Daily Devotionals

A confused man has speed. A visionary moves with velocity that eventually becomes momentum. There is speed, and then, there is velocity. You want to move fast with clarity and purpose. You want every step you take, to move you closer towards your goals. That is what it means to move with velocity. Moving fast without clarity around the exact change you want to drive with your mission adds up to nothing. After many years of running, you discover that your labours have not amounted to much. You have been moving with speed, no velocity. There is the place of gaining better clarity over time, and making the most of the light you have at the moment, but you should be wary of running without direction. Magnitude without direction is wasteful, and could lead to disaster.

Habakkuk 2:2 (ESV) says, “And the Lord answered me: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it”. There are three things going on in this verse. First, the vision is written. Second, it needs to be made plain. The vision must be scrutinised, and a clear business plan developed. It is the successful completion of these steps that enable you to run with velocity towards achieving the vision. You want to be clear about how your mission will change your world. You then draw up a plan around that change you are dreaming about. You need clarity for you to move with velocity.

You must avoid moving with speed at all costs. You must understand that you cannot steer your world towards a better future that is not clear to you. All your energy and enthusiasm is used up on projects that lead nowhere. You write up epistles, convene events and inaugurate projects, but nothing is getting done. All speed, no velocity. The future does not belong to the fastest, it belongs to the person doing it right – no matter how slowly. This calls for reflection. Are you running with energy, but just moving with speed in circles that lead nowhere? Or are you building velocity, and momentum by taking little, well measured steps towards the better future God promised us?

Here’s an interesting question worth thinking about. What would your world look like by the time your work takes effect? You need an exact image of how your work will change your community, town, industry, city or country. Without such clarity, it becomes hard to evaluate your work, and determine how much progress has been made. A lot of change agents are unable to effect any recognisable change, because they never achieved clarity around the exact changes they wanted to drive. A real watchman understands the change they want to bring about. And why those changes matter to God and their society.

If you cannot explain your mission in a straightforward way, then your vision needs more fine tuning. Some of the biggest names in the entrepreneurial world were driven by clear statements of purpose. Bill Gates was running with a vision of “a computer on every desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software”. There is no ambiguity around this. Reflecting on this, forty years later, Bill Gates wrote in an email to Microsoft employees, “It was a bold idea and a lot of people thought we were out of our minds to imagine it was possible”. The Redeemed Christian Church of God has a very clear and bold mission. There is no ambiguity about their plan. To plant a church within five minutes walking distance in every city, and town of developing countries. And within five minutes driving distance in every city, and town of developed countries.

You must embrace the risk that comes with having a falsifiable mission statement. When you have clarity around your work in this manner, it becomes easy to see how you are failing or succeeding with your mission. So, stop saying you want to change the education sector. You should state how your work will produce a thousand first-class students every year. Don’t say you want to increase the productivity of people. You should talk about how your work will create a thousand decent jobs every year. There is a lot of confusion and waste associated with lack of clarity. When you are clear about your mission, it is easier to garner the support you need.

The most important task for the watchman is to write the vision and make it plain. You cannot steer your world towards a better future you cannot explain or describe in some detail. It is hard to watch over your world if you do not have a compelling picture of what the future could be. There has to be some clarity around what the future could look like. You are then able to create whatever frameworks, machines, platforms, engines, companies, and institutions that will be required for that future to become a reality. A creative person thrives by thinking about tomorrow and then proceeds to begin to build it out, starting today.

When you go beyond the noise and empty motivational rhetorics. You realise that a creative person is a patient person. A creative genius is nothing more than someone that has embraced the discipline of endurance and long-suffering. It takes patience, endurance and long-suffering to display high-level creativity. You must dispel from your mind the myth of the creative genius that can build anything in a few seconds. In your quest to build the future, your mindset should be along the lines of “slow, and steady”. If you ignore this, reality will humble you. The greatest inventions and man-made institutions across history took a lot of creative people many decades to put them together.

Watching the world, and steering it towards where God wants is a marathon. Your most powerful expressions of creativity and inventiveness will require you to focus on your work for many years. Investigate great Creators and Inventors across history, and you will see the pattern. Your invention education could take up to a decade. Then you begin with the smallest project that could grow over time into the great visions that dominate your heart. Thinking tomorrow, today gives you a leverage as you will learn to build for the long-term. While you might have a sense of accomplishment from creating things in the short-term. Nothing beats the eternal fulfillment that comes from creating the things that power the future of your world.

You are not safe if there is nobody in your life, nobody on your team that can express concerns about your actions. You must be wary of the yes-men. People who want to impress you so much that they hold back from telling the truth. Progressive fellowships and relationships are built around the truth. No matter how unpopular such truths might be. Most friendships choose good feelings and fantasy over truth and honesty. Friends are quick to agree on issues, and will hide unpleasant activities from you, just to avoid an argument. Your band of yes-men with their chorus of “yes” to everything you do will lead you astray.

