Nothing just happens; Everything in life happens for a reason.

Nothing just happens; Everything in life happens for a reason.

This is wishing you a very Happy and pleasant year dear reader. 2021 has great potentials and I can totally feel it. How it turns out for each and every one of however is dependent on what we do or do not do with our time. We all know that this is the time to set achievable goals for the year, but what use is it if we cannot achieve as much, despite all our efforts.

Something happened to me on the 31^st of December, 2020 that got me thinking deeply on how I have missed powerful lessons I ought to have leant from unpleasant situations in my life.  It also made me realise that every experience in life is wrapped with powerful lessons for living right

On the said 31^st December 2020, I just could not find my phone. Apparently I was indoors taking stock of my life and charting a new course for the coming year. Before looking for the phone I had called my nephew asking him to help me set somethings right. He asked that I send some information to him to help facilitate my request.  The search for the document to send to him had me looking for it from one place to another only to finally find it in the room where I was and at a bag right next to me. All energy and anxiety dissipated towards finding it made me really angry. Well having found it I sent an SMS to him but needed to call him to let him know I had sent the information.  That was exactly where my arduous search for the phone began.

Initially I thought I had it all figured out. I went straight to the file cabinet in my room thinking I left it there, but it was not there nor was it in all the places I had been earlier. Then I remembered the usual tactics of calling the number with another phone so I can hear it ringing but the phone was saying switched off. One hour had gone and I was now angry. My plan to complete my 2021 strategic work plan as well as write my prayer request to present to God in the cross over night was being interfered with. Yet I had to continue the search for the phone because I needed to make calls as well as send out good will messages to family and friends for the new year. Two hours now gone and livid with anger I sat down to take stock about my movement. At this time, I began vigorously, binding and casting the devil who I was sure planned this distraction so that I will enter the new year sad and disorganized.

I had to seat down to reflect and calm my frayed nerves.  No one came into my place so the phone ought to be inside somewhere. Why is it switched off I asked myself, knowing I had charged it fully before calling my nephew?  Tired and furious with myself, I choose to take a nap to clear my head and to think better. I woke up two hours later feeling like I have not slept at all and still tired. I set out again looking for the phone.  Seeing that my personal effort was not helping, I began to pray asking the Holy Spirit to please help me find the phone. At this juncture I had to use my trump card which is a particular scripture in the bible in 2nd kings 6. It is about the episode of Prophet Elisha cutting a wood and throwing into the river so that a lost axe head that was borrowed floated to the surface. This is one of my most valued portion of the bible as this scripture has never failed me any time I called on God to help me find any missing thing. Any time I or my daughter lost something and we cried to God asking for a miracle using this scripture, He always answered us. Two hours to cross over service I decided to calm down and prepare for the most important activity of the day which was to go thank God for His love and grace for the past troubled and turbulent year.

If you are not in Nigeria now, you might not fully comprehend why all the fuss about a phone. Well I will tell you why. Less than a month ago the Government decided to curb the level of fraud being perpetrated by fraudsters using different sim cards to defraud people. All the network providers were mandated to stop selling new sims or to even renew lost ones. Every person with a mobile phone was to carry out a verification process which required their National Identification Number. That process is still ongoing meaning that if I do not see my phone, I cannot get my sim back and this is my regular number which has been in use since the inception of GSM in Nigeria. So without my phone, I cannot renew my sim and no one can reach me. Then again I have not backed up my contacts nor have I updated my contact data base in my contact book for months. This will mean my loosing so much contacts and waiting for people to call me whenever it is the GSM service providers are allowed to start issuing new sims. Horrifying knowing how our phones have become part and parcel of our everyday living.

As I quietened down, it dawned on me again; fully this time that this was a plot to distract me. I had a choice to make and I needed to make it fast.  It is either I allow myself get frustrated and grope around all day searching for a phone or settle down to the sober reflection I ought to be doing before the phone incident began. Exasperated and unsettled I began my breathing exercise to calm down. A lot was going on in my mind at this moment. A part of me said you do not need to go to church, stay home, plan your year. But my spirit screamed back at the voice, Nooo, I must go to show my gratitude to God and rejoice and pray with God’s people. Fighting off the nagging feeling of not going I began to dress up. I told myself I needed to go to where there is joy and laughter. I needed to be with happy people in a happy atmosphere and so I got ready and made my way to the church early.

