THE AGONY OF WASTED YEARS

THE AGONY OF WASTED YEARS

THE AGONY OF WASTED YEARS
By

Dr Tope Oni, Lagos, Nigeria

What is ‘Wasted Years’?

Wasted years are the part of a person’s youthful days when he or she did not do what he/she was supposed to do. He did not go to school when he was supposed to, he did not put in his best while in school – to have good grades, get admission, read a good course and pass out in flying colours.

The person who wastes his early years does not realize the fleeting, temporary nature of opportunities. He does not realize that hay is best made when the sun shines. He is deceived to think that the opportunity will always be there.

When the victim of wasted years is wasting his life away, he does not realize that the clock is ticking past, that he is gradually getting older, that his friends are passing him by. He thinks that life is static, frozen, always in repose. He knows not that life is in motion, that change is constant, that a person gets older every second.

Who is to blame?
Sometimes the victim of wasted years suffered from wrong background, poor foundation, absence of the right counsel, of the right motivation, and of the right discipline. Parents are poor; there are no successful people around, against whom he may benchmark his life. He could even have been a local champion, only to discover later in life that his ‘best’ could not match the demands of the battle of life, in which only the fittest survive. The victim of wasted years possibly went through economic hardship and there was nobody to assist or support, to meet the financial demand of education.

Pitiable as the situation just painted is, this fellow wasted his early years, not necessarily because of his poor economic background, but because of lack of self-motivation. For where there is a will, there is always a way. Several examples abound of people who have made it in life despite their difficult, rocky background, by dint of sheer determination and trust in Jehovah Jireh.

The...

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