Sharing with Aunty Abike (7)

How’s your Sunday? Sundays are beautiful days because we get to worship God and spend time with our loved ones. It is a pleasant way to start the week before going into the busy week.

But like other days, it is a day for learning, growing and praising. To learn means to acquire knowledge. To grow means to increase in size or form or quality. To praise means to express admiration for someone or something. It is important to ensure that as the clock of our lives tick, we are learning, growing and praising.

How can you grow?

I don’t want to go into the physical, cognitive, social and motor development. Let’s simply look at growing in the natural sense. You can ensure you are growing by eating the right food – quality and quantity, at the right time. Fruits and vegetables may be great but if you are eating a bucket full of oranges at 2am you may end up being adversely affected. If you spend the afternoons gossiping only to spend the nights reading with candle light, your eyes may end up not growing well even if you eat food that should aid your vision. If genetically you are to be tall and strong but your diet is poor or you live around smokers especially during your formative years, you may end up not being tall. So, growing needs discipline.

How do we learn?

It is important to understand how you learn. But whether you learn by seeing (visual), hearing (auditory) or doing (tactile) one thing is certain; learning comes to everyone as an experience or an exposure it now depends on what you do with it. If you watch on television how someone is canned for stealing, I will assume that you have learned that stealing is bad. If you have to be canned for stealing after what you watched, then you have not actually learned because the knowledge that stealing is bad is not followed by the right action. You can learn to be a good child, good student and good citizen by choosing to imbibe the good qualities of parents, teachers, mentors and leaders. So, learning depends on making the right choice and doing the right thing.

So how do we praise?

You can praise others by showing admiration, saying good things to or about them and giving commendation or gifts for good deeds. You can praise yourself by being cheerful or by celebrating yourself. Praising yourself includes wearing a smile, having a good self esteem – thinking and placing a high value on your person and exuding confidence. If a friend is wearing her head down and you say, “You know you are such a great friend and you just make me unhappy when I see you looking like that”, what do you think he or she would do? The response could very well be a smile.

As you grow, learn and praise remember to always share your Sunday with a smile.