Favvy_Okwans🖤

“The way we love God should reflect in the way we love people.” ~ X You can't say you love God and not love people, because God is love. Our love for people should flow from our love for God. The more we understand how deeply God loves us, the more that love should begin to shape the way we treat the people around us. And no, I don't mean that loving people means you'll always like them, agree with them, or enjoy being around them. People can be difficult, they can hurt us, disappoint us, misunderstand us, and sometimes, they can make loving them feel like serious spiritual warfare.  But love isn't always a feeling, I like to say, love is a decision, we get to decide to love with intentions, It's giving people grace because you remember how much grace you've received. It's seeing someone else's humanity even when they're getting on your last nerve. Jesus didn't tell us to love only the people who love us back. He told us to love our neighbours, l...

Talking is easy when we feel comfortable and safe, words flow, sentences come with ease. There are people we can easily yap around, tell our random thoughts to, share our stories with, and somehow, talking to them never feels like work. Then there are people we don't share things with. Talking about our feelings feels difficult, and sometimes, we don't even know how to begin. But maybe instead of asking, "Why doesn't this person talk to me?" we should sometimes ask, "What kind of environment have I created for this person to feel safe enough to talk?" Because vulnerability isn't something you can demand from people, it is something you create room for. If every time someone opens up, we judge them, dismiss their feelings, interrupt them, or use what they told us against them later, why would they feel safe enough to come back? The funny thing is, most times, people don't need you to have the perfect response. They just need to know that their hon...

Pastor Dolapo once gave a definition of friendship that I really loved. He said friendship is when one person becomes vulnerable and reaches out to the next person, and the other person is equally vulnerable and says, “You too?” And the first person reaches back and says, “Me too.” There’s something so beautiful about that. The idea that friendship is not just about having someone who celebrates with you when things are good, but having someone who can sit with you in the places you don’t always know how to explain. Someone who can hear your “I’m struggling” and say, “Me too.”  And I think it becomes even more beautiful when he related it to our relationship with Jesus. Scripture says we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize with the feelings of our infirmities. Jesus understands. There is literally nothing you will ever feel that Christ hasn’t felt in some way. Nothing you will ever walk through that makes Him look at you and say, “I don’t understand.” So when I co...

In this life, you will have days that test your patience, stretch your strength and make you wonder how much more you can possibly take. But it is important to remember that a bad day is not a bad life. Yes, your day may suck, but it doesn't mean your life does. A project may fail, a plan may fall apart, someone may disappoint you, and you may even disappoint yourself. But none of these things automatically make you a failure. I think there is an art to separating the problem from the person. Sometimes, we forget that there is a thin line between what happened and who we are. A project can fail without the person in charge being a failure. You can make a bad decision without being a bad person, you can have a terrible day without having a terrible life. Dearest reader, the point is, it is okay to fail as long as you do not make failure your identity. It is okay to have crappy days, the kind that leave you questioning your very essence, wondering if any of it is worth it. Just remem...

Have you ever noticed how when something comes too easily to someone, they sometimes struggle to see its value? It’s almost crazy when you think about it. Give someone something without making them work for it, and there’s a higher chance they’ll treat it carelessly. But let that same person struggle for it, sacrifice for it, wait for it, and suddenly, they know exactly how valuable it is. Maybe that’s why we sometimes value the things we had to fight for more than the things we received effortlessly. And honestly, I think this applies to more than just material things. Friendships, opportunities, money, knowledge and even people. Sometimes, when we become too comfortable with having something, we forget that it is a privilege to have it at all. But here’s the part that gets me: something being easy does not mean it is worthless, not everything valuable has to come with pain attached to it. Sometimes, God gives us things through grace, not because we suffered enough to deserve them. De...

On today’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy, there was one particular case that stood out to me. The patient was a 12 year old girl who believed she had superpowers because she couldn’t feel pain. She went around carelessly because, whether she stumbled, got punched in the stomach, or even put her hands in boiling water, she wouldn’t feel a thing. But here’s the crazy part: even though she couldn’t feel the pain, her body still registered the damage. She would even tell people to punch her in the stomach because, well, what could possibly go wrong? At one point, someone beat her with a baseball bat, and because she didn’t feel any pain, everyone assumed she was fine. She wasn’t. She had internal bleeding and was close to dying. They only discovered it because they took her for an X ray despite the fact that she insisted she was okay. And that got me thinking about pain. Dearest reader, without pain, we might never truly understand the extent of our wounds. Pain may be frustrating, uncomfortab...

