My Month Of Developing Myself

My son, keep your father's commandment, and forsake not your mother's teaching.

21 Bind them on your heart always; tie them around your neck.22 When you walk, they[d] will lead you; when you lie down, they will watch over you; and when you awake, they will talk with you

23 For the commandment is a lamp and the teaching a light, and the reproofs of discipline are the way of life, 24 to preserve you from the evil woman, from the smooth tongue of the adulteress. Prov 6:20-23

Praise God its another new day, but more than that it is another month and I want to welcome you in the precious name of Jesus. I pray this month will be your best month. There are two extremes to which people view and experience life. To some life is sweet while to some it is bitter. The two extremes are sweet and bitter, but the good thing is that most people are in the middle of the saddle. Those on the sweet side want to maintain it while those on the bitter side want to wriggle themselves out and move toward the sweet side. So wherever you find yourself in the saddle I want to help you move to the sweet side of life. After all no one throws away honey, what people do is search for honey. May you find the honey of life. Whether you want that honey in your marriage, spiritual, financial, material and career life, the path to locating it is called self-development. I pray that this month you will focus on developing yourself, not just for yourself, your relations your community but for our world. A better you will serve our world better. The good thing is that you can make it happen. This month, may your life be preserved, sweet, glorious and colourful in Jesus name.

The story was told. Lions love to eat gazelle meat. But it's very difficult for lions to catch gazelles because the latter run so fast. So instead of trying to catch their quarry, a group of young lions will form a line and try to herd them in a particular direction. The gazelles easily outrun the lions, heading in the opposite direction towards supposed safety. Except they are unknowingly being steered towards a deep, grassy area where a group of older lions are hiding. The older lions are too old and tired to be part of the chase; many are missing teeth, and would never be able to catch their own meat. But when the gazelles are driven within close range, the old lions jump up and ROAR loudly. The startled gazelles, responding immediately to a new threat of imminent death, turn and run in the opposite direction. Right back into the mouths of the young lions.

The moral is that running from your fears and not facing them can often lead you into real danger and worse outcomes. In day-to-day life, the lions lying in wait may not be life threatening, but they are often false fears. You must not fear to develop yourself. Let us take a journey to how you can develop yourself.

Examples of People who developed themselves

Let me give you examples of three people that developed themselves and eventually excelled, because that is the essence of self-development and two that refused to develop themselves and decayed.

The first one is Joseph. This young man born to a family of twelve sons and one daughter, identified a great path for himself at a tender age. He began to dream, wrote down his dream, and made his dreams known, so that he could run with it. Faced with challenges in the home front, that eventually sent him from sweet environment to a bitter environment, he faced sexual , poverty and racial challenges. He kept his focus, kept dreaming and developing himself, even in the prison he was still developing himself. He kept engaging himself in brief business of dream interpretation and building clientele and career prospect. Eventually after 13 years of hard work from age 17 to 30 he achieved his noble objective and became a Prime Minister in Egypt; that makes him a template of success for his generation and many generations. Even when in office you still see the spiritual development, training himself on how to forgive those who hated him and sold him to slavery. You see him training himself on how to be a good father to his children (Manasseh and Ephraim) when presenting them for blessing with Jacob his father.

The second one is the man Elisha. Even though he was a successful man with a flourishing grazing business but God called him to ministry and changed his career. Just as I found myself changing career from Chemical Engineering to Jesus Engineering. God gave him a hard no-nonsense mentor by the name of Elijah who anointed him as a prophet (1 King 19:16). Elisha developed himself as a servant, always pouring water on Elijah hands (2Kings 3:11). He learned to follow his mentor to difficult places even when faced with peer pressure and uncooperative difficult boss (2 Kings 2:1-21) He learnt how to pray and prophesy, he learnt how not to be discouraged, he learnt how to ask questions from his superiors and how to reply his colleagues when pestered with difficult questions. He learned how to apply known principles, for instance when his boss crossed the river by exercising spiritual prowess. He did a similar thing when faced with the challenge of crossing river Jordan. He so developed himself that he did not only have twice the anointing of his boss, he so excelled in ministry that every king was consulting him for advice, sending their top generals to him for solution and more importantly performing double miracles than his boss did.