when you believe in God, you will understand that everyone is born with a gift, otherwise your destiny remains buried.

I believe life is a mystery socialised in pleasant and unpleasant experiences. You have to understand that whatever thing we do in life, can never be hidden from public scrutiny. Even in death, our former daily lives have no real privacy. our lives will not be safe from the scrutiny of people who have not experienced hatred and resentment. Nevertheless, we gain some supernatural strength by sharing our struggles with other people. it is self destructive to keep those experiences to ourselves alone. The struggles and the difficulties of today are but the necessary price we must have to pay for the accomplishments and victory of tomorrow. it is my belief that you will draw great inspiration, and after reading through my life experiences, have the courage to face the challenges of this life. You will avoid falling into the same trap that almost ruined my future. These dicey episodes are too easy to recall but too painful to ponder alone. I was born very poor without a silver spoon in my mouth. I was inhibited , mousy, congealed, and mentally barricaded with all sort of insecurities thrown up barriers in my path. I existed alone, wrapped up in my own pain, and sealed off from the world. A typhoon of anguish and grotesque flashes of my cruel past always attacking me. A million images burned through my mind. I felt attacked by my past. I was going through some kind of a private torture. It was as if my life was a huge mistake, a very huge joke gone stale. How could one man go about tearing down structural barriers against individual achievement? How could one man get his voice heard above a noisy crowd? It was a prison into all eternity. The bars may be invisible, perhaps, but it is ever more real than physical captivity. I needed to give my life some purpose. I knew I needed direction, instead I only found confusion and disappointment. The real hard part was finding the right people whom i could trust. people who would not exploit my ignorance, but willing to show me understanding and direction. until it finally dawned on me that everywhere I had turned, everyone I have ever trusted tried to convince me that somehow my entire life was a huge mistake. I was rejected by the society and treated with impunity as I searched for reality. I was caught and imprisoned by society's sterile prejudices. It was if I had been condemned to a life of perpetual bondage without a chance of escape . But we cannot go through life with all our feelings and desires pulling us in different direction. For every mistake we make hurt and every hurt counts . I was determined to confront my own sense of discouragement and desolation. I thought of a brighter future and my courage began to soar. Brimming with a new found vitality and eagerness, I learned how to command the respect and earn the goodwill of many people. I was motivated. My encouragement was obvious as a billboard. My new strength did not come from bravado but, rather from a firm conviction and a determination to rise above societal prejudices. Graduation from secondary school passed in a quick blur. I imagined myself a young man at a threshold of a respectable career. Still nothing happened. Even job opportunities dried up fast after I graduated from school. In fact, I fought the battle of poverty with all the strength I could muster but I was always overwhelmed, constantly defeated. I was overlooked because my family name held no credentials. I became angry, hurt and bewildered. You know after resentment comes anger;and after anger comes bitterness especially if one has a good reason for feeling aggrieved. The more I worried, the more despondent I became. I was bored silly, so I ran away to a friend who lived in Kwara State. He represented an oasis of familiarity in the desert of foreign identities. After just three months away, I returned home again trying to brink away the nightmare that just won't go away. I began to have nightmares and my sleep too began to fracture. Different kinds of thoughts kept rushing at me, tumbling over one another in a vicious litany of woes. All of them skewed and troubled. Most nights, I would stay awake staring up into darkness aware of my crisis. I started imaging crazy things. I wondered if there was a spiritual curse hidden in my family. Those unrelated thoughts just happened to pop up at the same time, and got sort of weirdly fused together. You have to know that in moments of crisis, our thoughts do not actually run consecutively but rather wash over us in waves of intuition. How can one recognize the explicable moment that seals our fate? We often make the wrong choices in life even though we know it to undermine what we have created in our life. As such, we end up doing things we have vowed never to do.; most our decisions are never thought out properly. They are done quickly, instinctively and out of fear. The trick is to recognize the fundamental ambivalence lurking every form of human endeavour. Once we recognize the flaw nature of everything, we can then move forward without any further fear of disappointment. Without any warning, a thought appeared in my mind like a flashing highway sign. It was as if a tornado has swept me up into a whirling mass of terror and confusion. When the dust had finally settled, when all options were exhausted, it became obvious I had to go into the military. I did not like the idea of a military career. I considered their lifestyles crude, too dangerous, and too brutal for my comfort. Again, I was afraid, the military career could