In Matthew 6, Jesus uses the word secret at least three times. Once for giving, once for prayer, and once for fasting. These are not three separate teachings. They are one argument, made three times, with three of the most visible pillars of religious life as its raw material.
When you give, do it in secret. When you pray, close the door. When you fast, wash your face so no one can tell. Each command lands on the same note: your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
The repetition is deliberate, it is the very structure of a verdict.
And the verdict is that the most dangerous act in any religious community is visible virtue. The secrecy Matthew 6 demands is not about modesty. It is a structural intervention against the most dangerous person in the room: you.
Other traditions treat secrecy as currency. They hoard elite knowledge, and reserve hidden rituals for the initiated few. Secrecy, for them, is an architecture of exclusion, a gate you earn the right to pass through.
Christianity is doing something far more disruptive. It drives the most basic acts of devotion underground. Not to protect them from outsiders, but to protect outsiders from what your visible virtue would do to them.
This is a radical design. It does two heavy things at once.
First, it disarms your self-righteousness. When you cannot broadcast your piety, you lose the ability to weaponize your goodness. You cannot indict anyone else because your record is sealed. Your virtue cannot become a verdict against your neighbor.
Second, it insulates you from the exhausting machinery of human validation. If people have the power to validate you, they have the power to destroy you. The crowd that calls you a saint today will tire of your goodness tomorrow, especially once it starts exposing their own flaws.
Secrecy redirects that vulnerability toward a Father who is not in competition with you and cannot be outperformed.
But this design introduces a brutal psychological gap. Human relationships require feedback. If you pour your heart out to someone and receive stony silence, it does not feel like intimacy. It feels like psychological torture. We crave a sign, a ritual confirmation, a plume of holy smoke from heaven to signify: “order received”.
Yet God provides no celestial notification.
Why??
Because withholding an instant feedback loop is the only way to break our addiction to the transactional. A cosmic receipt turns faith into an algorithm: you insert prayer and receive confirmation. The performative ego needs that cycle to survive.
When you act entirely in the dark and the sky does not change color, the ego has nothing to chew on. The performance starves.
God answers on a frequency the performer in you cannot receive.
You do not get a real-time status update. What happens instead is you look down months later and discover that the frantic, performance-driven parts of your soul have gone quiet. You discover that they’ve not been merely suppressed, but remade.
The feedback is the peace you cannot logically explain, proving that someone was listening all along, reworking the inside while you were waiting on the outside.
Funny thing is when we wanted to buy a house around Lekki, it rained so much that day the place was flooded. Agberos guided us to one side of the road to make sure we entered a ditch. They then charged to bring us out. We never even got to see the house. We bought in Ikeja.😂
Do you have that one person who never initiates conversations, but every time you reach out, the energy is great?
I told myself I’d stop reaching out first.
Did a little social experiment, and even deleted their number so I wouldn’t cave.
It’s been 7 months. Still no text.
What do we call this?
I’m actually motivated like mad. But, quick question… where did you find the time to do all these things in this one year that seems like just yesterday biko?
My 2025 wrap 🌯
- First year in tech
- Built a personal brand from zero.
- Grew my X account from 100 followers to 45,000, close to 50k.
- Became more confident in myself.
- Stepped out more than I ever have in my life.
- My direction became clearer than it has ever been.
- Made my first 8 figures.
- Earned 7 figures consistently every single month.
- Moved from 700 naira to $15k+. Use to be a beggar😭🫣
- Launched my marketing agency.
- Started paying salaries.
- Secured brand partnerships.
- Got gifts from brands.
- Worked on world class projects in the US across fintech, travel, and entertainment as an email marketing specialist.
- Hosted Wednesday virtual events every single week without missing names, Struggles in tech as a freelancer.
- Over 100,000 people tuned in across X Spaces and other platforms.
- Coached People to land their first jobs, first clients, and first millions.
- Spent 3 to 4 million naira helping people, supporting positioning, and giving back.
- Personally gave out two laptops
With @TheQueenArit, we made it four laptops given to the community.
- Started a Telegram community with 1,000+ members and 5,000 applicants
- Built an X community from 0 to 3,000+ members
Named it “Broke Ones Will Rise Again”
- Spoke at my first tech event hosted by Mastercard and Jobberman.
- Became more visible across tech and business spaces.
- Built a freelance platform, currently on hold
- 4,000+ people joined the waiting list.
- Started building my startup app.
- Added weight and lost it. Took my health seriously.
- Multiple failed talking stages.
- Went to Lekki for the first time.
- Took an Uber for the first time.
- Tried new delicacies for the first time I went to chicken Republic for the first time.
- Bought more clothes and started dressing better. Now my ex talking stage wants to talk again. Lol 😂
- Received my first Valentine’s gift.
- Made more money in one year than my parents ever did.
- Celebrated my mum and dad’s birthdays properly.
- Went for my first Rave and Concert.
- Booked an apartment for the first time.
- unlimited data access for one year.
- partnered with the federal government and cleva to teach people.
Your life can change in one year 2025>>>>>>
TEMPLARS Achieves Top Tier Status in 2025 IFLR1000 Rankings.
