welikrus

The University is a wonderful place of learning that transverses the academic into the social, philosophical, technical, and indeed all aspects of life. People learn practical skills they use to work, play, live, and better the world. The University is also a place where dreams die. It is a place where people unable to handle the pressure often capsize and get lost instead of discovering & developing their talents. When I went to University I was very mature but the pressure & distraction were very strong. It took a lot of willpower, strength from God, and support from mature Christian brothers & sisters to constantly align & realign myself to achieve my goals. Today, people much younger than I was when I entered are already graduating. My heart goes out to them. I often wonder how they cope. And so, as part of my CLS series, I plan to develop materials that will help kids who get into tertiary institutions. You will find the 1st in the University Series entitled – Goin...

Everywhere looked quite dull but my friend was looking worse off. ‘Did you have so much fun over the weekend & didn’t want it to end?’ I asked. ‘It is something else bro’. ‘I am a bit fed up with work generally’. ‘Coming to work has become a torment’ That was a red flag that needed more attention, I thought to myself and pulled him to a corner to talk more. ‘I do not feel comfortable with working in the office. My work is not appreciated. After working hard for many months, Management doesn't approve & has shelved far more work than it has approved. Management doesn't provide the required resources for my work. People just loaf around, I am fed up and thinking about a new adventure.’ I used to feel that way too, I told him. However, I recommitted to excellence in my work a long time ago but recently a Policeman showed me that good work never goes unnoticed. I first encountered the policeman at the intersection of Obasanjo Way & Ahmadu Bello Way in Garki,...

The Doctor told me that my condition will predispose me to cold and flu and that I would need to be more cautious about respiratory infections including pneumonia. She also suggested that I should get the flu shot. It’s had been a whirlwind of conflicting diagnoses up to the one this Doctor gave me. One of the visible symptoms is enlarged lymph nodes on my chin. She also told me that she will advise a removal of the lymph if it poses any risk to me. Or I could take them out for aesthetic reasons if I so desire. Some other people have told me the same. I have also critically considered it. Several things have prevented me from taking them out. First, my research shows that despite advances in medicine, Doctors do not fully understand how the body works. Second, I have delved deeply into the workings of the mind and know that given the right prompting my mind can repair my body. Third, I believe in the power of prayers to change things. I have seen God’s power at work in my life several...

Death evokes a terrible mix of emotions in us. It creates a hauntingly complex maze of experience when we contemplate it. One day a person is here, gone the next day & then disposed of, even if it is with fanfare as is done in many cultures. The individual bristling with goals, ambitions, and desires gets extinguished in an instant, just like that. The loss is usually overwhelming for surviving family & friends who grapple with the heart-rending loss. Not that gradual death due to long-haul sickness or old age gives us any comfort. Then, the most mysterious of all is that where the person goes, we have not been able to fathom all by ourselves and no genuine and authentic messages or concrete information have come from beyond if it exists. We find it hard to accept that their journey was merely a fleeting one ending in just those brief years. Thus we make up a lot of stories & key into endless philosophies and beliefs to explain that they continue to exist. That we will disc...

‘How do you get ready so fast?’ My child asked me. Within 15 minutes of getting into the house from exercising, I bathed, dressed & I'm ready to go to work. Later that day as IT Customer Service staff worked on my Laptop, the talk was about the newly introduced Attendance Monitoring System & a colleague complained about how stressful it was to him. He needs about 1 hour every morning to dress up. You can imagine my horror! I do that in a blink of an eye. Another lady says that she spends the whole of Sunday evening planning for the next week & yet each morning her room is like it was hit by a tornado as she'd have clothes strewn all over in her bid to decide. So I shared my system with them & perhaps you too can adopt some of it. I have ‘automated’ what I wear to work & most other places I go to. All my suits are lined up in the Wardrobe & I wear them in a round-robin pattern. After it is worn, the suit goes to the back of the line, awaiting its turn. I...

Have you been sick before? Even if you have not, at least you have seen a sick person & can relate to the pain and agony of being ill. When you were sick, what was your prayer or most fervent wish? For most of us, the desire to get well was the most important thing, the only prayer we had. We may have had business and family concerns, work or other engagements, but to get well was the most important thing to us, our only prayer point. And then what happens? We focus all our actions on getting well. What we eat, when we sleep and every other thing that we did was all geared toward getting well & strong again. And soon enough our focus pays off – We are well & we are happy. Unfortunately, the next moment we are back into the rat race & begin to pursue a million things at the same time. We want this, we want that, in fact, we want everything. We hardly get to focus on anything like we did when we were sick and only wished to be well. It does appear that if we focused on j...

Life in the large family compound was great fun. As kids, me, my cousins & our friends from other compounds played, fought, roamed around and enjoyed ourselves. Debating or arguing about all sorts of things was one of our best pastimes. If the argument got so heated & we needed to resolve the debate quickly, then one of the parties or even the spectators will say ‘Put money!’. It was a moment of truth! One would then ask himself ‘does what I assert true enough for me to bet on it? We were very poor kids & jealously guarded the little money we had which we got mainly from visiting Uncles and Aunties. If both were willing to go on with the bet, then they would agree on a sum & the whole party or a designated few would go to verify the claim. The one who got it wrong would lose his money to the one whose claim was verified. There was no mercy! The cash must be taken from the loser – I don’t know how we arrived at that unwritten & never discussed rule. The transaction ...

