The Correction: Entry 07 — Diani

The Correction: Entry 07 — Diani

Two years ago I went to Diani.

I was still at the radio station. Things were heavy in a way I hadn’t fully named yet. I’d told my friend Kadzo what I was thinking — that I wanted to get away for a morning, sit by the water, jokingly have a conversation with God.

Kadzo is one of the people I can be open with. Not many of those. She listened and said one thing. Leave the phone. Take a pen and a notebook.

So I did.

I say jokingly because my relationship with God is a settled one. I’m not in crisis with it. I’m a man who knows what he believes and has known for a long time. The joke was the framing — I’ll go to the beach and we’ll have a chat. The truth was that I needed to put something down on paper and the beach is where I knew I could be honest.

I sat there one morning and wrote nineteen lines.

I’ll put them here as I wrote them. The handwriting is rough. The syntax is rough. They were never meant to be read by anyone else.

1. Be driven by integrity — not lust
2. Be upright but firm
3. Be open to receive
4. Strive for excellence
5. Show compassion
6. Understand your blessings
7. Do the right thing always
8. Invest in the first foundation
9. Build, build — it’s your strength
10. Accept your blessings
11. Don’t see God’s favour as work
12. Invest in self
13. Do more for you
14. Even the most insignificant has a story
15. Listen and obey the omens
16. The answers are found in silence
17. Life is still beautiful
18. Harness the power of the morning
19. Stay authentically grateful

I’ve been living most of these for two years. Quietly. Internally. Some of them came naturally — harness the power of the morning, listen and obey the omens, life is still beautiful. I was already those things. The list was me confirming what I knew.

Others I’ve worked at. Be open to receive. That one took a while. The whole architecture of my life has been built around giving — receiving was a posture I had to learn. I wrote about it in Entry 04. I didn’t realise then that I’d written it down on a beach two years before.

And one of them I keep coming back to.

Don’t see God’s favour as work.

That line sat me down when I wrote it and it sits me down every time I read it now. It says you have already been given more than you have earned. Stop performing for the grace. Stop maintaining what was never conditional. You are blessed beyond. Recognise it.

That’s a hard line for a man whose default is to make himself useful.

I am genuinely blessed. The friendships, the work, the years, the people who have come and stayed. None of it I earned in the way earning usually means. And yet I keep showing up at the desk every morning as if the favour will be withdrawn if I’m not productive enough. As if grace can be revoked for absenteeism.

The list told me, in 2024, to stop doing that.

I’m still working on it.

Most of what The Correction is doing publicly, this list was already doing privately. The series isn’t where the work started. The series is where the work stopped being only mine.

I went to Diani jokingly to have a conversation with God.

Kadzo told me to take a pen.

He sent me home with a list.

I’ve been quietly trying to live by it ever since.

The Correction. More to come.