Honor Without Surrender: On Fatherhood, Conviction, and the Trap of Control

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For my religion, it became pertinent to look at two wise men. Jesus and Solomon

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Komi Pede

2017. I was faced with a unique situation. I honestly wanted to continue being a boy, a young man insulated from the workings of the world. It was easier. Not thinking. But by virtue of being a new dad, I was forced to think. Forced to think about the kind of man and father I wanted to become.

There were hardly any worthy role models. Mostly because I was exposed to western media early, and it was easy to juxtapose the life and leadership I had versus what kids growing up in sane, normal family institutions had. I knew it was risky to pick one person from such a western society as the role model to follow and emulate. So it made sense to dig deep, and I broke it down into two buckets: my religion and my culture.

Religion: Jesus

For my religion, it became pertinent to look at two wise men. Jesus and Solomon. On the Jesus aspect, I needed to see what being a man from Jesus’s perspective entailed. From Solomon, the wisest man to ever walk this earth, the man who prayed for wisdom and understanding, I needed to learn who he was, how he thought, and how I could replicate these ideologies as I built my new family.

Four things stood out about Jesus as a man who stood on his own convictions and not those of his parents or society.

First, Luke 2:41 to 49. At twelve years old, his parents left Jerusalem assuming he was with the traveling group. He wasn’t. He was in the temple, reasoning with the elders. When Mary confronted him, worried and upset the way any parent would be, his response wasn’t apology, it was conviction. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” A twelve year old, correcting the itinerary of his own parents because he already knew what he was called to do. Call this the first sign, a boy asserting that his purpose doesn’t belong to his parents’ itinerary.

Second, John 2:1 to 11, the wedding at Cana. Roughly eighteen years later, right at the start of his public ministry, the wine runs out at a wedding Jesus is attending with his mother. Mary turns to him and says, “they have no wine.” Not a request. An instruction, the way a mother speaks to a son she still sees as hers to direct. His response is telling. “Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.” He doesn’t call her “mother” in that moment, he calls her “woman,” a formal, almost distancing address for a Jewish son in that culture. And he hesitates. He pushes back on the timing, on the assumption that her word was enough to move him into action. Even Mary, mother of the Messiah, tried to pull rank on destiny using the authority of “I raised you,” and even Jesus had to gently correct the dynamic before he acted.

And then he still turns the water to wine. Not because she commanded it and he obeyed like a child under instruction, but because in his own timing and his own judgment, it aligned with what he was there to do. That’s the difference. A grown man honoring his mother is not the same as a grown man obeying his mother. Cana shows both things happening in the same breath, honor without surrender of will. Call this the second sign, and if you trace it against the first, you can already see the relationship being forced to evolve stage by stage.

Third, Mark 3:31 to 35. His mother and brothers came looking for him while he was teaching, and instead of dropping everything because “family called,” he asked, “who is my mother, or my brethren?” Then he pointed to the people around him, those doing the will of God, and called them his family. That’s the third sign, and it’s complete. Family is redefined entirely around will and purpose, not blood. Not popular then, not popular now, especially not in a culture that treats blood as the final authority on right and wrong. The relationship didn’t stay static from the temple to Cana to this moment. It had to move because Jesus was moving, and Mary either adjusted with him or stood outside a door asking why her son wouldn’t come out and see her.

Fourth, Matthew 4:1 to 11, the wilderness temptation. Hungry, alone, at his weakest, Satan offered him shortcuts, bread, power, spectacle. Every offer was reasonable on the surface. He refused all three, standing on conviction even when no one was watching and even when the easier path was right there.

Respect as a leash

This is where a lot of African households get it twisted. “Respect your elders” has quietly been repurposed from a principle of honor into a tool of control. Exodus 20:12 and Ephesians 6:1 to 3 both speak on honoring parents, but if you read Ephesians closely, the instruction “children, obey your parents” is addressed to children still under the household, not to grown men and women running their own homes and callings. Honor is lifelong. Obedience isn’t, it was never meant to be. Genesis 2:24 makes that structural, “a man shall leave his father and mother,” meaning separation, a new household, a new center of decision making, is God’s design, not disrespect.

