The Audacity of God's Grace: 10 Strategies To Living Your Best Life Now (13 page)

Typically, the philosophy of User-friendly individuals is that if they are not the ones making things happen in their environment, things should not happen around them at all! Using false pretense to accumulate is their trademark, although a number of them work legitimately too. Several User-friendly people have attitudinal limited-mental-mindset disorder that makes it almost impossible to keep or sustain long term relationships. They are not straight forward or forthright. The goal of this group is geared towards negative energy. They are great pretenders and work very hard to make sure you don’t get to know who they really are or their true characters. Unfortunately, their attitudes and approach to life expose who they truly are because the leopard cannot erase its skin. If you want to grow in joy, in building your dream, and growing richer in sustaining your happiness, limit your exposure to this group. At best, pray for them, and ask God for wisdom when you notice them around you, for they are a very dangerous group. This is why I totally agree with Barbara de Angelis where she said: “We need to find the courage to say no to the things and people that are not serving us if we want to rediscover ourselves and live our lives with authenticity.”

Sometimes, User-friendly persons find it very disturbing to be corrected or to acknowledge any form of wrong doing because of a prolonged negative mindset which has characterized their lifestyle. They are usually perfect. If they are in politics, they will play very dirty and always find grounds to destroy their opponents even when common sense says no. A User-friendly person usually will not take responsibility for their bad or poor actions and judgments, neither will such individual apologize when they are wrong because there is no way they can be wrong in the first place—which is why they hardly keep relationships. User-friendly persons are not humble and they are ready to borrow resources or money from you unaccountably and use your money within their custody or control any how they deem fit. This group is always ready to pick up a fight with you, when you ask for your money back. This group will hardly brighten your day. They cannot be trusted. A User-friendly person hardly repay when they borrow. They don’t like to or hardly respect other people’s property, authority, or priced possessions. They can’t build. They are destroyers. Another key characteristic of a User-friendly person is that something tells them that wanting more and taking from others are a means to happiness because it is better to receive than to give. Taking the shortest distance possible by shred means is the life style of a user-friendly person and they are specialist fault-finders. Typically, a User-friendly individual will hardly respect constituted laws or authority and if they purport to do so, they will quickly mechanize a way to cheat.

This Group Can Hurt You, Regardless

In the U.S, we have heard cases of people and witnessed stories of User-friendly individuals who try to defraud the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). A great majority of them have falsified tax return information with the intention of getting more money from the IRS either by committing identity theft fraud, or using work colleagues, friends or other people who are in no way related to them and use their information to file taxes or list them as their dependents for the love of money. A good example of a User-friendly person who tried to defraud the State of Oregon Department of Revenue and make headlines across America in 2012 was Krystle Marie Reyes. Ms. Reyes, a 25-year-old woman duped the state of Oregon into giving her a $2.1 million tax refund. She later pleaded guilty to the crime and was later sentenced to 5 and half years in prison. The media reported that Ms. Reyes got $2.1 million back on a prepaid debit card and went on a bit of a spending spree, shelling out $150,000 on a variety of things before she was caught. Ms. Reyes filed a bogus (false) tax return on $3 million income. She got a $2.1 million back on a prepaid debit card.

Identity theft, tax fraud and tax-related identity theft are on the rise in the U.S because of User-friendly people. In 2011, more than 640,000 taxpayers were affected by tax fraud, which doubled the number of taxpayers affected the year before, according to statistics provided by J. Russell George, the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, and cited by the Wall Street Journal. The IRS received 2.2 million fraudulent tax returns in 2011 alone, 940,000 of which involved identity theft, according to George. User-friendly people are hurting us and have caused a number of Americans and people to find it difficult or unable to file legitimate tax returns because identity thieves filed fraudulent tax returns for them first.

User-friendly people hardly have good moral values and ethical standards and will betray you when you least expect. Avoid them, if you must live your best life now. They are not teachable and they are always not at fault as they are never open to discipline or correction. A User-friendly person will technically make you a friend or when they are unable to do so, they will study you very well, and then try to come in a closer relationship with you through any means possible for the sole benefit of using you or your resources to achieve their end, and dumping you in pain or loss afterwards. They like making people miserable. They are like cancer! Many of the times, if it is in a church setting or in an organizational setting, a User-friendly person will work very hard to infiltrate into getting people’s information at all cost even if it means to fabricate one with the intension of using such people’s information against their victim. In a Church setting, if they are church elders or officers, they usually appear to be saints. They know the sins of almost everyone in the congregation.

The User-friendly individuals I have encountered on my journey for success can be people you trust as close aides, friends, family, even church elders; church workers, and subordinates. Without knowing who they really are, these groups can infiltrate your team in order to steal your joy. In a thriving business organization, they can manipulate their way into your top team with the foremost goal to steal information. They are usually never satisfied; for there is hardly anything you can do that ensures that they are satisfied. They are usually unappreciative and very ungrateful. In their small minds, what matters is what happens now, not what is next.

