Written by Jennifer Azubuike
It was a hot July day. I was sweaty in my scrubs and was hunched over under the weight of a heavy backpack on the streets of Kensington.
I was in a scrub because I was one of the young health professional students going around to give free basic health screens to anyone who paid attention to us, and my heavy backpack contained our tools. I was walking along the road with my other two team members when a man approached us. He looked unkempt and somewhat sickly, so it was hard to tell his age. A rough guess would be mid-30s to 40s.
“Please let me use your phone.” He waved at us.
In a notorious place like Kensington, it would be naive and stupid to respond to such a request sympathetically, so we ignored him.
“Please let me use your phone to make a call.” He pleaded again following us. “Today is my birthday. I just want to call my mother.”
On hearing his last sentence, the woman who served as our interpreter stopped so we all did. He spoke in English so she didn’t need to interpret. However, she asked him a couple of questions for clarification. When she seemed satisfied, she took her phone from her handbag to our dismay, and handed it to the man. We tried to caution her but she asked us to hold our peace. So, we stood back and watched.
Standing right in front of us, this man I will call Sam called his mother, spoke with her for a few minutes, hung up, and handed the phone back to our interpreter. We had feared that he might run away with the phone but we judged him too quickly! As he returned the phone, he gave a brief synopsis of his life.
He was a drug addict. His addiction started with painkillers that were prescribed to him during tooth extraction back when he was a child. The addiction caused him to leave home and lose relationships – and I bet it also caused him not to have any structure in his life. Thankfully, his mother would still take his call, so he made it a point to call her on his birthdays.
The encounter with Sam has stayed with me over the years and returned to me when in the recent time a young man, when asked about handling peer pressure to use recreational drugs, said he would not do it because he valued his mind.
“I regard my mind as the most powerful asset that I own. I will not take anything that will mess it up.” [paraphrased]
I have turned those words over in my head a few times. If you think about it, the mind is the seat of thoughts and emotions. Even though the mind receives external inputs and influences, it navigates them to form the unique thoughts that we act on every day. Thus, our lives take on a structure from the building blocks sourced from our minds.
How about creativity? Any existing structure or art that man created was sourced from the mind. For instance, cars! The necessity to travel around faster must have pushed the first inventor into employing the power of his mind, nonetheless, it came from the MIND!
The scriptures say that God created man in his image. I believe the Creator wanted man to have the ability to create like Himself, so he gave him a mind.
If the beautiful and useful structures our eyes behold, including the works of art we appreciate every day were made from the power of the mind then the mind is beautiful. Why mess it up?
Why devalue your mind and numb it with drugs, alcohol, or any addictive substance? If your only chance of stamping your name in the face of time is in the ink of your mind, why give it up?
However, in Sam’s case, the open door to addiction was not his choice. While that is unfortunately true for many, if it can be helped please seek help.
“It is better not to start than to try to break [an] addiction.” – Dr D.K Olukoya
Till next time, stay lifted!
Read another uplifting blog here
