It is easy to indulge in self pity and despair when faced with challenging situations like failure, job loss, deformity, disaster, and other misfortunes.
There is a recurring tendency to blame human misfortunes on the evil craft of enemies, real or imagined, particularly forces from immediate family members or in a haunted residence.
A computer science graduate with a second class upper degree gave a testimony in church of how he could not get a stable, well paid job seven years after graduation, to the point that he started nurturing negative thoughts.
But after the pastor prophesied, prayed, and banished the demons behind his case, the man, called Chibuike, was connected with a contact in a bank that fetched him a well-paid employment.
Two additional offers came his way in less than four months from another bank and an oil company with more robust packages.
How did it happen? His former school mates had a get together in Lekki, Lagos to which all their classmates, including himself, were invited. Initially, Chibuike hesitated to attend because of the shame of joblessness, but one of them persuaded him.
It was at the event that a former classmate working in a bank linked him with where his service was needed. He has the skill and knowledge but lacked the network to launch out to success and change his financial situation.
Several such cases abound where people are caught up in a hope-challenging situation, where brilliant and intelligent men and women write themselves off and dissociate from contacts that could have launched them to progress.
American inventor and businessman, Thomas Edison, lost a valuable record of his experiments and equipment worth over $2 million in a fire incident at his New Jersey laboratory in 1914 when he was barely 16 years old.
Unruffled by the devastating damage, the inventor of electric light bulb, motion picture camera, and many other devices that greatly influenced life around the world, said: “There’s great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burnt up; thank God we can start anew.”
Edison was a poor student. When a schoolmaster called him “addled”, his furious mother took him out of the school and taught him at home.
“My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me, and I felt I had someone to live for, someone I must not disappoint,” Edison said many years later.
At an early age, Edison showed a fascination for mechanical things and chemical experiments.
Around the age of 12, he lost almost all his hearing but did not let his disability discourage him. Instead, he treated it as an asset, since it made it easier for him to concentrate on experiments and research.
Henry Ford, another American industrialist and founder of the Ford Motor Company, was once asked what he would do if he lost all his possession. Without mincing words, he said he would be a millionaire again in five years. How? You might ask.
Ford said he would think up another fundamental human need and meet it by offering a cheaper and more effective service than anybody else.
Ideas, they say, rule the world. To be liberated from a destructive loss of hope into a creative professional rebirth and success, as Chibuike did, requires being informed, appropriately connected, learning new skills, facts, and technology; keeping away from negative influences, and keeping moving instead of resigning to despair.
These strategies, as important as faith-filled prayer, are the tonic to break away from a debilitating cycle of vision and failure, joblessness, poverty, lack and want.
We shall return to this topic in the next edition.