Welcome to the November 20th edition of Faith & Life Lessons.
You will see this email full of tidbits from my week. My goal is simple. I hope that from how I live my life, you can find a thing or two that helps you as you try to live a life that matters. I am always trying to do one thing - make Christ-focused decisions in love, work, and life. And this was my week.
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The Story of My Week
This week was pretty intense for me.
Both professionally and personally.
One of our kids was not feeling well most of the week which involved two trips to the hospital and a few nights of disturbed sleep.
Any parent can get the drill.
At work, there were some payments that I was chasing funding on. They were long overdue and the funding had become a recurring follow-up with different institutions across two countries. International transfers are not as easy as they say sometimes.
And then, one of our banks said they got a notice from the tax authorities to put a lien on our account with them. We had a matter with the tax authorities. Taking advice from our tax consultants, we had passed a transaction in our books which recognised a loss due to value depreciation on an investment.
A loss means lower taxes. The tax boys didn't want to have that. They sent a letter requesting the tax.
We responded with further explanations and a request for arbitration.
The only problem is that the tax authorities is the one that arbitrates the matter. They are required to respond within 3 months.
And if they don't respond, it means they didn't accept our position. After which we can go to court.
Guess what? They sent the lien notice before the expiration of the 3 months.
By the way, we had been trying to get a meeting with the case officer on our matter. He was out of his office on other matters more than in the office for tax matters.
And that's how we all spread our nets wide across all our contacts.
If we couldn't meet him, we would try to meet his boss.
On Friday, we hit a breakthrough.
Somebody gave us his mobile. He agreed to review the file and meet with my CFO & me in the coming week.
Also on Friday, we got funds to be able to make the important payments we needed to make.
On Saturday, one of the persons I had reached out to - a former national minister called me.
He had been flying and was calling to respond to my text.
I gave him the update and he said I should let him know if I still needed to meet the case officer's boss after the meeting.
It was great to end the week strong after all the pressure.
And our kid is doing better but mummy and daddy still have to do a bit of hard work before we get to the finish line.
It's not all peachy.
But it's a fine view from here.
Things I Learnt
1 - God Prepares Even for Simple Problems: My wife's phone went bust this week. The screen went kaput and that was the end of seeing anything on the phone.
We got a new phone and started the process of doing all the regular set-up on the phone.
Everything was smooth sailing until it asked to do the two-factor authentication
Yep, it's a security protocol for android and google when accessing your account on a device. You knew that already, right?
We hit a bit of a snag on that.
The options for authenticating which we could do were either getting a text message code or authorising on another mobile phone which was already authorised.
The text message was a bust. It was her Nigerian number. The battery of that phone had died and the sim was the older size sim. We couldn't change the sim since we were not in Nigeria.
The second option became our salvation because of a little unrelated event over the weekend.
I was setting up music for the kids' room over the last weekend. I decided to use one of our old phones as the music player.
After resetting the phone, I used my wife's google details to activate the phone.
That meant we could use it to authenticate the replacement phone we had just bought.
I believe God was at work in this.
I could have used my details to set up the music-player phone, but it was my wife that won the lot.
The other phone could have died on us a few days earlier, which would have left us in a challenging situation.
It's not just the big things that are God's attention.
Even the little ones.
Like a phone needing authentication.
2 - Serving People the way They Want First: This week I get a fresh reminder that no matter what I think is in the best interest of the staff, only the staff can truly convey that.
A few weeks back, we were planning an end-of-the-year lunch to appreciate the staff for all the hard work they put into the job.
The team leads came back to say the staff would like us to defer this to another time.
According to them, they recognised that this was a challenging season for the company and most companies.
This week, I was trying to implement one of the initiatives I had pushed for the staff.
I had gotten the group executive management to approve a home acquisition scheme for staff.
Under it, staff could buy homes under the company projects at cost plus 3% and pay over 7 years.
Some staff members had benefited from this earlier in the year. We were about to start a new project. Instead of just offering houses, I wanted to offer service plots.
I figured it would be easier for the staff with lower salaries to benefit from this.
I shared this with my team leaders.
And that's when I found out, I didn't get the full picture.
It is easier for a camel to pass through the needle's eye than for an individual to get approval for his or her residential development.
The staff would prefer homes knowing that all the approvals had been sorted out and they were getting a property with everything sorted out.
When I raised the issue of the cost to the staff, they told me I had already given them a way out already.
Earlier in the year, I had gotten a waiver from executive management that allowed staff members to make an initial bulk payment which ensures the monthly deductions from their monthly salary do not exceed 30%.
They were sure that the staff would be able to make this and address the fear I had that low-income staff would not be able to meet their obligations.
The best-laid schemes of men and mice.
And that is why I keep having conversations with the people I work with.
Only people know how you should serve them best.
Postscript
May your heart be at peace amid the pressure that comes from everyday life. May you hold on to hope from God's promises in the middle of it all. Amen
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Tola - The Everyday Disciple
I help Christians like you who want to live intentional lives incorporate their faith into everyday life so they can make Christ focused decisions in all areas of life and truly live to make an impact and make God happy.
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