I had stage fright growing up.
I didn't fully understand why then, but later, when I began searching my soul for answers, I found one of the roots of it. The absence of my father during my formative years affected my confidence deeply. Part of that manifested as a fear of standing before people.
I still remember when I stood before my Primary Six class to read an Igbo essay. I was sweating profusely. My hands shook and my mouth quivered.
Because of that, I only stood before people when it was absolutely necessary, seminar presentations in the university, project defenses, IT defense presentations. Moments where I had no choice.
Coming to Dominion City gradually changed that. Not instantly. Progressively.
I remember the first time I was asked to lead a one-hour prayer session. I was terrified because I had never even prayed alone for one hour by myself. I almost told my assistant pastor to find someone else. But somehow I gathered the courage to ask God to help me, and I obeyed.
That was a small thing. But it mattered.
Because over time, I became a man who could lead prayer publicly. Not a man who no longer depends on God each time he stands but a man who is no longer afraid to obey when called upon.
And I've been thinking about why it happened that way. Why God didn't just remove the fear all at once. Why He moved me from thirty minutes to one hour instead of from zero to three hours overnight.
I think it is because God is not primarily interested in what we can do. He is interested in who we are becoming while we learn to do it.
There is a difference between being handed something and being built for it.
A man who is not properly formed will eventually collapse under the weight of blessings he was never prepared to carry. I have seen this. I have felt traces of it in my own life, moments where an opportunity arrived and I could feel that I was not yet the person that opportunity required.
God knows this about us better than we know it about ourselves.
That is why He builds us progressively before entrusting us with greater things. Not because He lacks the power to hand us something immediately, but because He is more concerned about who we become while carrying it than whether we carry it quickly.
Look at David.
He did not begin in the palace. He began in obscurity, tending sheep in the wilderness, learning responsibility, courage, and dependence on God long before anyone knew his name. It was in that quiet, unseen season that his character was actually formed. And even after he was anointed king, he did not try to seize power prematurely. He waited. He obeyed. He allowed God to complete the work in him.
I think about that often, especially in seasons where I feel like I am ready for something that hasn't arrived yet.
David's story tells me the wilderness is not punishment. It is preparation.
Joseph understood this too.
He knew he was destined for leadership. God had shown him that in a dream. But the dream did not come with a shortcut. It came with a process, years managing Potiphar's house faithfully, years enduring prison unjustly, seasons of obscurity that must have felt like contradiction.
But those seasons were doing something inside him. They were forging a man capable of governing a nation without breaking under the pressure of it. The vision was the destination. The process was the formation.
And I think this is what many of us resist.
We want the vision without the process.
We want the influence without the formation. The platform without the obscurity that precedes it. The palace without the wilderness that prepares us for it.
But skipping process is dangerous, not just practically, but spiritually.
The children of Israel left Egypt, but Egypt had not yet left their minds. God wanted to deal with that slave mentality before bringing them into the Promised Land. An untransformed man cannot properly steward milk and honey because his mindset will eventually betray him. People often say money exposes people. That is true. So does influence. So does success. These things do not change a man, they reveal him.
Sometimes God will keep a man in the wilderness longer because there is still something left to learn there.
I used to resist that idea. Now I find it merciful.
Better to be shaped in obscurity than to enter a place your character cannot sustain.
I am still learning this.
My life is a testimony of what happens when a man obeys small instructions consistently not perfectly, but faithfully. I am not yet where God showed me. There are things He has promised me that I have not yet seen. There are capacities in me that are still being built.
But I believe that if I remain faithful in the small things here and there, He will bring me there in His time.
Because the man who can be trusted with little is the man who eventually carries much.
And the man who obeyed God in the wilderness is the man who does not lose himself in the palace.