(John 5:1-7)
I meet with a lot of young folks everyday.
I talk with them often and sound them out to have an idea on how their minds work.
One thing I notice is, most of them believe for them to get ahead in life, they MUST have “connections”: they must know people in high places who will pull them up from the level they are.
They don’t trust in their own skills, abilities and capacities. They don’t think good grades matter when applying for jobs, they don’t think skills, knowledge, capacity matter: to them, what matters is the person they know who recommends them for the job! They invariably believe if they have a First Class Degree in Accounting and another applicant has a Third Class Degree in the same Accounting, an Accounting Firm would rather hire the Third Class Graduate if he happened to be “connected”.
How young people reason like this is beyond me.
They don’t seem to understand that these organizations are not stupid: they also want to hire the best hands to handle their affairs, that is why they do interviews in the first place: to sift the chaff from the wheat.
But I realized it’s not a new thing: people have had this mindset from time immemorial.
In the quoted Scripture above, Jesus was in Jerusalem by a pool called Bethesda. Once in a while, an angel would come and stir the water in the pool: the first person to jump in the pool after the stirring would get healed of whatever infirmity he has. Jesus saw a man lying by the pool who had been sick for 38 years, hoping to get an opportunity to enter the pool and get healed.
Jesus walked up to him and asked, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered Him, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; before I step in, someone else steps in before me.”
He did not answer the question Jesus asked him, he was just complaining he could not take advantage of the opportunity before him because he didn’t have any “connection”!
It’s like an MD/CEO asking a jobless Graduate if he would want to work in his organization and the jobless Graduate says, “I don’t have any connections to get employed in that place!”
He doesn’t recognize that the person asking him the question is the Boss in the organization!
That sick man did not recognize that the Jesus asking him that question was the HEALER: if he had recognized Him, he would have known he didn’t need anyone to put him in the pool anymore: the Healer was there with him.
The irony here is, we don’t seem to understand that even when we have the “connection” it doesn’t always work: we may bungle it with our irresponsibility, greed or any other vices in us.
Look at Gehazi, for example. He had the “connection”.
Hophni and Phinehas, the sons of the High Priest Eli are another example.
I once built a house for a Nigerian Ambassador in Abuja. He lived in Lagos, so I was pleasantly surprised when he walked into the site one morning around 9:45am. We went round to see how the project was going in 20minutes and by 10:05am, he left the site.
At 10:15am, a young man strolled into the site and asked for the Ambassador. I told him he just left. He was visibly upset! “He has left? When is he coming back?” I had no idea. I asked him to call the Ambassador himself to ask him directly. He did.
And as he was talking to the Ambassador, I could tell from his body language he didn’t like what he was hearing. When he cut the line, I asked him what the Ambassador said.
“He is on his way to the airport to fly to Lagos. Tomorrow morning he will fly to his base and won’t be back for 3 months!” At that point, he was almost weeping!
Then I asked him why he wanted to see the Ambassador.
“I applied for a Job in an Organization and I wanted him to help me use his connection to get in- he knows the MD/CEO. He asked me to meet him on this site this morning so he would give me a note to the MD/CEO…”
Out of curiosity, I asked if the Ambassador had given him a specific time.
He had: 10am! But the young man strolled in at 10:15am after the Ambassador had gone.
Now, who would blame the Ambassador? He gave the young man a TIME to meet him on the site. The young man came LATE: Ambassador had a flight to catch, so he had left by the time the young man got to the site!
The young man said, “but he should have told me he had a flight to catch- I would have come earlier!”
I just smiled. He will learn to drop that silly Entitlement Mentality soon enough.
You MUST learn to trust in your own God-given abilities, skills and capacities, folks.
Daniel and Joseph did not get into the corridors of Power in Babylon and Egypt through “connections”, neither did “connections” make David King of Israel.
“Connections” didn’t make Wole Soyinka a Nobel Laureate, neither did “connections” win Burna Boy the Grammy.
The Greatest “Connector” is God Almighty, folks. If He gives you skills and capacity, He will give you the opportunity to give them expression. That was what he did with Bezalel and Oholiab in Exodus 31:1-11.
Go read it up…
Shalom,
Haruna Daniels