I had been called to preach at a church in Zimbabwe when the pastor told us a true story of a boy called Taku.
Taku’s dad worked as a security guard. He was paid so little that they couldn’t afford electricity at home.
To make matters worse, in the midst of all these hardships, Taku was in his final year in High School. He had to pass, otherwise, his life would be doomed to a blue-collar, menial work career.
Unlike other students, Taku couldn’t stay up to study through the night because they couldn’t afford electricity. The whole house was always dark at night.
Yet, in spite of all this, Taku went on to pass with straight A’s in all his A-level subjects. He graduated High School as one of the top students in his school!
How did he do it? Well, when his Dad was guarding on night duty, Taku would come along to his dad’s workplace.
While Dad sat outside guarding the company premises, Taku would find his way inside, switch on the lights, and study through the night.
That’s how Taku managed to graduate top of his class and school.
Another True Story
One day, in an insignificant rural home, a poor black girl was born. Her mum and dad were separated, and her mum was neglectful and unkind.
This girl’s childhood was filled with sorrow and pain. Everything was wrong about her, even her name was misspelled.
When she was little, she was sexually abused by her relatives and mother’s friends…not just once, but several times.
When the girl was nine years old, her mum fell pregnant but kept it a secret. She secretly delivered a baby and gave the baby up for adoption.
At fourteen, the girl fell pregnant and tried to hide it. She delivered successfully, but a week later, her baby passed away.
At fourteen, this girl wouldn’t have been a mother; she would only have been a child with a child.
At an age when she should have been learning to change the world, she would have been changing diapers.
The real question is: having started up in such a dirty, smelly mess, what would that girl have grown up to be in life?
She received a life she wouldn’t dare to choose; so much disadvantaged in every way.
The beautiful thing is that girl grew up, and today, she is ranked among the most influential women of all time.
She has a net worth of more than three billion dollars, and for years, she reigned as the world’s wealthiest black woman. Her name is Oprah Winfrey.
In a single lifetime, she has found the time to go through hell, turn her life into paradise, and touch the lives of many.
The Lessons
Some people are born into a worse life than yours but they go on to achieve far more than you imagined you could with yours.
In my life coaching sessions, I normally asked my clients, “What does the name Oprah mean?”
Most of them reply, “Hmm, not sure, but maybe it means ‘happiness’ or… ‘Wealth?”
I laugh further when some suggest Oprah means “power,” “success,” or “fame.” Because honestly speaking – the name Oprah has no meaning.
She was supposed to be called Orpah after a biblical name, but on her birth certificate, it was misspelled to Oprah.
Sometimes we allow ourselves to bend to the identity the world imposes on us. We allow ourselves to be molded into the losers and failures the world labels us to be.
Every day they call you black, or blonde, or a minority, or a girl born when your mum wanted a boy (or a boy born by mistake) – these words are like hammers that force you to succumb to an identity the world superimposes on your life.
But the meaning we now see in a once meaningless name called Oprah; shows that we are more than what people call us.
You are more than what your name says. Don’t let your name give meaning to your life; rather let your life give meaning to your name.
You can live a life so beautiful that in your generation your children are named after you.
That is exactly what happened to Cinderella. Please, Cinderella does not mean princess!
Her evil stepmother beat her out of her room, deprived her of bed sheets, and marginalized her existence to the corner end of the room.
She was called Cinderella because she had nowhere to keep warm, she slept on the cinders.
The warmest place to sleep was upon the fireplace, beside the ashes and the cinders.
Cinderella literally means a cinder girl, a woman upon the ashes. It’s sad how in life people identify us by our afflictions.
If Cinderella had obeyed her name, the palace would have never been her new home, cinders and ashes would have been her doom.
What you were born into does not determine what is in you. And where you are going to matters more than what you are going through.
History is filled with great people born small, and you know what, their humble beginning is what makes their life story worth telling.
You couldn’t do anything about your starting line, but you can do something about your finish line.
One day I broke the name Cinderella in two, and I found it is made up of the word cinder and ella. “Cinder” yes is related to ashes, but Ella means a “goddess, a queen, a beautiful fairy!”
That struck me to the marrow and kicked an ache at my heart’s center.
There is an Ella in Cinderella; there is a goddess in the ashes. Cinderella doesn’t mean a girl on the ashes; it means a goddess on the ashes!
The Jesus that shines today was born in a manger – in a dirty smelly place.
