted to is far better than the place I was before: more responsibilities; more challenges. I simply love the new place. This our God is wonderful. Couldn’t believe this is happening to me after all I’d gone through recently.”
There is hardly anyone that has experienced any form of disappointment in life who did not find some sort of blessing arising from it.
When Climax magazine, which I struggled to keep afloat for three odd years, collapsed like a pack of cards on me, leaving me in huge debt, despair and extremely sad memories, it was one of the worst forms of disappointments a man can go through.
But looking back today, I am actually thanking God for the rich experience that I gained in the process of losing the battle to save the magazine.
That there is an equal seed of blessing in every adversity is not in doubt. What is in doubt, which is of concern to me here, is whether people ever have the patience to look for the blessings that come from disappointments.
In other words, blessings that arise from disappointments are sometimes difficult to discover. We must educate ourselves on how to search for it.
The first step to achieving this objective is to accept, first and foremost, that there is a blessing disguising itself somewhere when you get struck below the belt by disappointment. You see, no matter what you do, you will never be able to do anything about disappointments. They are events in your life which you get to know after they have happened. You can do something about preventing a particular type of disappointment from repeating itself; but you cannot change the one that has happened.
Therefore, after acknowledging a disappointment, whatever it is, the second step is to ask yourself:
“What can I gain from this disappointment? What can I learn from it? How can I be richer from this experience?”
In the process of asking yourself these questions, you are bound to see the many blessings in your disappointment.
Quote:
“To work hard for money is not the same thing as loving money. One example of loving money is to refuse to share it with others, especially those who should legitimately expect you to assist them because they had given you a helping hand at one point on your way to becoming wealthy”
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