Nothing Is Bare Minimum
You know something I hate about social media? It’s how much it takes the truth, slowly persecutes it, finally kills it, sells a lie and turns that lie into a lifestyle trend.
You’ll think it stops there. NEVER. It goes straight into demonising people who still hold onto the truth.
And one of these sad realities is the idea of BARE MINIMUM.
I saw a video online, and the comments blew my mind away. It was a video about a husband being there for his portpartum wife. He was doing his duties, cleaning up, etc.
And someone called that BARE MINIMUM.
I quietly left the app and went about my activities. I can’t believe it because here’s the thing. There are things that genuinely are expected and do not demand demand celebration.
Appreciating your parents, being respectful, honouring your partner, forgiving wrongs (especially for Christians) are expected. I’m not disputing that.
But then there are the other things. The things a person goes out of their way to do, the things that cost them time, money, energy, comfort and social media has convinced an entire generation that those things are also just “bare minimum.”
As if it’s owed to you. As if the person doing it isn’t also putting their own life on hold to do it.
Because here’s what nobody wants to admit: yes, they married you. Yes, they are committed to you. But they still have a life to live, and when they go out of their way for you, they are putting that life on hold. That deserves appreciation. Not entitlement.
I was watching something recently — a proposal, actually. Not one of the loud, extravagant ones you see all over Instagram with the flowers littered on the ground and the rented hall and the professional videographer catching every angle. This one was quiet. Simple. You could tell the person couldn’t afford the grand version, but what he did instead — you could feel the intent behind it. And that’s when it hit me.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It only changes form.
When someone puts real energy, real intent, real effort into something — even something small — that energy transfers. You can feel it. That’s why some videos hold your attention without a flashy hook, because the person behind the camera poured something real into it, and it comes through the screen as electromagnetic waves, as pixels, as whatever you want to call it, but it’s still there. You feel it.
And that’s exactly what’s under threat when we let consumer media set the standard. Because once everybody’s doing the grand gesture, the grand gesture becomes the baseline, and the person who genuinely cannot afford the grand gesture — the one giving from the heart of hearts what he actually has — starts to feel like his offering doesn’t measure up. It downplays intent. Not because the gesture changed, but because the standard moved.
That’s the real damage. Consumer media setting standards for love. That’s a problem.
Let me bring this closer to home.
Yesterday, before I even thought about writing this, my mum brought out the hot water flask and the bucket and kept it by the door. Small thing. Nobody asked me to. I just stood up and carried it in for her. She said thank you.
Somebody watching might say, “That’s normal, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” And yes — it is normal. But normal doesn’t mean it should go unacknowledged. The moment you tell someone “that’s just bare minimum,” you’ve stripped the value out of the effort and the intent behind it.
Love is not human by default. Don’t get that confused. Love is sacrifice. “For God so loved the world that He gave.” That’s love — giving. And to give means something has to leave you. So when we downplay somebody’s effort by calling it bare minimum, we are, in a very real sense, downplaying the sacrifice itself.
I will not have friends who don’t honour me. I mean that. It costs nothing to acknowledge what somebody has done for you, and if you can’t do that, you’ll drag people down without even realising it.
Now here’s where it gets scarier for me. Marriage.
Marriage is not marriage. It’s a big, big deal. I’m not convinced people count the cost of it before they jump in. Jesus said before a man builds a tower, he sits down and counts the cost — do I have enough to finish this? Marriage is one of those places where death happens fastest. Death to self, daily. It is one of the biggest categories of dying to self that exists.
So when a man is putting his business, his time, his entire life on hold to show up for his partner — and that gets met with “that’s bare minimum, that’s what you’re supposed to do” — something is deeply wrong there. Responsibility has to be appreciated. Otherwise you’re just training people to stop showing up.
That’s why I don’t rush toward marriage the way people rush toward it now. I’ve heard people say, “We met this year, we’re getting married in two months,” and I think — you don’t know what you’re stepping into. Except maybe you were previously married, you don’t know what you don’t know. You haven’t weighed the person from every side. You haven’t sat with the weight of what you’re doing.
And I think the devil knows exactly what’s at stake here, which is why marriages are under such heavy attack right now. Apostle taught something powerful recently — that God blesses a man, then the man’s seed, then the generations that come from that seed. So if the enemy wants to destroy a generation, he doesn’t attack the generation directly. He goes back. He attacks the father, or the grandfather, generations before the intended target is even born. The devil is future-proofing his destruction. He’s not interested in right now. He’s interested in what right now becomes in twenty, thirty, fifty years.
That’s why the attack on marriage right now has never been this aggressive in any generation before. And that’s why scripture has to be the foundation, not social media.
Because here’s the difference. Scripture gives you principle. Social media gives you context. If I tell you two plus two is four, that’s principle. If I show you two mangoes and two more mangoes, that’s context — a representation of the principle to help it land. But if you don’t have the principle first, you’ll forget where the four even came from. You’ll start arguing about how ripe the mangoes should be, whether they’re too green, whether one has a bruise — completely missing that the whole conversation started with two plus two.
That’s what happens when people build their entire understanding of marriage, love, and appreciation off Instagram and TikTok instead of scripture. They build philosophies around the mango and forget the math.
Social media isn’t the enemy in itself. God is using it too. But you need scripture as your foundation first, so that when you see a man living out Ephesians 5:25 or a woman living out Proverbs 31, you recognise the principle behind it instead of just admiring the mango.
So before you say yes to marriage — count your cost. Not because it isn’t worth it. But because it is too weighty a thing to walk into on excitement alone.
And to everyone already in it — stop calling each other’s sacrifices bare minimum. Appreciate the effort. Appreciate the intent. Because nothing done in love is ever truly bare minimum.
“For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?” — Luke 14:28
A weekly account of my life as a Wasseminarian.
A weekly account of my life as a Wasseminarian.
This week, I finished preparing my slides for the assistant upgrade training, and I think it’s good to go.
I also created a video for ads, and honestly, I want to take my hat off to video creators everywhere, on whatever platform. Those people are incredible. I created over thirty videos before I landed on the one I finally used. It is not easy work.
I kept up with creating my LinkedIn content for the week as usual.
And I used Claude to automate one of my client’s tasks. Period.
That’s all for this week.
Until next week. With love and intention ❤️