Flower from the Rock

To be, and not to seem.

[Tunde Onakoya @Tunde_OD]

I think you should be ridiculously optimistic about life however it sways. Do it with glee, do it with a deep sense of wonder.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

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.

[Thandiwe @PresidentFums]

The practice of Lament is so important for Christians. God must be trusted with your pain, your sorrow and anguish.

It is not an act of faith to deny or suppress what you should surrender to God in humility, honesty and trust.

[Thandiwe @PresidentFums]

I am violently oscillating between vibrant hope and nihilistic fatigue, so it’s safe to say that I understand David and the Psalms a little more.

[Sugabelly 🌕 @sugabelly]

So many Nigerian women look very weird and even sick or deformed during pregnancy because they are pregnant for a man whose lifetime poverty has ensured a lifetime of poor nutrition, poor health, poor environmental gene triggers, and ultimately low quality sperm which causes this

[Thandiwe @PresidentFums]

Nothing wise about marrying for the sake of it. Your life belongs to God and it is yours to steward. If a man will not improve the quality of your life to the end that being with him contributes immensely to your fulfillment of your purpose in God, what are you doing there?

[Mini Skirt Connoisseur😮‍💨 @chioma_mmeje]

Cheif advocate for living life in color🤩

[Thandiwe @PresidentFums]

Today is my favorite brother’s birthday. What a beautiful day to remind him of his history. 🥹

[Thandiwe @PresidentFums]

Ironically I think that moving to a place that cuts your prayer points by 90% should strengthen your faith. If you no longer have to pray for trivial things, that should be a good thing, because you will have more time and space to contemplate the beauty and holiness of God.

[Olori🍒 @OloriOfOloris]

My roommate in uni told me that when she was in secondary school, her dad was a full time pastor and was always at home, while her mum worked a government job and was the family’s sole provider.

Every day after school, the bus would drop her and her siblings off at home. Their father would be there with them, yet they would either drink garri or go hungry until their mum returned in the evening to cook dinner. This went on for years until they were old enough to start cooking for themselves and their father to ease the burden on their mum.

Do you know how insane that is? His wife was the sole breadwinner, he was at home all day and he still watched his own children go hungry after school because cooking was supposedly not his responsibility. Imagine choosing your ego over your own children’s wellbeing. A lot of men are very wicked.

[EnjoymentMinister @EnjoymentMamaa]

When you break down the ROI on male attention, you'll realise it's not even that serious.

- 90% of those who approach you don't mean you well. Straight up.
- Half of the remaining 10% are nothing to write home about.
- The remaining 5% may be worth spending your time with, but from spending time with that 5%, you'll realise half of them are not what they initially present as.

So you're essentially left with maybe 2 to 3% of this 'male attention' that would truly be worth your time and effort. So why is that something to define yourself by? Make it make sense please.

[Demotivational Speaker @OdunEweniyi]

consequences

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

One of the more interesting parts of early fatherhood is watching your child grow his own personality and will.

My 4-month-old son is becoming his own man and nowhere is this more obvious than in how he now chooses his times.

Every time I place him on the bed to sleep it becomes a whole event. He lifts his head, gets on his arms like a lizard, and just stares. I push his head down softly, he raises it again. I push it down, he raises it again. I usually give up. He has decided.

And honestly it frustrates me because how convenient would it be if he slept when I chose, sat still when I chose, stayed calm when I chose. I sustain this child alongside his mom. He has contributed nothing to his own survival. And yet I have to readjust to his orbit.

One evening in the middle of that frustration I just said out loud, Father Lord what is this. And the Lord laid it on my heart quietly: this is you. This is all of you.

And when it landed it landed heavy.

Because God does not have a partial claim on us the way I have a partial claim on my son. I feed my son and I pay his bills. God made the laws that hold your atoms together. In Him we live and move and have our being, Acts 17. Not past tense, but present continuous. Your next heartbeat is not self-funded.

And still we lift our heads. Again and again. He pushes us gently toward rest and we get back on our arms and stare at Him defiantly. And He does not withdraw the oxygen. He does not pull the breath as leverage. He just continues to sustain the very creatures resisting Him, with the very strength they are using to resist Him.

