Who GOD Has *Blessed*

Read Carefully & Learn from this.[An Encounter Stella Damasus had recently]

Something happened recently that really made me laugh even in the face of all the negativity. I was so relieved and surprisingly at peace that even my staff did not understand why I was so happy.
Let me take you back to where this all started from.

After one of my articles a few months ago, a journalist publicly tried to humiliate me but got the shocker of his life when he ended up being the humiliated. I wrote an article about journalists and how they can build and rebrand the country. Those that are not able to write good things about the country and it's people should write books or become publicists so they can make good money. Little did I know that I was causing major problems for myself. Unfortunately for a lot of them I am really not the type to break under insults and bad press because God sees my heart and my intentions.
Like I was saying, this man walked up to me at an event in Abuja and started shouting at the top of his voice. He went on and on about how he was going to destroy my image in the magazines and newspapers.  I asked him what he was going on about, that was when he referred to the article I wrote. Without even raising my voice I told him to go and read the article again, this time not with an ignorant and over defensive mind but an open mind. If he does he will realize that I was making suggestions and trying to say that people like him should not spend their whole day cooking up stories about people they know nothing about and help themselves grow to be bigger and better writers.
As he started pointing at me and getting louder, the security men came in, recognized me and felt someone wanted attack me so they took him outside. Knowing the kind of uproar this would eventually cause for me I had to go outside again to get him inside. I made him sit with me even though he did not want to be around me.
At the end of the event which I hosted, he sat with me and started telling me how upset a lot of them were as a result of the article. I apologized and told him that they misunderstood my intentions. By the time I was done he understood a lot of things and we started chatting about a lot of other things happening in the country.

This incident happened some months ago, so between then and now I know I have been doing so many things I consider to be very positive.
I was made ambassador for women 4 Africa, we did "THE ALTERNATIVE" which was a gospel concert, where people came to worship for free and then won some money by answering some bible questions, we had a singing contest where two winners got a hundred thousand naira each to produce their single and a free music video,  we organized a free seminar called ADIVA for young women and A REAL MAN for young men where we talked about money, men, sex, women and God, INDEX TWO STUDIOS did a free five day intensive training in Cameroon on film making and then asked the students to write a script. After that we produced a short film on cancer for them, we also partnered with their film industry to produce a feature length movie titled UNSPOKEN which is still in the post production process. We just finished a short film on Domestic violence called When Is It Enough, I have been doing different Projects with PROJECT ALERT as well. The Stella Damasus Arts foundation has trained up to 40 people for free within the last two years and all my students are doing extremely well. We also have been organizing small events for people to come and donate to the flood victims in Delta state plus so many other things we have been doing.

You might wonder why I am saying all of this which is very unlike me because I do not believe in helping people and letting the whole world know. However there is a need to do that now because of what happened recently. I got a call from the same journalist who confronted me a few months ago to warn me about some stories that were about to break, concerning me. He advised me not to respond to any of the stories in fact I should not even take the calls.

True to his word, some guy called me from one of the popular soft sell magazines and started asking me questions about my partner and I. He went on and on and said we bought a house, we got married and I am pregnant. I laughed so hard that I had a headache; he wanted me to confirm or refute the story. To his greatest shock I said " well, we bought eight houses on the same day, we got married in the Bahamas don't you remember the gift you bought for me and were you not at the reception?, we have fourteen children now, I am carrying twins as we speak, in fact I have just built an estate and I am about to give you one of the houses for free”.
He laughed and asked me to be serious because he is sensing that I am being sarcastic, I told him clearly that his level of intelligence is slightly off if after all I said he is still "sensing".  At that point I decided to give him a piece of my mind and this is what I said:
" whether I confirm or refute you will still go ahead and write your crap in full, then at the bottom of it you will say when you placed a call to the celeb she denied all the allegations, but at that time you would have succeeded in planting the seed in the minds of people, so what is the point of the call. Have you ever changed the story you wanted to write because the person denied the allegations? So why bother me at all when you need the negative stories to sell your magazines. Have you ever put me on the front cover of your magazine because of the good things I have been trying to do to give back to the society? Have you ever celebrated me for the successes I have been blessed with? Have you ever called me once to ask about my work, my kids, my new business, the shop we are opening, the studios we have set up and how I have been coping? Have you ever written anything good about me? But when it is time for negative and destructive stories you are quick to call me. Please by all means go ahead and write whatever you like, after all it's a free world. I ended the conversation by thanking him and people like him who have kept me in the news whether I work or not. By God's grace I have grown much stronger with each experience and I’m improving myself everyday, my children are growing up so wonderfully well that I cannot thank God enough. So no matter what you try to do to my image remember one thing "Who God has blessed no man can curse ".

After the phone call I was so relieved and happy because I had the opportunity to tell him how I felt and did not care what he would come up with. The next week, as I predicted, I was on the front page and he had written all the crap he could imagine. Guess what, the other journalist who had become my friend used the same photograph that was used in this one on his own front page and really celebrated me. He then called me and said I did not have to worry about all that anymore as he now saw me as his colleague and friend.

Source:Stella Damasus' Blog