Now imagine if Mary had leaned on “honor your mother” to keep Jesus performing family miracles on her schedule instead of stepping into the ministry he was actually sent for. There is no Jesus the Savior of billions in that version of the story. There’s only a talented son who never left Nazareth long enough to become who he was called to be, because his mother never let the relationship evolve past “the boy I raised.”

Parents who never adjust this dynamic when their children cross into adulthood will almost always read independence as rebellion. A grown man making decisions aligned with his calling instead of his parents’ wishes gets labeled rude, ungrateful, proud, when in reality he’s just doing exactly what Jesus and, as you’ll see shortly, Solomon did before him. Neither man asked permission from the people who raised them before stepping into who they actually were. Both honored where they came from. Neither outsourced their decisions to it.

Becoming the adult for a world that didn’t exist yet

That was the discernment for me. I had to become the adult for this new family, meaning everything poured into me by those before me becomes raw material, not a finished blueprint. My priority going forward is making decisions that fit the world I’m actually becoming a man in, not the world the people who raised me came of age in.

And that world moves fast now. There was a time a “generation” could be measured comfortably across fifteen to twenty years because the pace of technological and cultural change was slow enough that a father’s operating manual for life still worked for his son and often his grandson. That’s not the world anymore. Smartphones reshaped how an entire society communicates within a decade. Social media rewired attention spans and relationships within a handful of years. Right now, artificial intelligence is changing how people work and think in a matter of months, not decades. This is part of why sociologists now talk about microgenerations, meaningfully different worldviews and reference points separated by only a few years of birth, “Zillennials,” the split between Gen Z and Gen Alpha, cohorts that would have been considered the same generation a hundred years ago now experiencing entirely different childhoods a few years apart. Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice, the water has already moved on. The same applies to the world our parents are trying to hand us a blueprint for. That world has already moved on, and using its map for a territory that no longer exists is how good intentions produce bad guidance.

Few older people understand this. Most, if their emotional maturity hasn’t grown alongside their children, will hold on tighter the more the gap widens, because control feels like relevance to them. They created a person once, and somewhere along the line they stopped updating their picture of that person, so all they can see is the child, never the man standing in front of them making decisions for a world they never lived in.

So this is how I’ve had to bake it into my own reality. Honor where I came from, the way Jesus honored Mary even while correcting the terms of the relationship. But make decisions based on the calling in front of me, not the comfort or control of people who never evolved their view of me past the child they remember. Emotional blackmail dressed up as scripture or tradition doesn’t get to override that. Cana already showed me it didn’t override it for Jesus either.

Solomon

Solomon gave me the same lesson from a different angle. Three things stood out.

First, 1 Kings 3:5 to 14. God asked him what he wanted. Most kings in his position would have asked for wealth, long life, or the defeat of enemies. Solomon asked for wisdom and an understanding heart. That request alone tells you he already knew what actually mattered, independent of what tradition or expectation said a king should want.

Second, 1 Kings 3:16 to 28, the judgment of the two women fighting over one baby. No precedent, no elder to consult, no committee. He read the situation, trusted his own discernment, and made a call that exposed the truth. That’s a man owning his judgment publicly, with consequences attached, rather than passing the decision upward or outsourcing it.

Third, Ecclesiastes. Read that book and you’ll notice the repeated phrase, “I said in my own heart.” Solomon tested pleasure, wealth, labor, and folly with his own hands and drew his own conclusions rather than accepting inherited wisdom blindly. That’s a man doing his own philosophical work instead of parroting what elders before him assumed was true.

Both men were surrounded by people, family included, who expected something different from them. Both stood their ground. And when I evaluate anyone today who challenges the ideologies I’ve built from watching these two men, I ask myself a simple question. Would Jesus or Solomon have respected this person’s reasoning, or their results?

Culture: Orunmila and sang o

In my culture, I looked at Orunmila, the orisha of wisdom, and sang o, the man feared by all who eventually became an orisha himself.

