The distinction between good and bad becomes powerfully clear when seen through the lens of the Samurai-inspired concepts of the Warrior and the Gardener. True goodness isn’t impressive when one lacks the capacity for harm; it becomes a compliment only when you possess the skill, strength, and means to inflict damage but consciously choose peace. To put it simply, it is far better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. A Warrior in a Garden is one who is trained, disciplined, and capable of handling conflict, yet who deliberately chooses to live a quiet, peaceful life. Conversely, a Gardener is a gentle, peace-loving soul lacking the skills or mindset for conflict, and is tragically vulnerable when unexpectedly thrust into danger. Life is inherently unpredictable; peace is never guaranteed, and the most serene garden can transform into a battlefield without warning. This is precisely why it is wiser to prepare for hardship during times of calm than to be caught unprepared when trouble arrives. It is essential to fortify your core and your will to live, for in the war of life, it is always better to be prepared, embodying both the discipline of the warrior and the compassion of the gardener. This is how I arrived at this conclusion.
I am a third-generation Jehovah’s Witness, so you could say my faith is multigenerational. My grandfather made a choice decades ago that would ripple through my life: he embraced this faith as a way to bring order to the chaos of his life. For him, it worked, and he achieved tremendous success during his lifetime. My father inherited the religion, despite many of his eleven siblings choosing other paths. He was a deeply intelligent and practical man, and for his own reasons, he stayed and passed it on to me. However, this article isn’t truly about religion or its ancestral journey, not in the traditional sense. It’s about something far more fundamental: God. For many years, I wrestled with the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing being who watches over humanity, the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. My hope is that this piece will bring both me and you, the reader, to a clearer understanding of who God is and the role He plays in our lives.
Many view God as a man in the sky who watches over all; an all-powerful, all-knowing spirit who judges everyone. The first part is absolute rubbish. If God exists, He is certainly not a man, and the expanse of the sky is far too small to contain Him. I’ve heard critics, even scientists such as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, grapple with the question of whether God is all-good or all-powerful. Their argument is simple: if He is both, then He should have prevented tragedies like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which struck on All Saints’ Day and killed tens of thousands.
I don’t even need to delve into history to question the idea of an all-powerful, all-good God. I only have to look at the criminal organizations in Nigeria, and indeed worldwide, that operate as churches, swindling people out of their money in God’s name. One could also ask why God would permit genocides in Rwanda, Gaza, Congo, or Nazi Germany, or why He watched as Africans were enslaved for four hundred years under the global machinery of the transatlantic slave trade. And I refuse to ignore that, according to the Bible, God Himself commanded the Israelites to commit mass killings. I could continue indefinitely listing the reasons that made me agnostic towards the idea of a God who permits evil and suffering.
Consequently, I strayed from the God I knew, from religion. I became partly nihilistic, searching for other ideas, other explanations. Perhaps science would explain it all. Perhaps there isn’t a God after all; perhaps all there is is pleasure, pain, the human experience, the pursuit of money, the care for self and family, and then death. So I buried myself in work. There were no prayers, no thought of some higher power to help me. It was in this state that I made a grave error, and here it is.
The human mind, I argue, is far too fragile to exist at the top of the food chain without a central core, a value system that drives us to endure, to survive, to produce, and to elevate ourselves and our families. When I partly abandoned God, I lost this very core, the thing that gave me purpose. Money could not replace what belief once gave me; money was never enough, but God was. The corporate world, for all its shiny facades, is too unsophisticated to replace a religious body because it taps into no one’s spirit. My CEO could never replace religious guidance; in fact, I hated corporate politics. They felt hollow compared to the brotherly love I found in religion, where your presence matters and your struggles are regularly met with genuine care. Conversely, my bosses scolded me without hesitation. It was all about meeting KPIs, appealing to clients, and getting to the money. Perhaps I am simply lucky to have grown up in the Jehovah’s Witness faith, as other forms of faith are just as insidious in their search for money. In my faith, we are encouraged to pursue spiritual goals, not wealth. We don’t pay tithes or any form of compulsory fees, only voluntary contributions. This was the life I knew, a stark contrast to the corporate world.
I drifted elsewhere. At one point, I even tried to make history my core, a credit to a very good friend of mine. History imbues you with the need to carpe diem, to seize the moment and create something that will stand the test of time. It rationalizes your struggles, making you believe they will be worth it in the end, giving you the will to survive and achieve success. History permeates everything, and eventually it will be all that remains, yet I came to see that history, too, is not enough. I discovered that something higher than the need to make history had been calling to me.
So, for five years, I was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. I couldn’t go to Christian meetings because I didn’t truly believe in God, and the corporate 9-to-7 was its own kind of hell. Sometimes I think about my grandfather and wonder if I have reverted to the very chaos he avoided by choosing organized religion, or about my father, who made that choice generational. Eventually, I knew I needed to organize and reevaluate my original core: God.
My Search for God: The Good, the Bad & the Godly 2 – Coming Soon