Mai my was I glad I came. It was an incredible and a brilliant moment in the presence of God. Everything about the service was on point. Praise and worship my favorite part of the service was awesome and I danced away as the well selected songs came on. Key and on point prayers, powerful testimonies and strong prophetic declarations all took my mind off the phone incident. At this point I did not care anymore if I found the phone or not. God’s love simply washed all sorrow away as I yielded to His loving presence and was wholly absorbed by His glory all over the atmosphere.

Folks there is something about the immense undeserving love of God that comes and settles in the midst of awfully weak sinners like us in a church setting.

As those tears of gratitude and appreciation flowed down my face, sweeping away every worry, every pain and every doubt about God’s love, I began to rejoice intensely. Laughter, a certain mirth and un imaginable joy flowed from my spirit to my soul and I began to leap and dance for joy. When the praise and worship stopped we sat down and I truly began to see why the enemy did not want me to be in church that evening. I also began to feel a deep sense of sorrow for people that the devil has deceived not to be a part of the body of Christ. People he has convinced that they are better off outside the church that Jesus died for because of shortcomings of one man or woman that offended them. These people forget that if God was looking for a perfect church He might never have any. They forget that God loves man for while we were sinners Christ died for us, how much more now that we have been accepted into the beloved

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Time with God: – The Most Important thing to Focus on this 2021

Your eyes must always be on Christ and not on any man, so I said to a friend who is always complaining about how Christians are not holy. Who is really! all of us are striving daily to be more like Jesus. We are still trapped in the sinful body we inherited from Adam, but thank God we are renewed daily and growing from glory to glory as we work out our salvation with the fear of the Lord.  The more we keep pressing in, allowing the water of the word of God to cleanse and purge us of all filthiness of the flesh, the more we will be dying to those sins that easily beset us The bible in Hebrew 12: 1 says

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily besets us. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us” [NLT]

I can testify to the fact that I am no longer where I used to be. Every day I see changes in me that were not there years back and that encourages me to keep pressing on, knowing that one day I will be like my father Jesus. Yes I know I will.

Salvation is a gift from God alright, but to enter the Kingdom of God and work in the fullness of all God has purposed for those who love Him and have been called according to His purpose, you must live a life that pleases God. This friend of mine certainly does not know all of these and so denies himself of the opportunity of having an incredible relationship with God and his people because he sees only the weaknesses of believers and not knowing that each person is on a journey. Being a Christian is not a destination, being like Jesus is. A Christian’s life is a journey and the destination is the ‘nature and Character of Jesus Christ’.

Each believer has been saved, gifted with the power of the Holy Spirit to be able to live for God. It is however a choice believers have to make to either die to sin because we have been empowered to or continue to live a carnal life which drives away people from our faith like my friend. However, no one should use another man’s life to justify not knowing and living for God.

Like I told my friend, all eyes must be on the person of Jesus Christ and not on any person. Jesus is our example and our eyes must be fixed continuously on Him. He came to have a personal relationship with us and we cannot see or know Him through others but through a personal interaction with His person. His Spirit now lives in us and can empower us to live for Him if we let Him.

If we cannot live and interact well with the Holy Spirit that lives inside us, we might never ever be able to live with others right. I think that the key to living a fulfilling life is to have a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit of God. It is in this relationship that we are thought how to live with others. As we learn what grieves the Spirit of God, we also learn what grieves people in our lives. This personal relationship with the Holy Spirit to me trumps all in the life of any believer who wants to succeed in life. Let us therefore strive to make this our priority this year that is full of great awesome potentials in God.

