The Audacity of God's Grace: 10 Strategies To Living Your Best Life Now (5 page)

You Will Need Intercession

My wife and I and our extended families were always on our knees in intercession. Friends and Church members prayed fervently. My case was an unfamiliar one. I had pancreatic stones with more than thirty stones lodged in my pancreas. It was only during the surgery that the medical team discovered that the computed tomography (CT) scans which was being used to study my body has inefficiently conveyed the extent of damages and the nature of things inside my system. First, the spleen had been badly damaged, an internal pus formed, and the gall bladder affected plus thrombosis and other complicated issues. In the battle to save my life during the surgery, both the spleen and gall bladder were removed completely from my system. After my prolonged stay in the hospital, the enemy came from another direction the day we made it back to my home where I opted to convalesce. But the power of God through intercessory prayers prevailed. Those who want to live their best life now must learn to pray. Prayer works!

Determination Is Key

If you are thinking of success in life, determination and prayer is your beginning point, for it is a key you will always need to duplicate and have spares throughout your life journey. As I was being carried out of the car when I got home, discharged from the hospital after spending two months, which left me unable to walk on my own, just at the door of our house, my wife received a phone call from the hospital where she had her second job as a registered nurse and you can guess what the three words that followed the message were: You Are Fired! It sounded thunderous or like a bullet to her ears. Fired? She replied. And the caller answered affirmatively and went on to narrate how she had failed to show up to work, on the exact date that I had undergone the surgery of which she had communicated her nursing supervisor that she was not going to be available for work that particular day because I was going under the knife. What a lateral violence? As we received that call that afternoon, right there, we knew that we have got to depend on what no man, no system, or any employer can give us—the audacity of God’s grace to help us think successfully and reach our dream. We were more determined to succeed than ever before. We decided to go south—the opposite direction of what we had been taught about how to succeed under the definitions of American dream. For the next several days and months, my wife and I was on a battle on how to survive life and meet our financial obligations—and these are two highly educated people with great degrees!

Activate Your Faith & Learn to Release

From this time onwards, we knew it was about time to activate our faith and release them in the hands of the
master
provider and sustainer—the powerful God, who graciously loves. We had every legitimate reason to sue the hospital for this injustice. Every friend, family, or people that heard how my wife was fired from her job asked us to proceed on a lawsuit. In this type of case, there are lawyers who were willing to give the hospital a fight over this case without taking a dime from us. But we knew there was more to this, for: “The weapons of our warfare are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish [every] strongholds (2 Corinthians 10:4 NIV). It was in the middle of these crises that my entrepreneurial journey will begin proper in the United States with the launching of our first major business. My wife will resign from her full time job few months later as a registered nurse. This is why you don’t need to panic with people who gloat over your glory, and yet, who do not know your story. The audacity that the grace of God downloaded into our lives, the mindset for success, the power to do and achieve, to dream bigger and afresh; to hold God accountable to deliver his promises over our lives, and the assurance that my wife and I were going to live our best life and rise to the top no matter the odds or what it takes was borne about this time.

The Night Is Always Darker Before Day Break

In the following months we passed through the valley and shadow of past due bills, and late payments; storms and fires of financial disaster and the “terror of calls” from the collection agencies, which I will never forget. I saw first-hand, that there was nothing good and ‘Godful’ about poverty and a life of struggle. We lost one of our cars to repossession as I personally drove it back to the dealership followed with many other great losses. I hated poverty with everything within me. At one point when the heat was so intense, I began to blame myself and question why I was in this mess in the first place. I saw and experienced what poverty and pressure can do on our psych. We were leaving on unemployment checks. Things were not adding up at all. Then, I was beginning to re-think and re-consider what I have been taught over the years to be the pathway to success. Get a job! Keep the job! Retire from the job or die while you are a loyal employee. In one of those dark nights before our day break, I pressured my wife to leave our new found business in my care and management and go back and pick up her bedside nursing job at one of the hospitals she once worked as a registered nurse in Orange County, California.

Interestingly enough, the hospital was very willing to rehire my wife according to her terms—full time, per diem, or part time because of her big heart for patients care, her team spirit and exceptional career skills and qualifications. I will always remain thankful to God, that for the first time in our marital life, my wife was very determined to not listen to me, her parents, or my parents and defied every reasonable argument, logic, counsel, or prayer to go back to pick up a paid job as a registered nurse in any hospital whatsoever, no matter the pay package. She stubbornly and sternly resisted the whole idea, as if it was a deadly virus! She had other great ideas. She reminded me that God has always been bigger than our problems and knew what God wanted for our lives. She refused my counsels and hated to discuss the matter. For the very first time and thankfully, the very last time in our relational life, we had a quarrel we could not settle within 24 hours.

Be Stubborn For Your Success

My wife was very stubborn for our success. She chose to stay away from bedside nursing career even in the middle of a deep recession in the U.S when hospitals were not hiring nurses. She automated her mind to work for our success in the promised power of God’s word to supply our needs according to his riches in glory. One of those days, my wife reminded me one of the vows I once made to myself that as long as I live and as God gives me the grace, I was not going to be poor, or struggle through life to make a living. At one point, we had to temporarily pull our children away from the private early childhood learning education they were enrolled because we could no longer afford to pay their fees. It was terrible! I could have given into bitterness. I had every legitimate reason to become desperate and depressed; and yet, I decided to choose joy and success.