That’s because in life it does not matter where you started from, what really matters is where you are going.
When you are in ashes don’t forget that you are still a goddess.
That means in the mediocrity they call you by there still lies your greatness.
The same Jesus is today a lamb and tomorrow a lion, and that reminds us there is a lamb and a lion in every person.
There is a part of you that can succumb to the circumstances of life and whimper along like a wounded puppy, but there is also a part of you that roars in the face of danger.
To be victims of our circumstances or to be victors despite our circumstances is determined by which part of us we have chosen to spend our lives unleashed.
Terminator said “Disconnect the Pain”
Give attention to a hyperactive attention-seeking child and you have worsened his hyperactivity. He will embarrass you before visitors.
What you don’t notice is his unsettled behavior is being grown by the attention that you reward him with. Whatever you give attention to grows.
There are ashes and a goddess in Cinderella. Only if she stopped focusing on the cinders, could she release the ella in the inside of her.
I believe amidst your pain there lies your passion. Which of the two is getting most of your attention?
Just like the story of Taku in the beginning of this chapter… is it possible that you are counting what you don’t have to an extent that you are losing sight of what you have?
Taku didn’t complain about what he didn’t have, he simply chose to do his best with what he had.
If you want a bright future, then your today, as dark as it might seem, is the seed you should sow to reap the brightness of your tomorrow.
The brightness of your tomorrow lies in how you utilize your today, no matter how dark your today may seem to be.
If you embrace your passion you will lose your pain, but if you pay attention to your pain you will lose your passion.
I have met people who are so engrossed in their pain to an extent that they have forgotten what they would live for if that pain was taken away.
Such people are fed up with their pain but they are not ready for freedom.
I was re-watching the Terminator II Judgment Day and Kyle Reese (the father to John Connor) was asked by Sarah Connor if there was a girl in his life.
When he said there was none in the world of the future, Sarah pitied him so much that she asked how could people in the future live in such torment…
But Kyle responded with a life-changing statement for Sarah Connor…
“Pain can be controlled. You just disconnect it.”
For more than eight years, I thought the Terminator philosophy was a fictitious movie thriller concept.
Till one day I looked back in my life and found that I have outgrown my problems by ignoring them and focusing on what matters most.
By ignoring my pain I didn’t kill it from the world, but I killed it from my mind, and my mind is my world.
The problems of life are as big as the attention we give to them.
It’s not your problems that must be reduced, it’s your sensitivity. Some things you just have to ignore.
This is Not Your Story
Maybe you are saying “Sir Moffat, this is my story, my life cannot change.”
But I’m saying this is not your story, it is a story that you were born into.
There is a story that lives in you, that is the story your life is meant to tell.
There is a story of joy, life success, and happiness living in you, and that same beautiful story makes you sad because it was never meant to live in you.
It was meant to pour out of you and change the story that you were born into.
Don’t let the sad story that you were born into, distort the beautiful story that lives in you.
You can change your story. Real problems have solutions, it’s only imaginary problems that don’t have solutions.
You are stronger than you think, and you can achieve much more than you have ever tried!
Tender Shoot through the Dry Ground
One day I saw a tender plant that had grown through a concrete floor. I am sure you must have seen that too.
What prominently astounded me was that it seemed the crack on the tough concrete floor had been extended by the growth of the tender shoot.
Though tender, the plant has the power to crack a concrete floor. Tenderness is not weakness.
That should remind you of the biological weathering process that you learned at school.
That tender tree roots do grow and break up tough rocks that surround them.
Tenderness does not mean weakness.
God has endowed His creation with a power for life. In their tenderness, His creatures must remember they have the power for breakthrough.
Your circumstances might be tougher than you, but like the tender shoot that breaks the concrete, you have the power to break circumstances that are tougher than you.
You were planted in a hard dry situation, not to be a victim but to be its weathering agent. You were planted to be the cause of that problem’s breakdown.
In your tenderness there lies your strength. You can break through before you break down.
I know sometimes you have faced hard moments that have forced you to bend.
Yes, it forced you to change your career path, to work in a restaurant when what you were really after was a college degree.
To be an employee when what you really want is starting your own business.
Or to be in a faraway land in order to sustain the people that matter the most to you.
And when you try to connect the thoughts, you see life as having pushed you about and sometimes hate yourself for being such a runaway child who is pushed to and fro by the ferocious waves of life.
