So I was a bit ill a couple of weeks ago, and had to take some days off. Now, I probably wouldn’t have had to be away for more than a day, but, as a diabetic, any kind of illness tends to have an effect on my blood sugar levels, so my doctors had to monitor me until my readings were back to normal.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be a lot more difficult to accomplish than anyone anticipated. They kept giving me more and more insulin, but for some reason, nobody understood, my blood sugar levels simply refused to drop.

It didn’t matter what time of day we checked, it was still high. First thing in the morning, two hours after dinner, it didn’t matter. The readings kept coming back high. It just made no sense. I was doing everything right. I was eating at the correct times, I was correctly calculating the doses, but all our correct actions were still giving us the wrong results.

As the days went by, I started to get extremely frustrated. Why was the treatment not working? None of the doctors could explain to me why the medicine wasn’t working, why my body appeared to be defying tried and tested science.

It was the most frustrating experience I’ve ever been through, but I also realised that this frustration was actually a familiar feeling.

When things don’t work the way they’re supposed to, and you don’t know why, it can sometimes make you want to grab tufts of your hair and systematically rip them out while banging your head in a steady rhythm against a rough concrete wall.

When you have credit and a full signal, but can’t get on the internet; when a brand new pen you just wrote with, suddenly won’t produce any marks on the paper; when your visa card gets declined even though you know there’s money in your account; when your computer can’t recognise the perfectly fine pen drive that you just used to copy files from another laptop just minutes ago… we have all experienced this all too familiar frustration at one time or the other.

It’s human nature - when things don’t function the way they were made to, they don’t just become useless, they become infuriatingly nugatory.

So imagine how people feel about you if you’re a customer service officer who refuses to give customers service, or a receptionist who is too busy chatting on your phone to receive visitors, or a police officer who permits crime for a fee, or a nurse who makes patients feel worse, or a Christian who is nothing like Christ. 

How will the citizens feel in a country where the health insurance doesn’t cover your healthcare, the police don’t protect you, the judiciary doesn’t give you justice, the parliamentarians don’t represent their constituents, the sanitation ministry can’t keep the nation sanitary, the church, mosque and shrine don’t produce good people, and our leaders cannot lead us out of these predicaments.

All things and all people have a purpose, and when we fail to fulfill our purpose, we become valueless to those who should consider us valuable.

It’s bad enough if our presence on earth adds no value to the planet, but not only do we fail to be of use, our uselessness also causes frustration and anger.

My friends, we all like to think that we’re special. We believe in ourselves and have faith in a great destiny laid out before us. But one does not trip and fall into greatness. You don’t fall asleep in obscurity and wake up in prominence.

The journey to prominence, to relevance, to success, well, that journey is made in small daily steps. By functioning as you have been assigned to function on a daily basis, by doing your job, by fulfilling your purpose, you build the bricks that will someday become the monument of your destiny.

Plus, you will be surprised how things stop malfunctioning around you when you stop malfunctioning yourself.

My name is Kojo Yankson, and I can’t receive what God made for me if I don’t first achieve what God made me for.

GOOD MORNING, GHANAFO!