Bags of gold: The responsibility conundrum (3)

I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favour to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.

—Ecclesiastes 9:11

Life is wired in a cycle of reaping and sowing. Every day of our lives, we are living in the harvest of a seed we sowed in time past. Whether we know it or not, harvest is the only thing that life owes everyone. Never sow a seed whose harvest you don’t want to feature in your future.

Seed is nothing but potential, the encapsulation of everything a harvest should look like when fully manifested but which it doesn’t look anywhere like in its current state. This is what Myles Munroe was implying when he said that the grave was the richest place on earth because it warehouses not just dead people’s bones but also all their unfulfilled potentials; hit songs that were never composed, best-seller books that were never written, houses never built, etc.

Each talent given to the servants was nothing but a code of possibilities. But the unfaithful steward did not see that. All he saw was a worthless talent and a hard taskmaster. Thoroughly blinded to the potential in what he was endowed with, he wasted no time in keeping it away till the return of the master to whom he returned it with the words, “Look, there you have your money” – said in a condescending, spiteful way that seemed to suggest that he had even done the master a favour by keeping it. By so doing, he foreclosed every possibility of ever finding out the inherent treasure in the money he was given. His master had to highlight at least one possibility to him, a savings deposit that could have earned some interest, no matter how minimal.

Beyond cash, when the master was handing out the talents to his three servants, without any of them consciously knowing it, three other endowments were being thrown into the mix. It is what life throws at everyone who walks the face of the earth. Two of them are identified in the scripture quoted above: time and chance. Between these two is sandwiched the word ‘opportunity.’ Every man on the face of the earth, rich or poor, tall or short, wise or foolish, black or white, has 24 hours to his day within which to engage in all the activities that will signpost his future.

The real difference between the rich and the poor has nothing to do with pedigree or a bank balance. According to scriptures, God made both the rich and the poor, but he did not create anyone poor or with a fat bank account. We all came into the world the same way. We were all created with potentials, at least one endowment which, properly deployed in the service of others, becomes the very platform for our prosperity. Therefore, the real difference between the rich and the poor is in what they do with these three other endowments. Financial success comes more from the quality of resourcefulness than from the quantum of resources.

Opportunities are external to us. They have to do with what we have been given by the Creator, by people, by the environment, by our exposures or by our various serendipitous encounters.

As someone once said, every day of our lives, opportunities are always coming to us or passing us by. The word ‘poor’ has been defined in an acronym as “people overlooking opportunities repeatedly.” As painful as that may sound, life offers us no guarantees, only opportunities. We squeeze out our best guarantees from life by what we do with the opportunities we are presented with.

Chance on the other hand is about what we do. Although some have tried to define it as luck or coincidence, it is really about the opportunities that we can identify and embrace. Simply put, it is what we do with the various opportunities that life or God throws at us! The more opportunities we embrace, the luckier we are likely to get!

One of the tragedies of life underscored by the story under discourse is that while it is possible to equalise opportunities, you cannot equalise outcomes. No man is capable of giving what he does not have. A presidential candidate in Nigeria several years ago hinged his campaign on the promise of banishing poverty from the country by giving every Nigerian N1 million upon his assumption of office if he won the election! There could have been no better recipe for the perpetuation of poverty! This is because in less than one hour after collecting the money, some people who are perpetual consumers would have become flat broke while the smart value producers would have become richer! Same opportunity but different outcomes.

It is interesting to note that the same master that the unproductive servant described in such deprecating expletives was the one who empowered all three of them. Yet, in spite of it all, (or maybe they didn’t really know their master, or they were too focused on their assignment to care) two of them went ahead and exceeded the master’s expectations. It is also worthy of note that as disgruntled as the unproductive servant was, he did not stop drawing a salary or an upkeep from his master’s resources, neither did he move away in protest from the master’s house! Talk about wanting to eat your cake and having it at the same time!

As I have had cause to say previously, what you despise, you don’t attract. Nothing you dishonour can confer significant benefits on you. Honour is the first principle of progress and meaningful connections. Despising the rich will not make them poor, neither will it make you rich. The more you run down genuinely successful people, the poorer you are likely to get because instead of learning from them, you are too busy castigating them and looking out for their perceived flaws.

Nothing dulls focus more than ingratitude. He is indeed a great fool who has not learnt to be grateful. A lack of appreciation for what you have is what makes you believe that God has been partial to some and unfair to you. The ungrateful man cannot see beyond his limitations because he is always benchmarking himself with people that he believes that God has favoured above him. A morbid focus on what we lack irrevocably blinds us to the existence of and the possibilities inherent in what we have. With that mindset, focusing on a significant desired outcome becomes a herculean task. Your face may not be on the Forbes List of the world’s wealthiest personalities, but you must still be grateful for the gift of life and the opportunity to look forward to a good future in robust health! Your current reality is still someone’s current highest dream! Favour may open the door to possibilities and untold blessings. However, gratitude keeps the door open and unfolds its inherent possibilities. Continued.

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!

 

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