• Continued from last Monday
Welcome to the second half of this long thing. As you may already know, focus now shifts to generosity, humility, knowledge, love, money, truth and allied virtues. Can these virtues be taken for granted? Do people actually take them for granted?
You take advantage of generosity when you ask and receive what and when you don’t need. Or, when you (mis)direct others or you connive to abuse generosity. Or, when you badmouth a kind person as showing off. Or, when you are an ingrate.
The consolation is that the one who takes generosity for granted is a poor fool. Such a one is perpetually in need and a beggar, who hardly gathers enough help. And, such a one can never ever be generous. You cannot become what you don’t understand, you cannot become or understand what you pooh-pooh.
As for the one who takes humility for granted: an ungodly fool, a braggart. This one understands only the language of bragging rights. And, there is no godliness in this person. Humility extinguishes as rapidly as arrogance spreads because even those who should know tend to respect and reward what they shouldn’t.
You cannot not honour humility. You dishonour the top drawer virtue when you greet it with disdain instead of with a bow. You take humility for granted when you debase rather than exalt it. You demarket and devalue humility when you prefer or promote arrogance.
Humility has haters in high places. In church and allied places of worship, in government, in money and in schools, all that is paid to humility is lip service. Why should the powers that be placate those who destroy(ed) human lives and wealth but, simultaneously, sacrifice those who believe that peace is the best? Why should militants and terrorists cash out big time, every time?
Abi, dem yus jas? How can we prefer darkness to light? As the Ibibios of Nigeria always retort, how can you see easy life but choose hardship? Alas, evil mockers would throw tantrums at peace mongers: how market?
Which brings us to knowledge. No one should toy with knowledge. The millions who take knowledge for granted are clowns or idiots, or both. Remember, the number one book says people who lack knowledge perish.
Knowledge is a peculiar commodity. It is power if you have it and know you have it and know how to use it. Knowledge is not power all by itself. The magic of knowledge is in knowing first that, you have it coupled with second, how to apply it.
It is miserable to have knowledge but neither know it nor have the capacity to exercise it. This is the authority that is taken for granted by those without it. Satan today torments too many people because the hapless victims don’t know who is in them let alone how He functions. It is for the exact same reason that impossibility thrives in the jurisdiction of possibility.
Taking knowledge for granted can make tallest a dwarf. It is why many have eyes but cannot see. It is why unemployment holds graduates captive. It is why people become afraid of what or who ought to fear them.
The way out of this shadow stumbling block is three-pronged, a T-junction. One, acquire knowledge. Two, acquire also the awareness that you have that knowledge. And, three, of course, necessarily acquire the understanding of the workings of the particular knowledge.
Or, you won’t love your reality. Speaking of love, need we say that this intense feeling of deep affection is the most taken-for-granted human value? Hands in the air if you have never taken love for granted. You have never had to steal from your mother or lie to your father or deceive your sibling or nibling.
Not even one hands? Love has really suffered. No need to discuss marriage or the love between leaders and the led or between teachers and students. Love, a very soft skill, is being played like some political hardball.
So much betrayal. So must distrust. So much mistrust. Having taken it for granted, man and boy, we have ended up hating love.
How can anyone hate love and live? That’s why we are dead, though alive. Rewarding evil for good has stolen our health, our wealth; our life. Flip the page, start loving love and loving hate, and start enjoying better life.
About money and truth, who on earth paired them? Who ever couples water and oil? However, both also endure taking-for-granted torments. The rich man takes far too much for granted the same way he suffers in the hands, hearts and mouths of people.
He suspects everybody calling or coming to him. Surely, they come for his money. He takes hardship or hunger for granted. It is far below him. He does not know the food that his family and he waste can save a village from famine.
Rather naively and stupidly, the rich man doesn’t know money has wings. Money flies away. Money dries up. He was so rich yesterday, he is so poor today.
Fear and respect money, even if you can’t. When and while you have it, remain humble, and helpful, and sane. Build people, not only mansions. If it eventually rains on your roof, people not mansions built come through.
As for truth, I pray you to always be circumspect and empathetic. Never be carried away by it. Truth, apart from the main one (that is of salvation), is relative. There again, be prepared to suffer untold shame for truth.
‘”That one is Mr Truth. Or Madam Truth. Or, they are too holier than thou. Isolate them or perish”.
You can be hated for truth. Even killed for it. Clean people have committed suicide just because of being sidelined. Dirty clean people, that; because how are you so clean and friend of truth that you don’t know beyond killing yourself no matter the matter?
Think about that. Take nothing for granted. No man is God and God can never be man. May what or who you take for granted today never haunt you tomorrow.
God bless Nigeria!
• Concluded.