Equipping young women professionals with young families to find fulfillment, contentment and joy as mothers and home makers without losing sight of who they are as women.

Volume 03, Issue 03: Make no Little Plans

Most of us are still putting together our goals for the new year. It is important that we make our goal setting and goal getting process a continuous progression. Don’t just rush to make totally new goals, start with picking up from where you left things in 2012.

Some of the goals we made last year were one-off targets, the ones we accomplish and move on to the next thing, while others were continuous or even lifelong goals. For instance, if one of your goals was to embrace a healthy lifestyle in order to improve your physical well being, then you may not want to drop this goal in exchange for a totally different goal this year. Such a goal would fall under your on-going goals and would remain in your resolutions year after year.

See how far you went in accomplishing the things you wanted to start doing last year, and evaluate your performance. If there are items that you did not get to, or did not complete, consider if they are still important to you. If they are, they should be on your list for this year, with a tighter plan on how you will go about attaining them.

Move on to the things you were doing before last year, and purposed to continue doing. Review your priorities and decide if you still wish to continue doing them, or if you wish to drop them if they no longer serve your interests. We should always keep up good habits and practices while remaining dynamic enough to pick up new methodologies and strategies.

Also, consider the things you decided to stop doing last year. Some of these were good things, but you set them aside in order to focus on the best. See if any of those could come back on your list of things to do, given the changes that have taken place in your life by now. One of the reasons why it’s important to review this list is to ensure that you don’t find yourself allowing old disparaging habits and practices to creep back into your new improved life.

At this point, you are now ready to make some new goals. Make no little plans; they have no magic to impress anybody, or guarantee their realization. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work. As you do, go for balance. Make goals for your career and business, relationships, finances, health and fitness, fun and recreation, spiritual growth, and legacy goals.

I challenge you to raise the bar. Set yourself up for higher horizons. Dare to go further than you did last year. Stretch yourself, get out of your comfort zone while remaining true to your purpose.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 03, Issue 02: Embracing 2013 with Hope for Great Things

2013 is going to be a great year. I don’t see why it shouldn’t. This year offers us yet another opportunity to live out our purpose, maximize our potential, and move closer to realizing our greatness.

I am excited. Just like any other new year, 2013 is here to afford us yet another chance to reach our goals, improve our productivity, finances, health, grow deeper in our faith, and be the best that we can be in our professions, relationships, ministries, businesses, and other occupations.  I am choosing to live my best days in 2013.

Choose to speak the best of this year. Think, confess, and do great things. Reach out for new cycles of victory, success, and prosperity. See yourself gaining new territories in 2013; new emotional territory, new intellectual territory, new business territory, new spiritual territory, new ministerial territory, and new financial territory.

As usual, unwelcome circumstances will come up. Purpose not to let the elements of your days dictate your destiny, rather choose to take control of them and direct their course to a greater end. Choose to have a great year - 2013.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 03, Issue 01: Looking Back at 2012 with Gratitude

The last couple of months have been the busiest times I have ever known. It got to a point when I almost gave in to discouragement for what was becoming of 2012 for me. But now as I look back, I see that 2012 was a great year. Everything did not go as I planned it, but I am grateful for the surprises.

I choose gratitude as I look back at 2012. A ton of things went exceptionally well. The surprises stretched me, and I experienced exponential learning and growth. I am grateful for the successes, for the good times, for the blessings of a wonderful family that made my life beautiful, for dear friends who held me up and coloured my life, for the time to do the things I love to do, and for the works of my life.

What is your evaluation for 2012? If you are like me, you did not accomplish all your goals. You probably experienced some disappointments here and there, some setbacks, holdups, delays, frustrations, and even losses. Nonetheless, you must have something to be grateful about 2012. If you haven’t done so already, take time to look back and make a list of the things you are grateful for in the last twelve months.

Don’t let 2012 pass-by just like that. Reflect on your experiences and marvel at how blessed you were. Take time to reflect over your goals for 2012, one by one, and grade yourself. You will be surprised by how well you did.

Start with the things you purposed to continue doing and see how you faired. Then move on to the things you purposed to start doing, and then to the things you purposed to stop doing. Evaluate your 2012 before you can courageously embrace 2013 with renewed hope for even greater things.

Choose to be grateful as you look back at the last twelve months of your life. Keep record of your achievements and take note of the areas you need to do more work on, even as you come up with new goals for the new year.  It was a good year – 2012.

