Your Most Dangerous Enemy is You.

Your Most Dangerous Enemy is You!

By   Ogiri John Ogiri

In your daily journeys in this life, the likelihood that you will meet one form of challenge or another is very high. Don't be surprized or scared when they come and they will always come. The reason is that, life was not designed to be a bed of roses. The creator never promised anyone a life free from stresses or challenges. In fact,he specifically told Adam, “You will have to work hard all your life to make it produce enough food for you.  It will produce weeds and thorns, and you will have to eat wild plants.You will have to work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything, until you go back to the soil from which you were formed. You were made from soil, and you will become soil again.”(Genesis 3:17-19). The implication of the above statement is that you must work hard if you want to succeed. There is no overnight success anywhere.
Unfortunately, due to distorted scriptural teachings from materialistically-inclined 'men of the cloth' whose main message is prosperity at all cost, to gullible followers, (perhaps, you're one, ) as well as other factors like peer influence, family upbringing etc, many have come to associate hard work with suffering, particularly works outside the blue-chip companies and government ministries and departments. Any work that makes them sweat or trek is not from God. The result is that people now desire a life that makes it possible for them to wake up and find food on their table without working for it. They want to wait for God to send somebody to surprise them with a car gift instead of working for it.To ensure the sustainability of this mindset, a new theology came up. This new theology is aptly captured in the popular song "me I no go suffer...bla bla bla". It has become so bad, these days, that people no longer see challenge as part of life,as an experience everyone must encounter unless such person is not alive.Are challenges bad? They're not. Challenges are potential resources for productive thinking about life. Challenges provide opportunities for one to discover something new that he or she can use to reconstruct, reconfigure and fine-tune his or her visions.
It is because you are probably not ready to handle the responsibilities that come with challenges (which is to use challenges as raw materials to produce and advance your vision) that you keep finding someone to blame for your misfortunes. You bother yourself so much about witches and wizards wanting to kill you or truncate your destiny that you have no time for any serious soul-searching. Come to think of it, Why is it that the witches and wizards we have in Nigeria do not go to high brow areas like Victoria Island, Lekki(Lagos) or Wuse,Maitama or Asokoro (Abuja) inhabited by the very rich individuals in the country but are always active in the ghettos or slums where there is high level of poverty, deprivation and ignorance? You have been deceived to believe that a witch or wizard wants you dead,I ask 'why?' After all, you are not yet rich so that you can say they want to inherit your wealth. Yet this is part of the reasons you keep going from one prayer house to another. Can you see what you have done to yourself through superstitious beliefs and negative thinking? This, perhaps, is partly responsible for your visits to various churches and prayer houses in search of solutions to your problems. Since many of them are after your pocket, they do not always tell you what you need to hear; they tell you what you want to hear.
Well, as long as you have conditioned or reconfigured your mind to always think and believe that every challenge you encounter is a handiwork of an enemy, that you are not a part of your problem, you can never stumble on the solution.
Let me tell you.Jumping from one church or prayer house to another does not solve your problems; rather such action adds to your problems.
What should you do then? It is very simple. It does not require a rocket scientist to unravel the mystery for you.
Take a break, return to your inner being, interrogate your mind and you will find the solutions right there. You will discover, to your amazement, that you are your own most dangerous enemy. Have you ever seen where a robbery incident or an attack takes place in an area without a lead, a willing collaborator from that area?
Therefore, the next time you encounter a problem, do not find anyone to blame first. Do not point accusing fingers at any innocent elderly man or woman in your family or village first. Leave them alone! Do not look for any enemy outside you. Check your thoughts. For example, what have you been thinking about lately? What kind of thought have you been entertaining? Have your thoughts been negative or positive? Your business is not progressing. Have you examined your location, product quality, attitude towards customers ?What about your lifestyle? Are you living above your income? Do you keep proper records of your transactions? Do you differentiate between business money and personal money as you spend or you just spend because you think it is your money? You have not been able to save a penny from your salary. In fact, you do not know what you are spending the money on. Please, check your lifestyle. Your monthly earning is perhaps fifty-thousand naira (#50,000) but your children must attend the same school(charging #70,000 as tuition fee) with Mr X' s children. Mr X incidentally earns better than you do. You can not even maintain a bicycle but because you have made a little money,the next thing you think you need is a car. Your salary is perhaps, #100,000 but you want to live in a rented 3 bedroom apartment which cost #300,000 per annum. You are living above your income. You can even borrow money from wherever you can find it just because you must buy a latest item of luxury so you can continue living your fake wealthy life. You put yourself in so much debts that when the salary finally is paid, you use it to settle debts after which you are left with nothing. That is a big problem. You want to feel belong. You are so comfortable living in a rented apartment that you forget that you should own your personal house. So the landlord increases the rent. Your ego would not let you think straight. If this is your problem, then change your lifestyle. The list is inexhaustible.
Having examined your thought patterns, you can now examine your characters or attitudes in your relationship with others. Your mind and character/attitudes are your real enemies if you do not control them. So before you send the holy ghost fire on any perceived enemy from your family or village, first direct the fire to yourself. You always complain of having terrible nightmares with people or animals always chasing you. How can you not experience terrible dreams when, every night you go to bed, you do with a mind full of unforgiveness, negative thoughts and bitterness against another person? Do you expect to have a good or peaceful night's sleep with so much negativities tucked far away in your mind? What you fail to realize is that these negative thoughts eventually transform into monstrous beings that chase you up and down at night. Free your minds of every negative thought and sleep well. Allow the fire to burn out of you, laziness, chronic ignorance, intolerable superstitious beliefs, hatred,unforgivingness, wickedness, fear, greed, selfishness, pride and failure to plan and let it fan into flame the embers of industriousness, information/enlightenment, useful knowledge, love, willingness to forgive and let go, good acts, courage, selflessness, humility and habitual planning so that you can become cleaner  to accuse your "neighbours" as being responsible for misfortunes in your career,family and business.
I hold this to be true that 'nobody can sit on my back unless I bend it'. See you at the top!