Orunmila is remembered in Ifa tradition as a witness to creation, present at the foundation of things, which is why he’s consulted for direction rather than approached for miracles. Ifa divination itself is built on a principle people conveniently forget, the diviner reveals the path, but the individual still has to act, still has to make the offering, still has to adjust their conduct. It was never designed as a system for outsourcing responsibility. Suuru, patience, is considered by Ifa teaching to be the head of all good character, ori inu, meaning discipline over impulse was Orunmila’s defining trait long before Stoicism gave it a Greek name.

sang o was Alaafin of Oyo, a king known for decisive, uncompromising leadership, unafraid to enforce consequence even against powerful chiefs around him. He stood by the weight of his own authority and his own decisions, for better and for worse, and even in his transition, tradition remembers him through thunder and fire, a symbol that actions carry consequence whether or not anyone is there to enforce it. sang o is invoked in Yoruba tradition as a punisher of liars and thieves specifically because the belief system insists that wrongdoing eventually meets its outcome. Not luck. Not chance. Consequence.

The confrontation that clarified everything

Recently, I got into an emotional exchange with a supposed parent figure who told me my ideologies were “stupid.” I sat with that, then I looked at how this person had actually lived, the decisions made, the outcomes produced, and I could see clearly how Jesus, Solomon, Orunmila, and sang o would have been irritated by the conduct and the results. It dawned on me then.

A lot of African “elders” do not have any core convictions or ideologies. They mostly operate on “as life comes,” outsourcing reasoning and decision making to external beings, deities, Christianity, Islam, praying for a miracle that conveniently insulates them from their own poor judgment and lack of character on the path they walked.

Every man mentioned above believed he was responsible for his own life outcomes. But what’s prevalent in our culture and social context are people who believe every outcome in their life is the result of something supernatural and never themselves. It begs the question. Didn’t these same people spend their entire lives inside religious organizations? Didn’t they read the parable of the talents, Matthew 25:14 to 30, where the servant who buried what he was given and blamed his master’s hard nature was called wicked and slothful, not unlucky? The master didn’t accept “I was afraid” as an excuse for inaction. Responsibility for the outcome sat with the servant, not with fate.

Islam teaches the same principle. The Quran says every soul is held in pledge for what it has earned (74:38), and that no soul shall bear the burden of another (6:164). There’s no room in that framework for blaming ancestors or outsourcing your outcomes to a deity you never obeyed in the first place.

Yoruba traditional religion carries this too, arguably more directly than either. The concept of Ori teaches that a person chooses their own destiny before coming into the world, but that destiny alone guarantees nothing. Iwa, character, is what determines whether that destiny is fulfilled or squandered. There’s a Yoruba saying, “Iwa l’esin,” character is worship. Not sacrifice, not ritual, not prayer alone. Character. A person can have the best Ori in existence and still ruin it with poor conduct and poor decisions.q

The generational drop

Isn’t this a direct correlation to why 90s and 2000s kids look back at the lives of their middle class grandparents and see people who lived far more fulfilling, more disciplined, more grounded lives than their middle class parents who actually raised them? I’ll never know the true counterfactual for why something went inherently wrong with the generation that raised millennials and Gen Z, a generation that, on paper, grew up in arguably the golden era of Nigeria, yet somehow produced outcomes nowhere close to the standard their own parents set.

It’s sad, but it’s also simple. Older people with no strong convictions or ideologies raise children with no strong convictions or ideologies, and it compounds downward with every generation, easier for you, dear millennials and Gen Z, to inherit than to interrogate.

But you’re responsible for letting that buck stop with you.

Stoicism gives language to this that fits perfectly here. Epictetus taught the dichotomy of control: some things are within our power, our judgments, our actions, our responses, and some things are not, other people, outcomes, circumstance. Peace and character come from mastering the first category and releasing the second. Marcus Aurelius, ruling an empire, still spent his private hours interrogating his own conduct, not the conduct of others. That’s a Roman emperor doing exactly what Solomon did in Ecclesiastes and what Orunmila’s tradition demands through suuru. Self examination before external blame, every single time.

If you want a different outcome from the generation that raised you, build your own convictions, grounded in something, scripture, philosophy, Ifa, Stoicism, it barely matters which, as long as it’s actually examined and not inherited by default. Because the alternative, the one we’ve watched play out for generations now, is a life spent outsourcing responsibility to God, to ancestors, to fate, while the actual work of character sits undone.

The buck has to stop somewhere. Let it stop with us.

By ‘Komo Onipede