Lillian Chebosi

Volume 02, Issue 41: Redeem the Time

Time is what life is made of. Do you find that you don’t have enough time to live your best life now? We make excuses for not having the time to do the things that are important to us. Consider making a list of the things you would love do to on a regular basis but don’t get to do due to “lack of time”.

How is it that some people have time to do so much than most? One of the wisest things we can do is to live on purpose. Purposeful living enables us to be intentional with how we spend our time. It structures and focuses our lives to only what matters.

Everyone in the universe has the same quantity of time. With no exception, we all get twenty-four hours per day. What we do with those twenty-four hours determines what we accomplish in our lifetime.

We must learn the art of ordering our day. We must take into account each day and not squander the time that we have. It helps to note down what you want to accomplish, and list the specific tasks you will do daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly, to get you to your desired end. Without a plan, we leave ourselves to doing everything but not achieving much.

We live in an age of tremendous time-saving mechanisms. Tons of time is saved with modern conveniences such as instant coffees and microwaves. Despite these, we also have major time-depleters such as the television and the internet. There are people who sit for long hours in the night in a night club chatting and drinking; others before the television set surfing channel after channel, just because they are too tired to go to bed!

The only time we have is the time we make use of. We reap what we sow. If you want to get ahead in life, learn to make use of the time that others squander. What are the things that are stealing your time? What draws from your time that doesn’t yield much return? To make optimal use of your time, identify your time stealers and deal with them.

As with any financial investment, ask yourself what kind of return your time investments are yielding. Time spent is a cost – be mindful of the benefit you are exchanging for the cost you are incurring.

Redeem the time and make the most of every opportunity. In addition to being very intentional about what we spend time on, we must also learn to prioritize our time. Planning our time makes us efficient, but it is prioritizing that makes us effective.

Lillian Chebosi

Knowing Your Place
Inspired by the story of Sarah (Genesis 16-18, 21)

Sarah and Abraham had no children and were looking forward to having one as a fulfillment of Gods promise to them.

But the promise took quite a while to come to pass. Sarah gets discouraged and tries to help God, move things a little bit faster. She gives her maidservant, Hagar, to Abraham, hoping to build a family through her.

However, this arrangement did not work as Sarah had imagined it. When Hagar conceived, she began to despise her.

What are you perceiving as your deficiency as a wife in your home? For some like Sarah, its barrenness, for others, it is joblessness, or lack of a good education, or a lousy family background, or maybe a not-so-rosy past.

These conditions have the potential to affect how we view ourselves, the value we deem of ourselves as wives. They have the capacity to make you feel that you have let your husband down, that you are not worth your position in the home. They can lower your self-worth as a wife.

But this wasn’t the case for Sarah. She may have felt she let her husband down, thus offered a trial solution though Hagar, but she did not feel less valuable to Abraham for not having borne him children.

Sarah knew Hagar was her mistress with or without a child, and she did not allow Hagar room to despise her. She talked to her husband about it and Abraham reminded her of her place – to deal with her servant.

Sarah knew her place and rights and could make demands accordingly. Just because Hagar had borne Abraham a son did not make her feel she was less of a wife. She knew she was still the lady of the home, her husband’s beloved. God was in agreement, and Hagar had to submit to Sarah, just like before the pregnancy.

Later on, Sarah gets a son with Abraham, for God wasn’t going to settle for fleshly solutions to fulfill his promise. As Isaac was growing up, Sarah noticed Hagar’s son, Ishmael mocking. Knowing her place, Sarah spoke with finality that Ishmael would never share the inheritance with her son Isaac.

Sarah knew that Isaac was the child of the promise. She boldly asked her husband to send Hagar and her son away. This is to put it kindly. In essence, she demanded that Abraham gets rid of them. This was right in God’s sight, and so Abraham complied. He enquired of the Lord and agreed to listen to and do as Sarah desired.

Unlike Abraham, who reminded and reassured Sarah of her position in his life, your husband may not know your place and rights as a wife in his home, but you must know it and require it accorded to you. This does not in any way purport being bossy and dishonouring your husband.

God expects submission of wives. Sarah obeyed Abraham and even referred to him as “my lord,” and treated him as such. Through her submission to her husband, Sarah established that her mission in life was to help her husband fulfill God’s purpose for him.

Lillian Chebosi