If one looks at the world’s ecosystem and the background of creation, one cannot but wonder in amazement at the perfection created by God. As far as I am concerned, the only imperfection in the world today is, ironically, the creation put in place to rule the earth.
I am irrevocably convinced that the source of most of man’s suffering in the world today is man himself (his self-centredness and his Godlessness). For the Blackman, the situation is even worse; it is very painful for anyone to suffer in a world of outstanding resources freely provided by the Almighty. There is nothing that man needs that God has not provided; for the Blackman, it is an absurdity of “water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink”.
I want, therefore, to share with you a topic I consider important and hopefully life-changing. As long as a man keeps limiting his thoughts to himself, as long as he keeps thinking only within himself he cannot do better than himself, no matter how rich or wealthy he is, he cannot make giant strides or make outstanding progress in life.
In the story that we read about the prodigal son in Luke 15:12, the son said to the father: “Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me…” And the father divided unto them his living.
The word living here is the Greek word “Bio”, which means life; it is the same word from which biography is derived from. The son asked for his father’s life. What the young man asked for was his father’s bio. He took from his father the life that belonged to the father and went to enjoy himself in a far country. He limited his life to himself.
When we limit our lives to ourselves and our thinking to ourselves, we literally destroy the lives of other people. No wonder our country, Nigeria, is going through very critical periods because we are surrounded by people on a daily basis who limit their thinking to themselves and therefore divide the lives of others.
About six or seven years ago, in the church, I suddenly got a phone call that one of our sisters was critically ill. So I left everything I was doing and ran to the hospital in Anthony Village, Lagos. Then she was a senior member of our Teenage Church, about 16 or 17 years old.
We took her from that hospital around 9 pm and rushed her to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH). We got there around 10 pm, only to find that there was only one doctor on duty in the emergency ward. Initially, they refused to accept this girl because of a certain process. However, on my contacting a young man I knew in LUTH, she was subsequently admitted after his intervention. She was then dumped on a small table because there was no bed. There was this small doctor on duty running among the eight to 10 accident cases, sweating profusely. He would run to one and fix something, run to the other one and fix another thing. I had to tell him that this girl needed his attention, as he hadn’t paid her any attention since our arrival.
This is the primary hospital of this nation. This is the hospital we should call the pride of Nigeria, and yet there is only one doctor on duty on emergency with no facilities whatsoever. I was wondering to myself what happened to Nigeria that things became so bad.
