Chapter four
NEGATING DARKNESS
In God’s word the Bible, God first declared light because there was total darkness over the earth. What happened next was that darkness gave way.
Light cannot be in a place and darkness reveals itself. They both are not friends. Darkness only arrives because light chooses not to shine. The moment light discovers it’s potential and begins to reveal its potentials, darkness is displaced. Darkness however always positions itself around light so that in case light chooses to give up its potential, it arrives without stress.
You are light, a package of potential, skill and talent that has capacity to shine. The dark challenges around you isn’t what’s holding you from making the kind of influence you should make, it is you keeping back your light.
There are challenges everywhere in society. It’s not the challenges however that cause people to act in a radical manner; it is the failure of the people to act against the challenges that make them remain.
The intensity of light will determine how far darkness will travel. A low-intensity light will make little impact on darkness. There are some lights that are lit and no one knows they are because their lights are too little. Darkness still takes superseding control over most of the territory. One has to go very close to the source of the light to see that there is actually light.
If you keep your talent or skill at just discovery level, no one would see it. Only a few around you will be aware of the immense gifting that characterizes your gifts and talent. Beyond them, no one will. It's saddening too that those who are close to you may not have the wherewithal to help you develop that talent. Those who can are very far away. You have to increase the value of that light, that talent, till it influences so many persons that it cannot be overlooked.
The farther darkness goes, the stronger the light, the more important the light becomes and the less likely the light will be overlooked. I’d take the sun for example. The sun is the biggest light in this galaxy the milky wave. When the sun rays begin to streak in the morning, the darkness of the night gives way entirely to the light of the sun. That light doesn’t just provide illumination but it also provides life, it provides for both plants and animals. It controls the cycle of life.
Your light has similar capacity too. Your light does push darkness always from you but it could do same for people and lots of people beyond your immediate sphere. Take music for example. Music travels around the world immediately it is released. Sometimes the musician was singing to sooth his feelings, when the song is released and heard, the song also connects with people who were going through similar situations as the composer of the song. The difference is that the composer had chosen to use his light to take away his dark situation and didn’t just keep the light; he spread it and pushed the darkness away from it.
There was a time when I felt immense darkness around me. I had suffered from depression and quite a lot around wasn’t working. I struggled through it with the lessons of life I learned during this time. As a means of releasing my light amidst this strong darkness, I took to writing. The result of that writing is one of my books “Ekekere’s motivation Bible”. Most of the thoughts in that book arrived amidst those dark moments. Writings in that book have being read by millions of persons in the last three years.
I use the light of my writing to push off societal ill by writing open letters as well as commentaries offering advice to government. It has being immensely gratifying. My books are being read by people who find light in them and find hope for their challenges from them.
Don’t say “what I have has no value”. What you have has immense value to tell people's darkness away. Those who don’t value what they have keep it all to themselves. These persons continually find themselves being influenced by darkness.
Those challenges are only waiting for you to take action, for you to look inside of you. The mistake we make is trying to look outside for help. All the help we need begins from inside. It is only when we have done the work from inside out that people see the value we have inside us from outside.
Now you may think, I don’t have any darkness around me, I don’t have any challenge, and it’s all good. Is it? When people around you are not doing as well as you are doing, you are very much closer to darkness than you know or think. It is often said that a rich man amongst poor men is a poor man no matter how much he has. This is because those poor men could one day become a problem to him. They could choose to steal his wealth and leave him with nothing.
The rich man who has discovered his wealth and goes to help people around him find wealth will be safer amongst the people he has empowered.
Don’t keep your light to yourself when people are in darkness around you can benefit from. The world is waiting for your kind of light to push away the many dark tracks that characterize the world.