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15.01.2016 Feature Article

Responding To My Friend’s Plea For Help

Responding To My Friends Plea For Help
15.01.2016 LISTEN

Dear Joseph (pseudonym),

Thanks for taking time to email me. I really appreciate the fact that you have not forgotten me despite the distance that has kept us apart for many years now. I hope your family is doing great. I thought I should write you an open response because I think the message could benefit a lot more people.

I want to share with you a simple lesson of life that I have only come to appreciate recently. This is beautifully captured in this bible words, “As a man THINKTH in his heart, so is he” (proverbs chapter 23, verse 7). I think the failure to grasp this simple message is the very reason why happiness and success have eluded you and I. It is also the reason why Ghana and Africa is rich but poor. We are resource rich but mentally poor. That is why our leaders will always run to the IMF/World bank for loans anytime they hit a problem. These loans keep us in perpetual poverty but make our creditor incredibly rich.

You reminded me in your email that you still have the ambition of studying abroad. I hope this ambition come to pass quickly. You also asked for help because life has been unfair to you nowadays. But what should I say? I am sending you Ghc 20,000? No, my response is that, if you need help financially, I am not in a position to offer financial help at this moment. I am also struggling to pay my kids school fees and keep to family commitments here and home despite my meager salary. It’s a shame that as a dear friend, I can’t be able to help you.

I read a small book entitled “as a man thinkth” by James Allen written in 1903 [https://wahiduddin.net/thinketh/as_a_man_thinketh.pdf] that uses the wisdom in the above bible verse. The book has given me a wealth of insight into life that I wish to share with you as a dear friend. The wisdom in this piece of advice can be a million times more than any money I could offer you, ONLY if it is appreciated, reflected upon and applied.

It teaches us that, LIFE (nature, destiny, God, universal spirit, etc) is like a knife. It does not cut anything on its own. Therefore life can neither be fair nor unfair to anyone. Therefore, the condition we experience today is totally our creation and we are the only persons who can get us out of it. Even Bill Gates can't get us out of our present situations. I came to appreciate this rather late and wished I had known this long before now. I would have had enough money to share with you my dear friend.

I have learnt that we create our realities by our THOUGHTS. When all we think about are the PROBLEMS that we are currently going through and all the things that are going WRONG in our lives, we are CREATING those same realities in our lives. Therefore, our thoughts of yesteryears are our realities we are living today and our thoughts of today (which is almost always the worries of our current challenges) will be our realities tomorrow. This discovery scared me to death but the story of my good friend, Jude; below suggests that the wisdom in this is very true.

What then is the SOLUTION to our current problems? It is simply CHANGING our current thoughts from the worries to FOCUSING on the BRIGHTER FUTURE that we want to have. When our desires for the future are strong enough, they begin to build vivid mental images of where we want to be or what we want to have. Life or nature then takes these images and turns them into reality. That is how simple it is.

I have seen boys and girls selling on the streets rise to reaches and I do think they may have used this technique to the best effect. This happens only through sustained effort, dedication and hard work.

For instance, Jude challenged me years back by a simple question as, “how many applications have you made to universities outside of Ghana in the last 5 years in order to realize your dream of schooling abroad? I bet your answer will be 0 or at best not more than 3. I promise to give you Ghc 1000 immediately if you can send me evidence of more than 3 applications to foreign universities you have made in the last 5 years”.

I was seriously offended by this question but when I came back to my senses, I realized Jude was right. He didn’t have that much money to give me but I also didn’t have any evidence of even 1 application I had made to a foreign university. Today, I also come across people who wish to travel abroad but do not have passports. Wanting to study abroad without applying to schools is like wanting to travel abroad but having no passport. Like my answer to Jude, most people often comfortably ask me, “HOW CAN I APPLY TO FOREIGN SCHOOLS WHEN I AM FACED WITH ALL THESE CHALLENGES?”

Lets answer the above by contrasting my life with that of my friend, Jude. Jude and I grew up from similar backgrounds but ended up in different life circumstances. We both attended the same senior high school and had similarly poor family backgrounds (perhaps we both lost our fathers when we were only 10 years of age). Jude was never any more intelligent than me. I can’t also think of any chance or luck that he had that bestowed on him any fate better than I. Jude practically had nothing that was superior to what I had except that he knew the POWER of the MIND.

Today, Jude is studying for PhD abroad but I am struggling here in Ghana to make ends meet as a basic level teacher. The DIFFERENCE between Jude and me today since leaving high school has been how we have used our THOUGHTS. That is all. After high school or even before, whilst I was concerned about my poor background and my unfortunate family situations and all the problems I faced, Jude focused his thoughts on his future dreams and potential; what he wanted to be. He wanted to go to the university and that was his focus. But I settled for the training college because of the security of the allowances.

After our last paper in high school, Jude started as an apprentice in a barbering shop so that he could work and save money to buy university forms. That was how he bought forms to apply to the university. He always told me with confidence, “I know my family can't afford to pay university fees for me but that can never discourage me”. When he got admission to Legon, he wrote sponsorship applications to almost all NGO's in Tamale including World Vision, Action-Aid, PPAG, but all turned him down except PPAG that promised paying half of his 1st year fees.

At the peak of his frustrations, his friend's uncle came from abroad and decided to sponsor him to go through university. I told him he was very lucky to have had that chance but as I reflect on it today, I know for certainty that it was not luck. Imagine he said he couldn't afford university and for that matter never applied for one. Would he have had admission the time the friend’s uncle came? Did he gather courage to ask the friend’s uncle for support? YES. LUCK COMES TO THOSE WHO ARE PREPARED TO RECEIVE IT.

After his first degree, Jude also applied to 21 foreign universities for 3 years before he finally got scholarship to go to the UK for his masters. Each year he applied to 7 universities and got admission in most cases but no funding. But he never gave up. That’s how people get lucky.

When he was looking for his PhD, he told me he sent emails to more than 100 professors all over the world before finding one. He even had admission to OXFORD UNIVERSITY to do his PhD but he never had the funding. He cried like a baby on phone with me when this opportunity had to escape him. He said it was one of his most cherished dreams. Knowing the determination and perseverance that runs through his blood, my only consolation to Jude was that this was DESTINY.

The SIMPLE MESSAGE I have tried to convey to you in this letter is that, WE ARE THE CREATORS OF OUR REALITIES. That’s simple. If you want to change our current circumstances, we must first change our thoughts and follow that with action. The life that is unfair to us today will begin to change by drawing opportunities to us that we never thought we could have. But LIFE will change gradually because it will wait to see if we are really committed to what we say we want. We have to do the hard work, before life will step in.

This is the end of my letter. I have already begun to practice the wisdom shared in this letter and the results are encouraging. I hope to share in your experimental results when you write next time. My best WISHES to you and family

Sincerely,

H. S Wumpini

[email protected]

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