We do not commend Naaman enough for the kind of enabling environment he built around himself. He had an environment where a lowly slave girl could whisper into the ears of her mistress. And he acted on the intelligence she provided. Naaman was a high ranking officer in his days. Such a whisper from the little girl could have been ignored or drowned out. And as you follow the story, you see again how Naaman’s men challenged his decision. As it is written, “but his officers tried to reason with him and said, “Sir, if the prophet had told you to do something very difficult, wouldn’t you have done it? So you should certainly obey him when he says simply, ‘Go and wash and be cured!’” So Naaman went down to the Jordan River and dipped himself seven times, as the man of God had instructed him. And his skin became as healthy as the skin of a young child, and he was healed! (2 Kings 5:13‭-‬14 NLT).

You will not make much progress when you substitute applause for proper feedback. Naaman had created an environment where his officers could look him in the eyes and say the truth. It would have been a disaster if everybody with him that day chorused “yes” to endorse his decision to ignore the prophetic instruction they received. Naaman did not surround himself with yes-men and sycophants. He received the best ideas within his company, and he had a posture that made it easy for his mind to be changed by his officers.

It was John Patterson that said, “only fools and dead men don’t change their minds. Fools won’t and dead men can’t”. It is not a strength to brag about an unwillingness to change your mind about anything. Fools don’t change their mind because they think they are right. As it is written, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice” (Proverbs 12:15 ESV). When you hold on to a personal opinion in light of better information and contrary evidence, you are being foolish. If you cannot explain the conditions that would make you change your mind on an issue, you are being foolish.

The most successful people have been found to change their minds, and often on issues they once held strong opinions about. Mark Zuckerberg changed his mind about allowing advertisements on Facebook. Olusegun Obasanjo publicly changed his mind and endorsed a politician he had opposed for years. If you cannot remember a time you changed your mind on an issue you once held strong opinions about. It could be a red flag. Are you always right? Have you never suffered as a consequence of some poor judgement on your part? A fool is oblivious to all of these. However, a wise person is aware of their limitations, and learns to shape their work with good feedback.

What would it take to change your mind? You have to consider both extremes of the desired and the undesired alike. Find your balance in between the extremes. A wise person responds better to feedback because they remain open to improving their understanding. They are open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking. The secret is that a wise person builds a foundation of truth and justice in their heart. Then they shape their day-to-day activities with proper feedback received. They might never change their mind about their God-given vision, but they learn to be flexible around the implementation.

You want to hear about how awesome, brilliant, and fantastic you are. There is no chance to consider whether you might be awful, dull and insignificant. You are not interested in the truth. You want validation that you are on the right path, regardless of whether that is true or not. This unholy obsession with personal vindication will separate you from the Spirit of Truth and Justice. You will be opened up to the ministry of lies, deceit and familiar spirits. As you can guess, this ministry is headed by the devil. It seduces you and leads you to complete destruction.

Consider 2 Timothy 4:3-‬4, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (ESV). Something is amiss when you curate teachers and advisors around your lewd passions. Your passions, fueled by lust and greed will take you further away from the true nature of things. You will wander off into myths and fiction. How do you operate day-to-day with an ideology that is not based on truth and substance, and yet, expect to succeed?

If you cannot stomach feedback, you cannot succeed in the real world. The universe does not care about your feelings. Your relationships and marriage will crash. It will crash your business. A good way to check your true state is to consider the last time your conscience countered your actions. You claim to be led by the spirit of God with an inner witness, but you cannot remember the last time that inner witness stood against your will. You have seared your heart already, and you can no longer trust that spirit. There is a need to seek truth and feedback at all times. Stop positioning your heart for what you want to hear. Position for the truth, the truth will make you whole.

A lot of dissatisfied young people are angry at society. They are angry about a system that has left them poor and disenfranchised. This is not a problem. The problem arises when they choose an unproductive venture as a channel for their anger. A lot of youthful energy is wasted on poorly planned projects. It is trendy to talk about how one could start a revolution. However, we should be suspicious of revolutionary movements, there are few benefits to a political revolution or violent social change in the long term. In the short term, you might think the change is here, but over time, nothing changes. Real changes will require long-term planning around personal moral improvement, family building and engagement in economic activities.

Strive Masiyiwa wrote, “What Africa doesn’t really need now are Activists and Revolutionaries… We’ve had a lot of them. What we need now are Great Economic planners, Innovators, Entrepreneurs, Creators, Investors and Executioners. Rallies, Activism and Protests could take us somewhere, but in order to drive the change we really need in our societies, we need these other people”. We cannot fight, rally and protest our way into a progressive and productive society. If you engage in these courses of actions, you will soon be locked in a never ending cycle of violence. This will bring even worse economic conditions.