I have had one of those crazy days, the kind that leaves you pissed about something that happened hours ago. By the time I got home, all I wanted to do was watch Grey’s Anatomy and sleep. I was ready to be done with the day. But well, today had other plans. Turns out I hadn’t downloaded the next episode, and there was the usual network struggle. Somehow, in between trying to write my content and get the episode downloaded, Kingatha opened her old notepad from 2022 and 2023. And suddenly, I wasn't so interested in Grey’s Anatomy anymore. The first time I discovered writing was through her notebooks. Sometimes, we would write poems together, she could start something, leave it halfway, and I would pick it up from where she stopped. Other times, I would start and she would continue. It was our thing, like I could complete her sentences and she could complete mine, except our sentences came in verses. So discovering that old notepad after all these years was beautiful. We read poems th...

"What is too soon and what is soon enough?" One of the ways I'm spending my holiday is watching Grey's Anatomy with Kingatha. It's a medical drama where every episode comes with a different set of patients, and somehow, each story is packed with so many things happening at once. That's what makes it so interesting to watch. So, in today's episode, one case stood out to me. A woman had been in an accident and needed multiple surgeries, so many that almost all the top surgeons in the hospital were in the OR, operating on her. However, it got to a point where they had to stop. Her body had become too weak, and if they continued operating, she could die. So they connected her to some machines and left her for a while. It was strange to watch because her body was still open. They hadn't even sewn her up yet, but they weren't operating either. They had to wait a few hours before they could go back in. When they explained the situation to her parents, the...

"What is too soon and what is soon enough?" One of the ways I'm spending my holiday is watching Grey's Anatomy with Kingatha. It's a medical drama where every episode comes with a different set of patients, and somehow, each story is packed with so many things happening at once. That's what makes it so interesting to watch. So, in today's episode, one case stood out to me. A woman had been in an accident and needed multiple surgeries, so many that almost all the top surgeons in the hospital were in the OR, operating on her. However, it got to a point where they had to stop. Her body had become too weak, and if they continued operating, she could die. So they connected her to some machines and left her for a while. It was strange to watch because her body was still open. They hadn't even sewn her up yet, but they weren't operating either. They had to wait a few hours before they could go back in. When they explained the situation to her parents, the...

“I want for my life at this time what God wants for me.” ~ X What do you want? You and I want a billion things. Literally. Give us a blank sheet and ask that question again, and we probably would not have enough space to write down every single thing we want. It was Lionel Robbins, an economist, who said that human wants are insatiable. The more you have, the more you want. It is almost like a carousel that keeps moving. Now imagine trying to fulfil every single one of your wants. It would be utterly exhausting Abi not? So I came across this concept of bigger than me, and I was intrigued. What if my life is not just about what I want? What if I can take my hands off the wheel and trust that there is Someone who sees further than I do? For me, that is God. Can we come to the point where we're simply being able to say, “God, I have things I want, but I want what You want for me more important” And honestly, there is something deeply comforting about that. Dearest reader, ...

So my church has this really cool program we do yearly. It’s called the Feast of Horns (FOH), and it’s beautiful in so many ways. For starters, it’s a 50 day program where we get to write prayer requests, which are submitted at the altar and prayed over each day for the entire 50 days. Then, on the last day of the feast, the prayer requests are burnt. How cool is that? Now, the fun thing about the prayer cards is that you get two. You submit one and keep the duplicate, so when God starts answering your prayers, you have evidence. It’s FOH season, and I was given my prayer cards today. While writing my requests for this year, I decided to check my card from last year. And honestly, I had no idea just how much of it had been answered. Dearest reader, why am I telling you this? One of two things. First, the importance of keeping track. You have no idea how much you’ve grown because you’re not tracking your goals, your prayers, your little wins, or even the things you once desperately want...

I was having a conversation with someone today, and somehow we got into this interesting argument about how we define things. My position was simple: if you really want to understand the essence of something, shouldn't you go back to where it began? The origin of the word, the reason it was created, what it was originally intended to mean. I tend to think this way naturally. Whenever I come across a word I don't fully understand, one of the first things I want to know is its etymology. Where did this word come from? What did it originally mean? What was happening when it was coined? Well, he his debate he used cultism as a example, a bases for his point. The earliest Nigerian confraternities weren't created with the exact meaning we attach to “cultism” today. The Pyrates Confraternity, for instance, began as a student movement concerned with things like tribalism, oppression, corruption and social inequality. But somewhere along the line, however, confraternities evolved, a...

There's someone I love, and she always says, “Whatever you are doing at the moment may not be what you want to do, but it's preparing you for where you are going.” She tells a story about a sister of hers who had a really crappy job, the kind of job you go home from complaining about every single day. And each time she'd tell her sister not to quit, to hold on a little longer, because the version of herself she was growing into during that crappy job season would be needed when she finally landed her dream job. And she did. She landed her dream job, and guess what? There was a need for a particular skill set she had developed while working that crappy job. Dearest reader, I'm always intrigued whenever she retells this story because it's pretty simple, yet profound. Sometimes, we are so focused on getting out of a season that we fail to ask what the season is trying to grow in us. We call it a detour because it doesn't look like the destination, we call it a crap...