make me a stranger to my conscience. I did not realize that a man must be tough before he could allow himself to be gentle again. My grief was pretty intense. Many people are afraid of death as the main feature of the military. They forget that death is a permanent feature in life. No matter how hard we spend a lifetime building a fortress against its onslaught, it still triumphs. I believe it is an essential part of life. Be as it may, I secretly admired how the military me talk tough. But most of the things they always say are mere trash, yet they will be talking and feeling dangerous. General Charles De Gaulle, the renowned French general who later became the president of France wrote a book - " EDGE OF THE SWORD ". He painted the military profession in vivid colours when he said: " There are no fundamental human rights in the profession of arms. Those men who adopt the profession of arms submit of their own free will to a law of perpetual constraints of their own accord. They reject the right to live where they choose; to say what they think, to dress as they like. From the moment they become soldiers, it needs but an order to settle them in this place, to move them to that; to separate them from their families, and to dislocate their normal lives. On the word of command, they must rise, march, run, endure bad weather, go without food or sleep, or be isolated in some distant and work till they drop dead... They have ceased to be masters of their own fate. If the drop in their tracks, and if their ashes are scattered to the four winds; that is all part and parcel of their job." Once in the military, I allowed myself to be wrongly influenced. I developed an excessive bizarre s****l appetite mixed up with a reckless and an extravagant lifestyle. For evil desire always start as a spark, and when it stands unchallenged for some time, it then grows into a furnace. After all, youthful life is considered rash and irresponsible. I became a man of perverse s****l impulses. It was if I had closed down one good phase of my life and had stepped through a door with a whole new ambiguous character. It was a betrayal of complex personal values. But you have to remember how my childhood had been chaotic, marked by neglect and abandonment. The ripples that spread out from childhood experiences always rob off on innocent people, especially if they are still at tender age. But as I matured on the job, I began moderating my lifestyle. it was because my experiences as a soldier taught me tougher lessons. countless occasions of extreme danger now appealed to my conscience. During my peace keeping tour of Liberia and Sierra Leone, I learned how to appreciate life as a precious gift from God which must not be taken for granted. The surface of my life was so rocky that I had to dig deep in order to stay anchored. My life with all its tragic baggage and uncertain potentials was linked with the desire to get out this desperate situation. I have strayed from the important and basic values of my life. Tears burned my eyes but I refused to cry. I'm not a kind of a soldier to run away from a battle when the shooting gets started. somehow, I managed to emerge from the dangerous adventure unscathed fiercely determined to turning these challenges into little triumphs. I guess I was able to achieve this feat because I was blest with a strong will power by divine Providence. And for the very first time in many years, I had peace of mind. You know there is an element of relief in being honest with yourself. In retrospect, it seemed odd to many of my friends who complained I had become too soft, too sober as a military man. But everybody is a fool in someone else opinion. I surprised many people by breaking away from my regular friends. we were a bunch of fools who went around chasing shadows. We went around bumping our heads into the same obstacles again and again because we were too stupid to realise what had hit us a short while ago. As young soldiers, we had embraced military culture and principles a bit too much. But if you we can put everything into perspective, we would be able to attach a critical legitimacy to these ethics. I despise petty principles, obstinate ethics that declare right and wrong on matters of little consequences. sometimes, strict regulations and rigid principles can hinder progress and so needs to be broken. We do not necessarily have to play by strict rules, if we can find a way that works better; as long as it is reasonable, and does not hurt anybody. But the military thinks discipline or any other military purpose is advanced by these absurdities. I believe that our vanity should not run our sanity. I have always believed that the march of history was forward, with less suffering and greater freedom for mankind; the chain of need and tyranny breaking apart. Though freedom has no guarantee, but personal freedom is a universal aspiration. It is bitter hypocrisy to disown these realities. In the end, I refused to grow where we had planted ourselves. I went ahead; I got a degree in Mass Communication from a reputable university. I was glad for the positive development in my new life. But the society too had changed. New opportunities also presented new challenges. Since changes are a continuous process, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Ben Carson in his book "Gifted Hands" He said, if you believe in your dreams, sometimes, you have to go against popular opinion. Most major accomplishments were made in spite of those fears and doubts. The starting point of all accomplishments is desire. It is like planting a seed. It causes something to begin