It was a morning when the clock ran in geometric progression. I woke up quite early alright but now if I don’t make haste I’d run afoul of the day’s commitment. So very quickly I bathed, dressed up & was in a mad hurry to leave the room.  Then, it rang in my head ‘You cannot leave the room scattered. You got to arrange it'. It was my wife’s voice! I just froze there. I quickly retreated, cleaned the room, arranged stuff, and promptly left. The truth is that there is no strand of anything domestic in my DNA. Granted, I love a clean house & surroundings, but sweeping the house, making beds, and washing plates are not part of my makeup. The worst of chores for me is ironing. It was my upbringing, at some point, I was a sickly child & was excluded from work at home & eventually, I just got set in my ‘lazy’, soft life, lift-no-finger ways. Now, I prefer to spend my time on things I consider more productive than handling chores that I can outsource. But my wife is the co...

My Leave period was ending & yet I hadn’t completed all the items on my to-do list for the period. So I drove to Gudu to get the comprehensive car wash on my list, no more excuses. Coincidentally, it was at about that time that school closed. It was a great reminiscence as I saw the many children on the street returning from school. I just got transported back to the period when I walked back home from School with a similarly large crowd. My School was on the boundary between 2 towns and so at close, the school divided into 2 with each group going their separate ways. It was a beautiful sight to behold, such as I just did. As I looked at the large group that just closed from school and heading home, what kept playing in my mind is ‘In this group, there are Lawyers, Doctors, Scientists, Inventors, just name it’. The very thought of that brought tears to my eyes. How would we have known in those days when we roamed aimlessly that we were great men & women in the making who just n...

The ‘Past’, (I mean events that have already happened, like that encounter that you just had or the one you had 10 years ago) and the ‘future’, (the next minute, day, month, and year), can have a great impact on us now – our present. Decisions in the past affect and to a large extent determine where we are today and together with what we are doing now, the future is already shaping up. The Past does not exist anymore but we can allow it to destroy the present when we indulge in regrets and blame games. Things may not be what we envisioned them to be but can we for a moment stop and take a hold of ourselves? We may have done or not done things in the past that seem to a large extent to affect us presently. Please, don’t be too hard on yourself. Let’s stop the blames and regrets. What really happened? Take the lessons. Did you do wrong? Are you sorry for what you did? Have you made efforts to solve or make amends – restitutions? Are you determined that it would never happen again? Tick, ...

October 10, 2022 #BibleStudyNotes Exodus 13 – 17 on till Joshua. The story of the Israelites from their suffering in Egypt, the fight for their deliverance, the plagues, the salvation at the Red Sea, and the trek in the wilderness strikes a chord in my mind about what we face now in this system of things. They seem to match the times we live in and are a warning of pitfalls we may face after Armageddon. If we do not manage our expectations, we may fall into the same trap that the Israelites did when they longed for the things of the old system of things in Egypt, murmured about the provisions of Jehovah, and suffered dire consequences. We have all imagined how glorious life will be in Paradise; perhaps we are motivated by the clear picture in the Bible that describes the time when there will be no sorrow, pain, death, or evil people. Then we also see beautiful pictures & demonstrative videos of the new world in publications. We see beautiful houses, clean water, lush gardens, and w...

I do not remember where and how we got the pair of medicated glasses but for a while, it was our most cherished toy. We would wear it and try to walk, run and jump. The glasses made things look farther and smaller than they really were. It distorted the view & was quite disorienting when we used it. As kids, me & my friends, who were mostly my cousins, found this to be amusing. The most interesting pastime was jumping from a wall in the School Assembly Hall, it was about 2 feet higher than the window level of a standard modern house. Wearing the glasses while jumping was so electrifying; it would seem that you are jumping at a height much higher than it really was. The shock of the impact of hitting the ground whereas the mind has recorded a longer distance still to go exhilarated us. We felt very dizzy afterwards. But it was fun. Fun derived from what I know now to be unreal. You may be facing hard times. Are you sure what you are seeing is real? Could it be that the hard time...

As Social beings we need people to thrive. Everything we do revolves around other people, whether at home or at work; whether we have a service or product to sell or buy. To show the great effect of social interactions on humans a recent study conducted by Harvard University* shows that the quality of our social interaction is the #1 predictor of longevity, and places it higher than exercise, healthy feeding, and other health indicators like no smoking. Many people I know recognize the role of relationships in their lives but not even one person I know has prioritized relationships with colleagues; many do not think that the pool for social well-being includes their colleagues, the people they work with. For a long time, I have noticed that there has been much vilification of colleagues and relationships at work. The summary of what I hear people say is this: ‘The organization does not love you. It is there to make profits, it uses the people to do this & everyone looks out for him...

‘Where does the meat, the soup & the Eba go to?’ ‘ Na inside belle ’ I answered. ‘So does it matter in what order or shape they go as long as they end up in the stomach?’. It was logical reasoning. Akin had noticed how I twitched my face as I watched him eat his Eba with Okro soup in the same bowl. Worse of all, he wasn’t even turning the Eba into balls. It was a bit disgusting to me, I was in shock, deep culture shock. I grew up & lived all my life up to when I was about 25 years within a particular culture in Nigeria. We ate with different bowls for Eba & soup. We also carefully formed the Eba into exquisite balls before making an indent and using it to scope to soup into the mouth to savour whatever delicacy it is we are indulging in. And here was a man who poured the Eba & soup in the same bowl! And generally mixed the thing together. It was only Bingo the dog that we fed like that! This is unbearable to watch. Akin snapped me back to reality with his clear solid v...