Back to the phone issue. Coming back from cross over night after 1am and still reeling from the sweetness of being in God’s presence the reality of not seeing my phone dawned on me again. Family and friends am sure would have been calling me and I needed to get in touch with them as well. With joy in my heart and a knowing that nothing can take away my joy this year I went to bed and slept like a baby. Something happened as I woke up to do my morning devotion.

The Holy Spirit began to minister to me. He was like “why do you not search for the things of God just like you are searching for this phone”. He continued, ‘what do you think this phone that means so much to you can give you that I cannot give you a million fold, and yet you do not find time to seek me as you have sought for a mere thing called phone’. Then He capped it up with ‘do you know the resource you deny yourself by not searching for me?, do you know what I can give you if only u can need me and search for me like u need and search for this phone”. 

Shame and guilt swept over me but I quickly asked for forgiveness and settled down to meditate on the issue raised by the Spirit of God. It dawned on me that many times in our lives, things happen so that God can get our attention and possibly teach us a lesson. The challenges we go through are full of lessons that we ought to pause and learn so we can do better; instead we only dwell on the negative aspect of these challenges, never allowing them to impact us positively.

So as we search for lost things in our lives, it will be ok too to search for the Lord and His will for our lives daily. There are things and people we pursue as if our very existence depends on them. I think it will benefit us to give more of our time and lives in searching for things that have earthly and eternal values.

Get back to the phone thing Chinwe, let us know how it ended you must be saying now. Well here comes the miracle from a loving God. After the devotion, with a clear and thankful heart, I began my day. It was not up to 2 hours and the Holy Spirit led me to the least unexpected place. A place I would never have thought the phone was in. There it was hid away from any human eye. Stuck behind a 50liter container of water and other household containers in the compound I reached out and picked it and it was on for crying out loud. But why did it not ring out as I and my neigbours tried calling it. A mystery indeed. How did it get there I pondered, but It now became very obvious it was intended to distract and deny me of the richness of God’s blessings in my life for the new year. I bless God who helped me deal with this distraction.

This experience taught me never to allow anything distract me or cause me to loose focus from that which counts most in God, my life and those of others. I learnt never to let my emotions and feelings rob me of the joy of the lord. I learnt to jump over any obstacle I see and move on mindful of the evil tactics of the enemy to weary me.  Gen 1: 28 says that “God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”  Man has been blessed to subdue and rule, but despite this powerful Blessings God bestowed on man; the pressures and demands of this world and life will not let man pause and search out ways God has planned for him to actualise His blessings in his life. How true this is for you and I. But we can win if we choose to. We can still subdue the enemy and rule over him if only we can discipline ourselves to work with God, staying in His presence long enough for answer to our questions and challenges. I am sure we can be more like Him in image just like He intended when He made us, if we draw close to Him more especially this 2021. If we can tarry enough He will show us how to be fruitful, how to multiply to subdue and dominate. But we just think we can figure life out by ourselves. By refusing to use the manual [Bible] given to us by the one that created us; we simply expose our lives to pitfalls that leave us with indelible scars for life.

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It is a brand new year that God has given you and I despite all the troubles that 2020 came with, Covid and all. We have been counted amongst the living despite the scores of thousands of people that died and those impoverished emotionally, financially, physically and otherwise. It is time to rewrite the script of your life’s movie using God’s manual so you can get it right this year and beyond. I have made that choice, thanks to my phone. I implore you dear reader to also make that choice. As you look on the experiences God allowed in your life, learn from them and keep pressing on but this time focus more on God and His directives for godly living.

Just like I read in ‘Our Daily Bread Devotion’ of January 4^th, 2014 “Godliness may sound dull, scary and unattainable, but the essence of godliness is simply self-giving love –caring more for others than we care for ourselves. This kind of love is hard to come by, but it’s one that grows in the presence of love. We grow loving and more lovely by sitting at Jesus; feet, listening to Him, talking things over-gaining in likeness to the One who is love.  [1^st John 4:8]

” Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love”.  ‘Life is a journey into love’ so let us allow God’s love permeate our every being this year even as we spread His love to all around us.

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Wishing you a most amazing and destiny fulfilling 2021.

Hurray we made it, Glory be to our God.