The Freedom of Letting God Defend You

You know the feeling. Someone says something untrue about you, or does something unfair, and hours later — sometimes days later — you are still rehearsing your defense in the shower, in traffic, in the quiet before sleep. The conversation is over. You are still fighting it. You compose the perfect response, the one that would have set the record straight, and then compose it again, a little sharper this time. Nobody ever hears it. It simply loops, quietly, in a heart that has appointed itself judge and jury in a case it was never meant to try.

The Ministry of Showing Up: Where Presence Matters Most

My mother used to tell me about a huge tree that stood in the square of her own village growing up — old enough that her own grandparents remembered playing in its shade as children themselves. That tree, she said, never preached a sermon, settled a dispute, or offered anyone advice. It simply stood there, faithfully, through every wedding celebrated beneath it, every dispute mediated in its shade, every funeral gathering that needed somewhere cool to sit and grieve together.

Thou Shalt Prosper — But Prosper How?

On a bush trek some years back, I came across a termite mound taller than I was — one of those impressive reddish towers you sometimes stumble on in the savanna, hardened like clay, standing as confidently as a small monument. From the outside, it looked utterly solid, the kind of structure you’d assume could survive anything. My guide tapped it lightly with a stick, and it gave a hollow, papery sound.

Pride Goes Before the Fall — But What Comes Before Pride?

Every farmer knows the disappointment of digging up what looked, from the surface, like a perfectly healthy yam or cassava tuber — only to slice it open and find the inside soft, dark, and rotten. Nothing above ground warned you. The leaves looked fine. The stem stood tall right up until harvest day. But weeks, sometimes months earlier, a small insect had already bored its way in, or moisture had already begun quietly working through the flesh, unseen, unremarkable, easy to miss because nothing on the surface changed.

Discernment: Knowing the Difference Between Good and Best

At harvest time, every yam farmer faces a quiet decision nobody outside the farm ever thinks about. Spread out before him are dozens of perfectly good yams — healthy, edible, fit for the pot tonight. But from that same pile, he sets aside a smaller, more carefully chosen selection: the seed yams. Not simply the biggest ones, or the ones that look most impressive.

The Mentor Nobody Notices

Any cocoa farmer in the south-west will tell you a secret most people never think to ask about: young cocoa seedlings cannot survive direct sun. For the first several years, they need shade — usually provided by plantain or banana suckers planted deliberately around them, standing guard against the harshest afternoon heat until the cocoa is finally strong enough to stand in open sun on its own. Years later, when that same tree is heavy with pods and the farmer is counting his harvest, nobody remembers which particular plantain tree did the shading.

Why Can’t Christians Get Along?

If there is one question that has echoed throughout the history of Christianity, it is this: Why can’t Christians get along? The Church was never meant to resemble the divided world around it. It was called to be a living demonstration of God’s love—a community where people from different backgrounds, cultures, and personalities are united through faith in Jesus Christ.

Honor Doesn’t Wait For Agreement

Anyone who has watched a documentary on elephants will have seen something remarkable. An old matriarch, sometimes limping, sometimes half-blind, sometimes leading her herd toward water sources only she seems to remember from decades past, is never pushed aside for a younger, stronger cow to take over. The herd stays close to her. They wait for her. When she finally dies, the others have been documented standing over her body for days, touching her with their trunks, reluctant to leave.

What Really Happens the Moment We Die?

There’s a scene you’ll recognise from almost any wake-keeping across Nigeria — someone leans over, pats a grieving person’s shoulder, and says, gently, “Don’t cry, they’re watching over you now. They’re smiling down from above.” It’s said with real love. Nobody means any harm by it. But it’s worth asking, honestly, as believers who care about truth: is that actually what Scripture teaches happens the moment someone in Christ dies?

The Fear of Man Is a Snare

There’s a particular kind of trap hunters used to set for small game back in the village — a simple snare, a loop of rope hidden under leaves, tied to a bent branch. The animal doesn’t see the danger until its foot is already caught, and the harder it struggles, the tighter the loop pulls. What’s remarkable about a snare is that it doesn’t grab you violently from a distance. You walk into it yourself, one ordinary step at a time, usually while chasing something else entirely.