Fola Ojo
I made you. You would not be who you are today if not for me. I put clothes on your back when you were naked. I put you through school. I provided for you and your family. Without me, you’ll be picking up crumbs for dinner in a trash bin. You owe me your life.”
I am sure you must have heard some of these silly singsongs from men and women who, in the process of time, have been benefactors to certain people in their orbits who fell into hard times. I have heard similar audaciously spoken words by blustering and bombastic men who God used to help other people in their journeys of life. I have run into characters who daily barge into and pound on people’s lives screaming around town that without them, nobody can become somebody. Maybe as you read this treatise, this is your story. You may have encountered somebody who has held or is holding your life hostage, believing that you owe them your life and more because they helped meet a particular need at a point in your life. For the sake of those among us who never read or heard about the dream exploits of a young boy called Joseph, I will tell his story over again.
Joseph was a cute young boy, one of thirteen children—twelve boys and one girl—of a man called Jake. Something stood out special about Joseph that made his dad fall head-over-heels in love with the child of his old age. Dad made a very expensive rainbow-coalition garment for Joseph in which he cladded proudly around town. One night Joseph went to bed and had a big dream that made him dizzy with bemusement. “We were all out in the field gathering bundles of wheat. All of a sudden my bundle stood straight up and your bundles circled around it and bowed down to mine,” he narrated to his brothers who hated him for this.
He had another dream where he saw the moon, the sun, and eleven stars bowing down to him. He got more rattled and told a startled Dad who knew what the dream meant. Dad sent Joseph on an errand to his brothers in a hunting camp and his hateful brothers held him down in a pit. They contemplated murdering him to see what would become of the dream. But they changed their minds and sold him into slavery in a country far away from home and the dad who loved him.
In this country, he ran into trouble while serving the right-hand man of the king. The wife of this influential personality was sexually attracted to Joseph. She pursued him for a one-night stand. Joseph resisted; escaping from her hounding hands. He was caged in the nation’s worst calaboose for an attempted rape offense he never committed. Behind bars, he met other jailbirds. One was the king’s butler who also had a confusing dream he sought meaning for.
Joseph told the butler what the dream meant. His interpretation was right on the money. Butler was out of the calaboose as predicted by Joseph. He later introduced him to King Pharaoh who also had a bad dream that needed unravelling. Again, Joseph gave his interpretation of the king’s dream. Messages from the mouth of Joseph sounded right in the ears of Pharaoh. Pharaoh did not allow Joseph to be taken back into the calaboose. He immediately hired him as Prime Minister to help solve a nation’s famine quagmire that was to come in seven years. Joseph’s story was a program from heaven to help rejigger the destiny of a young man who had been destined to rule a nation. But what is striking in this story is that none of the people Joseph came across in his nightmarish odyssey, not even Pharaoh, whose final words sealed the deal, claimed once that without them, Joseph wouldn’t have become somebody in life. None of them tried to choke Joseph that he owed them. None of them claimed they made him. As godless as Pharaoh was, he knew better.
If your breakthrough comes from certain people with an agenda of enslavement, they resort to smothering you with asinine insinuations that they made you. Their target is to pillory you until you capitulate to their whims and caprices. Why can’t people help without strings attached? Why can’t people be kind to men without trying to hold them in eternal captivity? My friends, not one man contributes to the growth and development of men? There are others who come into a man’s life to help one way or the other during his journey.
There are people who have received help from men and women they never knew. God can use strangers to perform His strange acts in the lives of men. A young man I didn’t have a relationship with helped chart my way to the United States over thirty years ago. I have not seen him since then despite many efforts on my part. God used another young man for me where I currently do the work of ministry. Up till today, he never asked me to tell anyone what he did—although I did—and he never told me or anyone I owe him. Life is calibrated in stages, my friends. At every stage of life are different human angels dispatched by God to carry out specific assignments and for specific purposes in our lives. We must always connect the dots. We thank God for the man who helped you but remind him that he is only one of many connecting dots to your destiny. Let no man yak around town today that he made you.
There is a difference between a helper and a godfather. Godfathers are mean men with selfish agendas. Anyone who offers you help, expecting to own you forever, is a godfather mafioso on a selfish evil agenda. Godfathers are men who keep men subservient for life while they sharpen their own weapons to rise and shine. Sometimes they plot that you serve their children too when they’re gone. A helper is God’s angel. His offers are about the man who needs help, not himself. If you seek an upgrade in life, pray for helpers, not godfathers who always believe that you must put your future on hold while they pursue theirs with speed.
Every good deed that passes through our fingers into the life of someone is a seed that will soon come back as a bountiful harvest. But whoever holds other men hostage because of the help he rendered once or twice has turned himself to Jehovah “EL-IN-CHARGE.” Such a person has received his rewards. And such a person may remain a kingmaker, but he will never become king.
– Twitter: @Folaojotweet
