Is Your Money Where Your Mouth Is?

What do you believe in? Before you answer that, could I possibly know it just by watching you?

Just across the street from where I live, a guy runs a small electronics shop – CDs, DVDs and a small assortment of home appliances – who also doubles as a local DJ of sorts. (Lagos residents will know what I mean.)

Anyway, in the time I’ve lived in the area, I came to realise he had a routine for the music he blared from the large speakers in front of his shop. He would kick off in the mornings with gospel music, slide by afternoon into old school hits, and switch in the evenings (when most people were returning from work) into more contemporary jams.

That was then.

Early this year, a friend who lives around mentioned that she’d recently seen him reading a Bible. She made a little joke about him having gotten religious, and the conversation moved on to some other subject, and I thought little more of it.  Until a couple months back, when it struck me that the 3-course sound menu was down to only one – gospel – and it had been that way a few weeks. (Precious little of it was my style – his playlist was largely traditional fare, while I prefer mine a little more guitar-driven and a lot more energetic, but that’s beside the point.)

I wondered: could our man really have undergone a drastic change in values? I made a mental note to check if this would prove consistent. It has, 3 months on and counting. (The only times I did hear anything different, he wasn’t in.)

One more thing remained to check. But that too checked out: his stock of porn videos was nowhere in sight. (Of course there’s always the possibility that they’re only stashed in some corner, but that remains to be seen.) Looks like we have a real change of lifestyle here.

That’s something, isn’t it? In a world when many of us fall short of our beliefs, a local electronics dealer is aligning his business with his. And I know enough to take a man seriously when he puts his money where his mouth is.

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