A User-friendly person can do whatever it takes to get ahead first and now. They are typically unhappy with other people’s success or when others are more prosperous or successful than they are, they may plot how to bring them down, regardless of the means. User-friendly individuals will not help you to live your best life, for they are grand masters in manipulation, distraction, and distortion. They have a crab-mentality that says: “instead of someone to succeed more than I do or before I succeed, let everyone remain unsuccessful.” In my native Ngwa language of Eastern Nigeria, we describe them as “Onyensi.” Onyensi is an evil, jealous or greedy person who is usually ungrateful, never satisfied, and bitter against someone else or other people’s progress or prosperity. Sometimes at the extreme, Onyensi specializes in causing more harm than good. They pride in prosperous people’s misfortune and can use supernatural means such as voodoo powers to cause evil. They have the capacity to poison people’s mind one against the other. They usually succeed with people who believe much in their powers. The irony is that majority of them or their children are not usually successful in life. A great majority of them are “religious People” too. They attend churches or the mosques.

User-friendly people are usually dishonest and rebellious. If you place them at a position of influence in your business, their goal will be to run you aground or take your customers and business secret to begin the same line of business or the sale of those trade secrets to your competitors. If they do not have the financial resources, they will use or sale the business secrets they have learnt from you to your competitors or give them out for a peanut of for free. They also specialize in petitioning authorities or the law enforcement against your business dealings with false information to cause your downfall when they are fired from your firm. Their major objective is to cause one’s failure in life or to make someone drag through life. Remember that this is not God’s intention for your life. In the Christian Scriptures, (Jeremiah 29:11NLT) makes clear what God’s intention for our lives are when the prophet Jeremiah affirmed: “For I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD,” they are plans for good [for prosperity] and not for disaster [not to cause you harm or difficulties of life], plans to give you a future and a hope.”

The User-friendly person will lie and cheat very easily to get their way, and when they fall short of their way, they go on the offensive side by taking defensive avoidance or simply put—go for blackmail. Occasionally, because of my positions in leadership, I encounter couple of User-friendly individuals around me every now and then both in my ministry and businesses too. One individual in particular who topped the list, managed to somehow, manipulate into accessing payroll information and get to know what every staff was paid plus other vital information that that individual should never have had access to, and then personally became infuriated and questioned me why the individual was not paid what certain others were paid—telling me specifically what each staff were paid. This individual got fired!

The same individual recruited couple of other people on my team to work against me even while that individual worked in my establishments and I was paying that individual’s salary. Before this time, the same individual had infiltrated my ministry top team somehow, and tried to work hard for its failure, more especially when things couldn’t work the way the individual had wanted, while a top ministry officer in God’s church under my leadership and a “trusted” employee of one of my businesses. This is why ministers who are entrepreneurs must watch who they bring on their teams in ministry and in their businesses too. Where possible, it is better that you don’t add a single person you have on your top teams in ministry to your other top teams in your secular businesses, unless it is your spouse. Learn to separate the two.

I recall that on a certain day, after I have confronted the individual and truly discovered the potentialities of this individual to bring my organizations down as things were no longer working in the individual’s favor, that the individual in question came over to me and said: “Pastor don’t you know that if we all leave this church for you that you will be left alone with your wife and children to worship here”? Surely, when that individual decide it was time to leave the ministry which was still in its formative years—a ministry that had established a brand name for being family to many, unity and being a fellowship in the truest sense of it, that that individual tried to fragment the ministry by making sure to cause enough havoc; sowing mind boggling seeds of discord with blackmails, distortion of facts, and enough evil-seed to destabilize the work of God under my leadership. This individual surely took a handful of people who believed the lies that was sold to them anyway.

The good news however is that God is more powerful than any other power. For most of you who have been betrayed and endured the pains inflicted by User-friendly people or groups, this is what I want you to hold onto: If you are going through life with such a level of difficulty and pain because of User-friendly people, don’t give up. Your help will come from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, because he who keeps watch over Israel never sleep nor slumber (Psalm 91), for: If God is for us, does it matter who can ever be against us? (Romans 8:31). Your pain is only temporal. But your joy is eternal. If you want to live your best life now and perform on top of your game, you must either avoid these kinds of people or you learn how to go around them.

Don’t Trust Easily

Before certain experiences, I was used to pastorally trusting people easily. But things have changed. Not long ago when we were moving our church ministry site to a new facility, I did not know that two of the people (U.S citizens) I hired to help in the constructions, were User-friendly persons. What baffled me was that they came highly recommended. The first individual strategically brought the female girlfriend into the picture. We offered her a job also, since we discovered that they were both hard working. Because of the ongoing constructions and for the fact that neither I or any of my ministry officers were available at the site all the time to supervise the reconstructions that were going on, considering that a significant part of it were done in the nights, we opted to live the keys to the new ministry facility for this two hard working individuals amongst others.

Swiftly, these individuals duplicated the keys we made available to them without our consent. For about four months, we couldn’t believe that they were sleeping in a section of the children’s church when constructions were already completed. We suspected the foul play at first, but opted to carefully investigate it, since they were now attending our church. Through my surveillances, we had evidence to prove that they were sleeping in the children’s church. At that point, I decided to confront them and ask them to hand me the keys. They did. But I was disappointedly surprise to find out that they had another spare key and continued to sleep in the children’s church.

Speedily, once I confirmed the situation, I brought a company the following day that came and change all the church door keys, both inside and outside. That was the only way we could stop these individuals, even though we had every reason to initiate a legal action against them. For you to live your best life now, you must learn as much as possible, to avoid people who are User-friendly. Do not trust people easily, even if they are fellow ministers, church elders, or people working in your secular organization. Ask God for wisdom to guide you. Background check will reveal quite much about peoples past history, but it will not reveal people’s mind. This is why the Christian Scriptures according to (Jeremiah 17:9 NLT) cautioned that: “The human heart [mind] is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is”?