The 10th of December is a very momentous and significant day in my life. On this day I was born! This particular day stands out even more because I will be crossing a great milestone as I turn 50.
Although it doesn’t feel like it, indeed, I have lived for half a century! Despite the sobering reality, I am deeply fulfilled, immensely satisfied and absolutely privileged to have lived and be here to tell of it.
It seems just like yesterday that I was a teenager. Just the other day that I was playing volleyball at Kariobangi grounds for Huruma Hot Spikers.
And just the other day I was a goalkeeper for my school team. Memories still flood my mind of the fun, the games, the times — they seemed to linger forever, yet it came and went.
Time flies.
There are a myriad of lessons that I have learnt in my multi-faceted life as a pastor, father, mentor, life coach, businessman and husband. I may not share them all here, right now, but allow me to share the three most important:
Specific purpose
The first lesson that I have learnt is that God intentionally and deliberately created each and every one of us for a specific purpose.
Just like a manufacturer identifies a need, determines a solution and then creates a product, the creator of the universe, the eternal God created every person on the face of the earth to fulfill a very particular pre-determined purpose.
Within each and every one of us, yes, the over seven billion people alive, is a unique purpose! All the billions of the dead ones and the billions yet to be born — each of them has a unique purpose for which they were shot into the world to accomplish, then depart into eternity.
We don’t just live to die, there’s got to be more than that! We live to fulfill something! In every person there is a purpose-shaped vacuum that only purpose can fit in, fill and fulfill.
People can try to drown themselves in alcohol, drugs, money, power or illicit intimacy, but that gap can only be filled by purpose. Your purpose carries solutions, answers, revelations, perspectives, methods, means and ways of making the lives of others better and greater.
When you settle at hand-to-mouth for yourself, the earth will keep rotating, but you deny the world the power to move forward! When a human being locates and settles in his purpose, Heaven kisses Earth!
The second lesson I have learnt, is the highly rewarding power of focus. Focus is the intentional ability to harness and concentrate your talent, effort, energy, passion and zeal on the same thing until a yield of success becomes inevitable.
The light of the sun is normal, harmless and docile until it is focused by a magnifying glass to one point — a sustained focus of these rays ignites the point of contact into a fire!
When we focus, we destroy the power of distraction and its ramifications, we remove divided attention and its thinness and eradicate ‘busybodyness’ and its unprofitability.
The patriarch of faith Apostle Paul expressly role-models this principle for us in Philippians 3:13 – He writes: “but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before…”
Focus is the ability to point out and zero in on the singular thing that God created you to do and doing it with every ounce of your being!
Never give up
To identify and pursue purpose, and to train the eye of our focus are two irreplaceable aspects of greatness. But further to that, I have also learnt that success demands an iron resolve to never ever give up!
A close observation of God has taught me over the years that He is not a God of abandoned projects.
That means He completes everything that He begins – in fact, He finishes before He begins. Consistent persistence wears out resistance!
Everything you will ever attempt in life will always resist and oppose you but it is your irrevocable decision to pursue, overtake and recover all that shall win your day.
Success is not money and fame, it is the triumphant subjugation of purpose. It is the relentless battle to fulfill purpose before you die – by all means, at all costs. Don’t quit and throw in the towel.
Quitters never win and winners never quit.