and grow. Deep desire create not only its own opportunity but also its own talents. The most important thing in life is to understand our purpose and release our potentials so that we can plant positive seeds. It is a psychological concept which is deeply rooted in the material environment. Life cannot be tailored to our own specifications. We are all faced with life's inconveniences and hazards. Unexpected situations constantly occur. But it is easy to be happy if we can find happiness in small doses. If we set impossible criteria for happiness, then it will be difficult for us to be happy. I strongly believe what Ben Carson once said that we create our destiny by the way we do things. We have to take advantage of opportunities and be responsible for our actions. If we choose to see the obstacles in our paths as barriers, we stop trying. But if we see the the obstacles as hurdles, we can leap over them. Whatever direction we choose, if we realise that every hurdle we jump strengthen and prepares us for the next one, we are already on the way to success. Just like Martin Luther King Jr. rightly said that the ultimate measure of a man is not when he finds himself in a moment of comfort, but when he stands in time of challenges. We are all architects of our own misfortunes. Don't let your life depend on the opinion of other people. Develop an infinite capacity to ignore what others think about you. The most insignificant people are the first to sneer at others. The most destructive voice is your voice. Don't let your brain hear negative things and accept them as truth. You did not begin when you were born. God duplicated Himself in you. Your potentials are buried in your makeup and your destiny is also buried in your potentials. Every one of us is born with a gift. Your gift determined your placement in the society. Until you discover your gift, your destiny will remain buried. It is not enough to discover your gift, you must develop it. You were created to solve a particular problem for your own generation and the one yet unborn. There is a need only you can meet. There is a course only you can take. There is a pain only you can stop. Your background is not your identity. Those who amplify their background always end up backward and grounded. If you are going through any kind of difficulty, remember that obstacles across our paths are imaginary flat tyres. Disruptions seem disastrous at the time, but they end up by redirecting our steps in a meaningful way. Every path has a puddle, but each puddle can be telling you where to step next. Life teaches us by giving us new problems. Temporary mistakes can be a bridge and not a barricade to success. It is not how far you have fallen that counts but how high you bounce back that makes all the difference. So, stick to the fight when you are hardest hit. It is when things seem worse that you must not give up. Happy is the man who can adjust to a new set of circumstances. If you believe in God, you must realise that you cannot be tempted beyond what you can bear. And in every trial you face, there must be a way of escape if you look hard enough. Some people are so locked up in their own insecurities that they can't grow up. They cannot look beyond their noses. Don't be contended to settle for an ordinary and a mediocre life. Each one of us has been touched by lives before us, and will have to share the experience through our own lives with the next generations still to come. Your dreams and ambitions are temporary dormant but they have not been destroyed. You are still a Champion. Everything in life is essentially catastrophic. Your scars are not images of defeat but a reflection of the battle you must win in order to climb the ladder of victory. But those who detest hard work have condemned themselves to a life of decline and failure . Do not give up. We are all victims of a ruthless society. We belong to a society that exists only on materialism. A society that has no consideration for its great themes, - hard work, morality, and respect for authority. We were born innocent but become infected as we continue to mingle and learn from a morally, socially, and religious corrupt society. A society whose people are plagued by desolation and deprivation, amid the joyous surrounding of a privileged few. This privileged minorities are a spectacular of embarrassment and disappointment to people who have social conscience. The globalisation of our societies do not place any premium on social values. These attitudes come from western liberal Democratic societies. They are driven by their liberal conservative mindset devoid of any religious virtue. They are governed by laws designed to keep themselves happy alone. In this world today, there are only two paths left open to every man. The partnership and brotherhood of those who have social conscience. The other option is the partnership and friendship of those who work the capitalist system in an evil way. They are deaf to the voice of conscience, and are obsessed with an unquenchable thirst for riches. They have made the whole economic system hard and relentless in a ghastly measure. They have got the most perverted sense of logic, and they are always struggling to build their happiness on other people's tragedies. Now, that the moment of decision has arrived, which path do you want to take? You have the power to change the world for good. And the change begins with you. It is the defining moment of your life If you can make one person happy in your community. You are still alive for a purpose. You were born to bless others, and without you, the world will not be complete.