CHAPTER ONE
ARE YOU DESTINED TO POVERTY OR GREATNESS?
Your Destiny Is What You Create Yourself To Be.
Are You Destined To Poverty Or Greatness?
Why are so many people born into the world as ordinary people, passed through the world as paupers and return to their Creator as they had come, just unsung people? In other words, why are majority of people born poor, pass through life poor, and finally die poor, and totally forgotten without anything to show that they had been here? Why does life favor few and make them so great and unique in whatever they do, thereby making them the singsong of others, even after they had departed the world for years? Why is nature so unjust, making others to be born with silver-spoons, while to others it makes Church-rats? Why has nature been so partial to have destined majority in the world to a life of poverty and want, thereby making them the hewers of woods and drawers of water to a few it had destined greats and nobles? Why is destiny so wicked to have determined the fate of some to be poor and lowly while to some, it determined theirs to be rich?
To answer all the questions above in a simple way, it is held that we get from life what destiny had package for us before we came to be. This, they called predestination. In the book, Institute Of The Christian Religion, published by John Calvin (1509-64), a work that came to be regarded as the doctrinal foundation of the Christians, it is stated:
“We assert that by an eternal and immutable counsel, God has once for all determined both whom He would admit to salvation, and whom He would condemn to destruction. We affirm that this counsel, as far as concerns the elect, is founded on His gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective of human merit; but that to those whom He devotes to condemnation, the gate of life is closed by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible judgment”.
Concluding on what is predestination, Calvin said: “We define predestination as the eternal design of God, whereby He determined what He wanted to do with each man. For He did not create them all in the same condition, but foreordains some to everlasting life and others to eternal damnation”. Awake. May, 2007.
On its own, the Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary defines predestination as: “The theory or the belief that everything that happens has been decided or planned in advance by God or fate and that human cannot change it”.
So, which side of the divide has destiny, fate, or God placed you? I mean, what has God predestined for you? Are you among the unfortunates, whom fate or destiny or God hates so much and had determined in advance to make poor and miserable, even when you did nothing wrong against Him? If that is your belief, please take heart and bear your poverty in gladness to God because God is the absolute Sovereign, whose will determines and rules over everyone and everything that happens in life. Besides, when God says yes, no one can say no. And since God had already predestined that you be poor in life, what else can you do than to bear your cross of poverty, lovingly given to you by a loving God? After all, “Nko Obot ekpekebo ata iyak ekpedung ke ediene inyang”. Literarily, if the creator had wanted you to have fishes for dinner, your abode would have been in the Sea.
In other words, you are absolutely free to hold on to the belief that whatever has happened to you in life or wherever life has placed you was predestined for you and hence, your fate. However, I wish you to know this single truth and that is:
Man is Designed and Mandated to Be Great.
From my knowledge of man and the purpose for which man was created, I have come to see destiny or fate as nothing more than the outcome of natural laws in application. In other words, what one becomes in life is determined by how one applies the natural laws governing what one wants to become in life. That is, destiny is not that which happens to somebody which had been determined in advance by fate. Instead, destiny is that which happens to somebody as determined by how that individual had applied the natural laws governing that which had happened to him. The meaning of this is that we get out of life exactly what we have sown into life. That is, if we apply the natural principles of planning, diligence, hard work, etc, that govern success and greatness in our daily activities, we ultimately become successful and great. If on the other hand, we apply the laws governing poverty (lack of vision, laziness, etc) we must expect poverty to be our destination.
