First Post

Thursday 30th November, 2006. Wait… is there any magical ring to this date? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely the day I’m breaking through every barrier that has stood in the way of my joining the [prestigious ;-)] e-community of bloggers.

I really can’t remember for how long I’ve been meaning to start a blog. I mean, I signed up on a free blog site ages ago and even wrote a couple of initial posts (offline of course), but none of them have featured outside of my personal computer till date. I have friends whose blog sites I visit occasionally, and after each visit my resolve to post something, anything, on my own site is strengthened. Surprisingly however, that resolve is almost always instantly dissolved in any one of the myriad legitimate cares I have in this world, so that I soon forget all about blogging and all my attention is riveted on whatever issue is at hand.

That says a lot, I think, about the disparity between decisions and actions. The bridge that links the two is called discipline. In other words, without discipline it is near impossible to translate our decisions into actions.

Discipline is what makes us overcome the odds that stand in the way of our accomplishing anything. There will always be many things fighting for our attention, but it is the disciplined person that will be able to prioritise and organise tasks and goals into definite timelines, and then execute each task accordingly. Now, all this sounds perfectly logical and non-negotiable in theory, but it took me this whole blog experience to learn the lessons practically.

You’ll be surprised to know that it actually took God’s intervention to get me going. I was in a church service a few weeks ago where a friend preached about the time value of life for every human being. This guy was in the same high-level meeting with some of the victims of the Abuja-Sokoto ADC crash less than 24 hours before the disaster, so as you can imagine, he had a very good idea of what he was talking about. As he rounded up the sermon he instructed us to turn to someone next to us and tell them whatever it was we had been putting off doing, with a promise to start it before the end of this year. Well, quite naturally my long-standing issue with blogging surfaced, I made a promise ‘before God and man’ to start it, and here I am keeping that promise. You ever wondered about the guy that said, “God is in the details”? Well, he’s very right. I could never have done this without Him.

That said, I’d like to welcome you officially to my web log. It’s basically gonna be a collection of thoughts and personal reflections as they come, but my hope is that the reader will always be enriched as I share my experiences.

This is actually an introductory post, so it is immediately followed by what was supposed to be my first post eight months ago :)
Read on, and remember, even the best intentions are no good until they are acted out!