Creativity, they say, is making something from nothing, Reaching into the invisible and giving it a name. Emotions become colours, sentences, shapes and sounds, And suddenly, what lived only inside you can live in another. Take poetry, for instance. “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers, rolled up.” My darling, that is bathos. A literary device I learnt recently, and somehow, learning its name made me love art even more. In science, we spend our time trying to explain what is. Very often, art asks a different question; what if we simply felt it? It can make you experience a heartbreak you have never had, taste a grief you have never known, or hold a fear as tangible as the palm of your hand. That is the strange beauty of the arts. They do not always explain the human experience. Sometimes, they simply make you feel it. You can explain bathos, of course. You can define poetry, dissect a painting, analyse a story, name every technique and every stroke. But art was...

The highlight of my day was finding out that a post I made months ago got 3,000 views on TikTok. Now, quick backstory. I had almost given up on showing up, and I had this conversation with someone I really looked up to. She made me do an exercise. She said, “You’re complaining about 100 views and 300 views? Go on Google and search for a picture of a room filled with 100 people.” I did. Then she said, “That’s how many people saw your post.” She asked me to do the same for 300 people. I did, and she asked if I had 300 friends. I said no. And she said, “That’s 300 people you don’t know watching you.” Factually, I knew this, I knew it wasn’t really about views, likes, or numbers, i knew visibility takes time. But honestly, I was exhausted. So, it wasn’t until today that I finally had the courage to open my account, only to be met with the surprise of a 3k view. For someone who had just been taught to appreciate the significance of 300 people viewing my post, seeing that 3,000 people had vi...

They are just some conversations you need to have. One of my biggest role models was in town, and it was an absolute honour to meet her today. For me, it was a priceless meet up, and I’m genuinely grateful it happened. You know that feeling when you’ve been bottling so much inside, and then you finally get to release it all? It was that kind of experience for me. To be heard, to be seen. I left there with a lighter heart after carrying around for days what felt like the weight of the whole world. There’s a kind of lightness that comes with clarity, and it is utterly beautiful. I still have problems to fix, but I gained valuable insight and direction. As we spoke, I could see in HD what needed fixing, what needed changing, and perhaps most importantly, where to begin. Dearest reader, shout out to all the people in our lives who make us feel like we matter. The ones who will sit with us as we unravel for hours and help us find a way through what seems like darkness. The ones who hold up ...

“You don't have a discipline problem, you have an identity problem.” Gbammmmm!!! People will do almost anything that aligns with the kind of person they believe themselves to be. We all struggle to maintain consistency, but once you can convince yourself, “This is who I am,” your actions begin to follow that identity. For instance, I am the kind of person who writes every day. So even on the days when I am exhausted, frustrated, drowning, crying, or hanging on by a thread, I still write. Not because I always feel like it, but because writing has become part of my identity. And there is hardly anything we protect as fiercely as the identities we have built for ourselves. So what if, instead of constantly forcing yourself to do the things you want to do, you became the kind of person who naturally does them? Notice something interesting throughout Scripture. Whenever God brought people into a new dimension of purpose, He often marked that transformation by changing or redefining thei...

The intent of your thoughts will determine your actions. This is why King Solomon says in Proverbs, “As a man thinks, so is he.” He thinks = the intent of his thoughts. He is = his state of being. And we know that being translates into doing, because what we do, most times, is simply an expression of who we are, which in turn is shaped by the intent of our thoughts. I was conversing with a friend sometime last week, and I said, “Intentions are not enough.” We were looking at a situation where the intentions were pure, but the result was a disaster, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. So, basically, intent, which is how we think, equals being, which is how we are. Therefore, there should be some level of uniformity between the two. If intent and being are one, then how is it possible for intent to be completely different from action? I thought about it long and hard and came to the realisation that perhaps the problem is dissonance. That uncomfortable state where what you think i...

"Gosh!!! I give such good advice, i wish I could take them." I was reading one of the contents I posted this week and I was like, "Mehn, I give such good advice, i wish I could take them." Many a time, when I say "dearest reader," I'm not even addressing my readers. When I write, I don't really consider my audience. It's just about me really. So, by the time I get to that concluding paragraph where I'm seemingly addressing the reader, I'm most times secretly begging myself to take my own solid advice. And it's funny and crazy at the same time. But I think that's the beauty of it all. I get to take a thought, an experience, or an idea, put it into words, and somehow draw out an insight from it to pass across. But in the process of teaching someone else, I'm also teaching myself. Sometimes, I write about lessons I've already learnt. Other times, I write about lessons I'm still learning. And perhaps that...