“Those who are not stubborn for their own success will not achieve excellence.”

I chose to see the brighter side of life. I chose joy, thankfulness, peace, love, and happiness over bitterness and decided that each of those unpleasant days was going to be lived with a purpose and direction and for the best too. It is for this reason that I strongly believe in determination because according to Mario Andretti, in the journey for success, “desire is the key to motivation, but it’s the determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal — a commitment to excellence — that will enable you to attain the success you seek.”

Love Wins

This is why it is urgent and important to have two crazy people who are crazy about their love for each other and crazy to work together and become a success story. As I reminisce over what kept us strong, united in our differences and not tore us apart in the latter days of our nights before our day break, I knew it had to be real and genuine love, founded in the principle of agape. Our love for each other won over our disagreements. True love indeed, wins! Again, this is where and when most couples make the most expensive desperate mistakes of their lives like going for the cheap option of an unnecessary divorce. Even in our adversity, I believe that we can choose to be happy. In times of adversity, those who are courageous will see opportunity. It’s all in our minds. It’s a choice we have to make or not make. To live each day with a sense of purpose, humor, smile, and to make the most out of our everyday life, thus living at our best even in the middle of life difficulties. We can chose faith in the God of unlimited possibilities by standing strong and undefeated, for when we do so, our dreams and love cannot be compromised. This is why we must learn that life is about purpose. If you have nothing much you are living for, chances are that you will give in easily to mediocrity. But if you are purpose driven, you discover that love wins.

In times of adversity, those who are courageous will see opportunity.

Invest Your Energy Into Good Use

My wife—who remains my number one friend, confidant, and lover and I in our days of adversity and financial disaster invested our energy, our days and evenings into good use by researching for, and investigating success. We invested handsomely into devotion and prayer and asking God to turn around the ugly with beauty and the ordinary works of our hands into extraordinary favor and success. For whatever reason, the more I struggled to succeed, the more I discovered that the measure of our success depends on our mindset [what we believe in] and faith [our ability to raise our expectations] in God. I learnt that what you believe to be truth in your mind is what works for you. This is what we call perception. For most people, their perception is that poverty is a virtue and a way to serve God better. This has worked for them somehow by keeping such people down in the lowest neighborhood of life where they are unable to meet their daily needs and drag through life as well as their children. For me, while going through my days of adversity, what I believed was that by the special grace and mercy of God, I will live my best life with success even when I was in the dark with the details of how it will happen. Slowly and steadily, I saw my life, my businesses, and our ministry re-emerged, turned around, and given vitality by the grace of God. When you invest your energy into good use, you will never out run the goodness of God—the new level of favor and promotions God has positioned you for.

Your Compensation Will Come With Compound Interest

All the stolen goods the enemy forcefully snatched away from my life was returned to me by a hundred fold by the audacity of God’s grace, and with compound interest. This is the singular reason why my life is built on nothing less, dependent on nothing more, and operated by the wings of God’s audacious grace. For everything I am; all that I own, and every accomplishment of my life has come to me and can be traced through the grace of God. Looking at where God brought me from, I believe that before any person might want to place a curse on me or work for my downfall, God has already blessed me ahead of time. This can hold true for you too. Anybody who might want to stand on our way to prosperity, against the direction of excellence and prosperity or joy that God has placed on our path to higher heights will first, had to contend with God.

You know why? Because we are God-made product, branded and packaged with excellence and produced in the factory of God’s grace. The favor God has placed over your life is limitless, because you belonged to God. And when God is with you, it does not matter who is against. It is because of this, that I strongly believe that when we turn our lives over to the audacity of God’s grace and lean not on our own understanding and details of what we have been taught, there will be more power to us. The power to think successfully, the ability to become a blessing to humanity, to make and create wealth and become whatever God wants us to become. God longs for our success. Our ability to succeed however will not be discovered in buried talents.

“When we give God a chance, God’s blessings will speak for itself over our lives.”

God will compensate us. His prosperity will radiate in us and the power of excellence given to us with the vitality, finances and health we need to live our best life now will be made available to us by his special grace.

Those Powered By Grace Do Not Live In Fear

When our lives are powered by the grace of God, we will not live in fear. In fact, we will receive new ability to do what appears impossible to folks around us. We will become more focused that even in the midst of unpleasant circumstances; God will perform the impossible and make a way by giving us words, wisdom, knowledge, power, solutions, strength and the courage for escape. When we act on God’s directives, we operate with a higher power in a higher ground that expands our success. No matter what you are going through today, or what you have had to deal with in the past, what I want you to know is this: You can do better today, and even now than you have done before. There is a place for you to succeed in God’s triune economy. There is audacity in the grace of God. It’s got power and it works too! It can change your health, your finances, and your life completely.

This is why I am most convinced that the grace of God is very powerful and inexplicable. For it is only by God’s grace that we can attain our goals, reach our dreams, realize our visions, touch lives, expect peace, receive joy, experience freedom from our fears, and be liberated from the limitations that people and our minds have set for us. It is only when this grace is received that we will have our hopes and dreams become unstoppable and fulfilled while we experience God’s leadership, prosperity, and his healing from the bruises that the enemy and life brings our way. When we abide by these, we will enjoy the fruits and refreshment of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:19-23) and eat the fruit of the land. For these reasons, God through his infinite mercy at work within us will grant us forgiveness from our past mistakes, and the ability to live our best lives even now.