You take your tenderness for a weakness, but in that ability to bend that is where your strength lies. The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.
Whosoever resists bending shall break, but the bamboo that bends rises again when the wind sweeps past.
Cinderella must have hated herself for allowing such ill-treatment upon her soul. She must have told herself, “It’s your fault, silly girl; you allow them to ill-treat you like this.”
But you know what… Though it must not be so all the time, there is a time in life when all you can do is just bend.
There is a time when to flee is the best way to fight, to cry is the best way to be strong and to remain silent would be the best speech to give.
This is the time that tames your enemy.
The best way to tame your enemy is not by defeating him, but by giving him a false confidence that he has defeated you.
In that confidence, he relaxes, and in his restfulness, he forgets to beware of your injurious restlessness.
Intimidated, and his life threatened by Pharaoh, Moses fled Egypt.
But after forty years in exile, Moses had a conversation with God upon Mount Horeb – in this conversation, he received power from God and returned to Egypt, conquered the Pharaoh who once had the power to kill him, and he liberated the Israelites that he had failed to liberate forty years before.
Look into your life and see all that you have spent running away from, I want you to know for that time it was good because it was the only thing that you could do.
But I pray that, like Mount Horeb, may the conversations between this book and your soul be accompanied by the impartation of power for life!
After reading this book, may you bring a fight upon what caused you flight.
In the face of danger, some flee, some freeze but some fight.
In Endocrinology and Human Behavior, we learn that in the face of danger it is the one and the same hormone that causes your flight, which will cause you to freeze or to fight.
It takes the same energy to fight as it takes to run away. It takes the same hormone. That hormone is called adrenaline.
Adrenaline is a chemical that is secreted in your body when you are threatened.
One man was chased by a German shepherd dog, and he confessed not to understand how he outran that dog and how he swiftly sprang over a wall far taller than him.
One bullied child at school confessed he could not understand how he kicked and left Tom, the class bully, bleeding from the mouth lying prostrate on the floor.
When adrenaline was released both these people found power to either fight or flee in ways beyond their expected ability.
But the most important thing is that: whether to fight, to flee or to freeze – you will use the same energy hormone.
That means, look back into your life and you shall find the same energy you used to run away is the same energy required to fight back.
Maybe in your life, you have just frozen in the midst of adversity, I want to tell you that it takes strength to stand still.
Your ability to freeze and your ability to flee show me that you have the ability to fight – because it takes the same energy chemical to be a fighter as it takes to be a “flighter.”
In your weaknesses, I see great strength!
The Sperm that Won the Race
Let me take you back to an almost unknown era in your life.
It is to a time before you were even trapped in your mother’s womb.
I want to take you to a day in your sperm days when you left your father’s loins and landed in your mother’s womb.
Millions of sperms are released during intercourse, but of all the millions, only one fastest sperm that reaches the uterus first fertilizes the egg.
This one sperm will grow into a baby that will be born – what about the millions of other sperms that were outrun by this single sperm?
Sorry to say, but they all suffocate and die in a few days. They have no second chance.
My friend, you are reading this book because you are the sperm that won the race!
There has already been a contest before you were born, and you are here today because you are the sperm that won the contest over millions of other sperms that night!
Hey, you were not just born to win; you are a winner that is why you were born.
If you were really a loser as those dumb people say, you wouldn’t have been born in the first place. But you won that is why you are here.
Before you could even see or talk, you already could win. Winning runs in your veins!
So Remember the Ella after Cinder
So if people call you Cinderella, a name that should mean nonentity and ashes, remember in Cinderella there is Ella after Cinder.
There is strength in your weakness.
Amid your pain, there is your passion.
Though your pain releases your tears, your passion will release your inner power.
Embrace your passion and disconnect your pain, and you will have unleashed your power for life!
In tough situations that make you seem tender, I won’t lie by telling you that you are just as tough as other people might do. You and I know that’s not true.
The truth is you don’t always have to be tougher to overcome tough times. You don’t need to be tougher in order to be stronger.
Your tenderness has enough strength in it to make you break through without breaking down.
And just in case you want to achieve something so you can be a winner, I want to tell you that you already have the greatest medal anyone can give to prove oneself a winner – it was being born.
You ran faster than millions – you were the sperm that won the race.
In your Cinderella identity, remove “Cinder” and you will become Ella – a goddess, a divine force.
Hello Ella. Am I glad to talk to you!
Next Chapter…