TEMPLARS is ranked as Tier 1 in Nigeria across Banking, Capital Markets (Debt and Equity), Mergers and Acquisitions, and Projects, extending more than a decade of top-tier recognition.
TEMPLARS Ghana is also ranked as a Recommended Firm with strong rankings in Banking and Mergers and Acquisitions and notable individual mentions in Capital Markets and Projects.
Individual rankings highlight the Firm’s Bench Strength: Managing Partner, Oghogho Akpata, is recognised as a Highly Regarded Lawyer; Deputy Managing Partner, Chike Obianwu, as a Market Leader; and Partners, Adewale Atake, SAN and Desmond Ogba as Highly Regarded Lawyers.
Partner, Zelda Akindele, is recognised both as a Market Leader and Women Leader, Partners, Dayo Okusami and Sarpong Odame are named Notable Practitioners while Partner, Dupe Dabiri, is ranked as a Rising Star Partner.
TEMPLARS Associates also had a very strong showing: Managing Counsel, Obianuju Ifebunandu, Senior Associates, Ayodele Ashiata Kadiri, Okabonye Chukwuani, Temple Ezebuike, Damilola Oshodi and Aasiya Sarku Nettey are each recognised as Rising Stars.
With 14 individual rankings and top-tier firm recognition across both jurisdictions, the results reinforce TEMPLARS’ leadership in financial and corporate advisory. Clients commend the Firm’s commercial clarity, responsiveness and sector expertise, including “expert knowledge of the gas-to-power sector and the dynamics of international mergers and acquisitions”.
TEMPLARS continues to deliver clear, commercially grounded legal advice across complex mandates in energy, finance, infrastructure, technology and corporate sectors.
Learn more: https://t.co/UGNhf75Uue
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#IFLR1000 #TopTierFirm #BankingAndFinance #CapitalMarkets #MergersAndAcquisitions #ProjectsAndInfrastructure #EnergyAndPower #FinancialServices
On paper it is gorgeous. Two toothbrushes in one cup. Tiny socks on the radiator. Someone whose face you know in the dark reaching for you at 3:12 and not leaving. A small person with your eyes and their laugh eating cereal too slowly before school. It sounds like the closest thing to safety we have ever invented.
But a lot of people did not grow up watching love look like that. They grew up watching marriage be a war that never declared itself out loud. 19:40 on a Tuesday, plates not quite slammed, voices just quiet enough for the neighbors not to hear. A father sleeping on the couch for three years. A mother doing the emotional admin for five people and getting a wilted bouquet once a year as a receipt. The child learns quickly that forever can be a threat as easily as it is a promise.
You say mini mes. A lot of people hear smaller witnesses. Witnesses to debt. To screaming in the car park. To one parent disappearing for six months and calling it adjusting. Some bodies carry the memory of being the kid who held the camera and took the Christmas photo where nobody spoke to each other for two days after. They do not crave that house. They crave never putting anyone through it.
There is another layer no one likes talking about because it sounds too practical for a sacred topic. Mortgage rates that bite. Groceries that feel like a test. Friends burning out in two jobs and still wondering if they can afford a dentist, не те що дитину. Bodies that already wake tired. The idea of bringing in a small, breakable person is not just cute to them. It is a spreadsheet with red numbers and a nervous system that shakes.
And then there are the ones who were never told they were allowed to want something for themselves first. To them, choosing no partner and no kids for now is not selfishness. It is the first act of self parenting. It is finally learning to feed the part of them that was always the one doing the caretaking. They are not missing the desire. Sometimes they are surgically removing the compulsion put in them by a culture that treated women as wombs and men as wallets.
Some people hear spouse and feel warmth. Others hear spouse and feel a hand closing over their life. Some people look at a child and feel their chest widen. Others look at their own sleep schedule, their own untreated trauma, their own rage in traffic and think not yet, not like this. That is not nihilism. That is responsibility. The bravest thing some people will ever do is break the chain by not adding another link.
Marriage and children can be the most beautiful thing. They can also be the most efficient way to hide from yourself. It is easy to call it forever if you have never sat with your own loneliness without a witness. It is easy to say mini me if you have not yet met the parts of you that should not be replicated without serious editing. Many people want to arrive to that altar and that nursery with less unprocessed violence in their hands. That takes time. That looks from the outside like drifting.
If you are lucky enough to want it and still be soft when you picture it, hold that gently. Do not turn your hunger into a ruler you hit others with. The world has given plenty of reasons to be afraid of binding contracts and tiny hearts. Climate, war, courts, childhood bedrooms where love was conditional on performance. Not everyone has healed enough to gamble a child on their hope.
Ask people what they want under all the noise. Some will say a partner and kids. Some will say a room, a dog, three good friends and work that feels honest. Some will say I do not know yet, I was never given space to ask. The distance is not as far as it looks. Everyone is hunting the same thing under different packaging. A place where their nervous system can stop scanning the door. A hand that stays. A tomorrow that is not a threat.
You can stand in your dream of spouse and children without needing the whole planet to agree.