You are better off with a focus on personal moral improvement, family building, and engaging in economic activity. When you become a productive member of society, you will get a seat at the decision table. You will then be able to work out the changes you want. Economic matters are productivity matters. A focus on hard work and rigid morality, will improve the economic situation of your world. This kind of revolution takes a lot of time to come together, but once it takes off. You are sure that it will bring about long lasting changes, and a better future for everyone.

All applause without sincere feedback will waste your life. If your work is mediocre or not good enough for the results you want, you need to know right away. If your work is good enough to attract genuine applause, that’s great. However, you still need to understand why it worked, with a view to improve your performance. You must grow to a point whereby honest feedback matters more to you than the applause of the crowd. Genuine feedback will reveal how useful or useless your work is. There is no other way to make good progress.

The problem with applause is that without objective feedback, you won’t have results in the real world. If your college of fools nudges you on about how wonderful your ideas are. Such an applause would embolden you to go all out in pursuit of such ideas. After investing so much time, energy and resources towards the idea. You then realize that your projects have failed in the real world. With little or no patronage. Create an atmosphere where your close friends and family can go beyond an applause, and tell you the truth. Some of your brilliant ideas that are not good enough. Some ideas will be shaped further and become very good with honest feedback.

Proverbs 9:7-9 (T4T version) says, “If you rebuke someone who will not allow others to correct him, he will insult you. If you reprove/scold an evil man, he will hurt you. Do not rebuke someone who will not allow others to correct him/tell him what he has done is wrong. Because he will hate you for doing that. But if you rebuke a wise person, he will respect you. If you give instruction to wise people, they will become wiser. And if you teach righteous people, they will learn more”. Decide today that no matter what happens, you would never listen to your songs of praise coming from the college of fools. Commit to emulating the response of wise and righteous people to feedback. You need to come to a place of understanding that without feedback on your work, you will waste time, energy and resources. If you continue to avoid feedback, you will waste your life.

You need a lot of honest feedback and evaluation about your work. It is great to get applause. However, you must prepare your heart for whatever kind of feedback you might get about your work. A lot of people want to hear only nice things about their work. Even if it is not true. You must never dwell in that camp. This is well summarised by Proverbs 9:7‭-‬9, “Correct a worthless bragger, and all you will get are insults and injuries. Any bragger you correct will only hate you. But if you correct someone who has common sense, you will be loved. If you have good sense, instruction will help you to have even better sense. And if you live right, education will help you to know even more” (CEV version).

Are you getting the feedback you need to do your best work that glorifies God? The creation account in Genesis always talks about God evaluating and taking feedback about his creations. Up to the point where it was discovered that “it is not good for a man to be alone”. Then some more work was done in that aspect. We see God evaluating his own work and getting feedback. There is a chance that your work is mediocre and nowhere as useful as you would like to think. You might think certain criticism of your work is unkind, but that is the exact kind of feedback you need inorder to grow.

Ecclesiastes 7:5 says, “It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools” (ESV). It is a good idea to consider where your applause and feedback comes from. Neither applause nor feedback from a college of fools is worth anything to the overall quality of your work. You want to seek out genuine feedback about your work. Getting feedback is hard, not everyone is comfortable with it. So, you want to assume a posture that makes it easier for a wise person to tell you what you need to hear, and not just what you want to hear

A special report jointly released by UNESCO, UNDP, and UNOSSC declared that “Creativity and innovation, at both the individual and group levels, have become the true wealth of nations in the 21st century”. Creativity is this incredible gift that you possess. And with some training, you can begin to reshape your world with your creations. You can steer the world towards where God wants through the applications of your creative talent. However, before we begin to transform the world’s culture or terraform Mars. It makes a lot of sense to start off with small projects. Let your creativity make an impact in your home and localised community for a start.

At age 19, Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook, with an initial focus on his campus. Over time he expanded access to other campuses. And when the time was right, they allowed everyone on the platform. Before Facebook happened, Mark Zuckerberg had been building things. At age 12, he created his first messaging system called “ZuckNet”, which was used by his family to communicate within the house. It was also used by his father in his dental office to let his receptionist inform him about a patient without shouting. That project allowed the young man to explore different social software ideas in his mind early on. Today, Mark Zuckerberg owns two messaging services, Messenger and WhatsApp, that each have more than 1 billion users. He started at home.

This is the big question: How can your knowledge and creative powers help any member of your family? The world is a very big place. It would take a lot of time and resources to make an impact on the larger society. When starting out, what you really want to do is to build confidence by demonstrating competence in little projects. Each little project you complete sets you up for the next one. If your family members won’t grant you an audience, then seek a new family or community that would. The key to dominating the world lies in your ability to solve problems at a lower level, and then scale up your solutions to the world. Creativity should begin at the grassroots.