Any tyrant can dominate weakness. What God does is something different entirely. He holds immature, stubborn, ungrateful wills without crushing them. And then, when the resistance produced its full cost, He absorbed it Himself on a cross.

My son taught me that God’s patience is not passive. It is the most active and costly choice He makes every single day.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Apart from the absurdity and demonic degeneracy of the claim itself, this exposes a deeper theological problem. The reasoning implicitly normalizes male lust as something primarily managed through external regulation rather than internal moral responsibility.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus radically internalizes sin. He does not say, “If someone causes you to lust, they are guilty.” He says, “If YOU look lustfully, YOU have sinned.” The burden is placed first on the heart, the eyes, the will of the individual.

That is why Christ says, “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” The problem begins within. Moral failure is not outsourced onto other people’s clothing, appearance, or existence.

By contrast, this kind of reasoning creates a framework where responsibility is continually externalized:

Women must veil so men do not lust,
men must grow beards so other men are not tempted, society must endlessly regulate appearances because self-control is treated as secondary.

Christianity addresses desire at the root. It confronts the human heart itself rather than building an ever-expanding system of external restrictions to compensate for it.

[Subomi @subomiplumptre]

My trials set me on a path to a healthy fear of God.

They have not been nice - traumatizing is an apt word.

But they showed me the fallacy of control and the limits of willpower.

I am still learning.

[ThatPortharcourtBoy aka Nnukwu Nmanwu @ThatPHCBoy]

divorce is so difficult in nigeria that i no longer encourage the women i know to do court marriage. just do traditional wedding (the law recognises that) and move on. if and when kasala bursts, return dowry to his people and move on with your life. you don't have to take my advise o, i am just tweeting my thoughts.

[Subomi @subomiplumptre]

There are decisions that shred your destiny. You wonder how you arrived here while looking at the pieces on the ground.

But there is a mercy that rebuilds. It completely restores and breathes new life.

It whispers, "But I'm not done with you yet. I'm still working on you."

Look up. Your deliverer is near.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Zohran Mamdani is more Christlike than any politician I have seen on the American stage currently. He cares about people. He is genuinely humble. He is not a grifter. He is not chasing symbols or manufacturing outrage for a base. He is trying to make lives materially better and he is doing it with efficiency and conviction.

And I will be honest, that burdens my heart deeply. Because I am jealous he is not a Christian. I do not say that lightly. I say it as someone who believes the gospel is the most powerful moral vision ever given to humanity.

But when I look at the big stage, I do not see Christian leaders carrying the passion of Christ. I see people obsessed with symbolism, captured by agendas, performing faith for cameras and donors. I see grifters wrapping themselves in the cross while doing nothing about suffering. I see the name of Jesus used as a flag, not a standard.

Mamdani does not wave a flag. He just does the work. And somehow, the man who does not confess Christ is showing up closer to the Sermon on the Mount than most who do. That should not sit comfortably with any of us.

[Adwoa Yeboah🪵 @Agonizo_mai]

I delude myself into thinking that I don’t expect anything from people. Deep down, however, I desire to receive as much help as I’ve given if the roles were reversed. It’s why I lowkey hate needing help, because the realization that not many people truly care is quite unsettling.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

If one is angry with God, one must be angry as one bound in love.

Not angry towards the edge of the exit door of the house, but angry far inside the warmth of the bedroom, as though not planning to leave.

One must sit in anger and not stand, and not just sit but sit with crossed legs, as though understanding the certainty of resolution.

The binding is not a feeling. It does not arrive with the anger or depend on it. It is the premise the anger stands on. And the geometry of the image carries the whole argument: the difference between the doorway and the bedroom is the difference between an anger interrogating the relationship and an anger still inside it. Both are angry, but only one is faithful.

The crossed legs are an essential detail.

Sitting already signals non-departure. But crossed legs signal something further, ease within settledness. You do not sit that way in a place you are about to leave. You do not sit that way in formal confrontation. It is the posture of someone who belongs in the room and has not forgotten it, not even now.

But what is the certainty of resolution?…

Full Article [https://t.co/pxwfFnJr6m]