Until a few years back, my life, especially thoughtwise, was closed into my proximity. Beyond my surrounding it didn’t really matter  if it did not affect my situation.

My journey to UCU started in 2004, when while in A ‘level, a close friend told me about the wonders of the place. Thinking of it back then, this place was not  what it looks like today. There were bushes and potato gardens everywhere and the sports facilities were in constant rivalry with unkempt grass.
But back then, this was home, and probably the best thing that ever happened to me.
While I was at secondary school, I was what you would call a nice person. My only undoing was seclusion, and I loved it that way, but because of that, it was often hard for people to understand me and whenever something went wrong, everybody wished to know where I was at the time of the incident.
This does not mean I had a following or that I was great. It was because in my silence I had started an internal rebellion to all sorts of authority and by that time, the school administrators were getting fed up and looked for an opportunity to get rid of me.
That opportunity eventually came when I was about to sit my final exams. It had a lasting impression and the decisions I made then, thank God, were based on prayer and soul searching, and they still mean much to me today, the way they did then.
My situation is not unique, there are many people who fall down, not literally, and fail to rise up for fear of falling again.  The issue here not  how many times we fall but our ability to rise up every time we fall: to    avoid the situations that led us to fall in the first place.
There are those who have never learnt from their mistakes. I am glad I did, and in good faith. It showed me that in life privileged positions come and go. One only needs to trust that God will always make a way for them as he did in Isaiah 43:10-19. He is the only constant and all he desires of us to trust in his timing.
Coming to UCU made me realise all that and more. It’s not the things that you call your own or the
humble beginnings that we make in life, it’s the clean heart that you come with before the lord that matters in the end.

Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.  - Isaiah 43 : 10

Arthur Oyako is the News editor,
 The Standard Newspaper