Love crept in on Jide stealthily and knocked him off his feet. ‘Woo-hoo, woo-hoo, woo-hoo! Let’s get this straight,’ he protested to himself, alone in his bedroom one night as he paced his bedroom floor and held a monologue.
‘When I wasn’t thinking of it; who does that? How could somebody I didn’t know suddenly become so important to me?” Yet for ten days now Jide paced his bedroom floor at night instead of sleeping and during the day, thoughts of a woman occupied his mind paralysing his limbs from working.
If love were a human being, Jide would have walked up to him in his usual bold manner and told him to his face that that was a sneaky thing to do. But, alas, it wasn’t a human being. It was a… feeling? An emotion? A force? A paralysing, disorganising, breath-taking, head-turning heart-thudding, insomnia-causing, mind-monopolising and what else have you sort of thing. Jesus Christ!
All that his pastor diligently taught them on self-control, prayer, giving God the qualities you want in a woman and God bringing her to you, then you go to your pastor first before approaching the woman, and all that stuff and all that stuff, came tumbling down.
“I haven’t even asked God for a life partner,” Jide said in a soliloquy. “I haven’t given God any qualities yet, haven’t even thought about the qualities I may need in a woman. What’s going on, dear Lord? I can no longer get any sleep anymore!”
At work, Jide unconsciously became aware that his boss was starring at him with a puzzled expression, some papers dancing in her hand. Startled, he jumped to his feet. He didn’t notice when the woman entered the office he shared with two other colleagues.
“Are you alright, Jide?” his boss asked concerned.
“I’ve not told my pastor.”
“What? Told your pastor what?”
The woman drew near. “Are you not well?”
Realising what he had done, Jide nodded. His colleagues were observing him closely.
Jide was mentally ill. What hit him was heavy. He blinked several times like a girl, trying to recover.
“I’m very well, thank you, ma!” he said with great effort.
His boss said with a frown, “I told you yesterday to make sure you paid in these cheques first thing in the morning – today!”
“I’m sorry, ma. I’ll do that right away.”
Jide managed to moron through the day. The following day, he phoned in sick. It was no lie, he was truly sick. What hit him could not be handled in a rational emotionless manner. He’s been swept off his feet. The feeling was hypertensive threatening neural paralysis.
It was a full occupation to sit all day, all night thinking about the object of his madness. His fact-finding mission revealed that her name was Ifeoma, a good thing. Ifeoma was a cuddly Igbo girl he could hold in his arms forever. He needed eternity to get to know her, to satiate the hunger in his heart and elsewhere. Those that made honeymoon had an idea of his need, and the Bible too. Doesn’t the Bible say, let the bridegroom not leave his bedchamber for a year?
Problem was, how do you go about it? What do you say on your first encounter? How do you get the person to stop and chat with you? What do you do when you want to marry someone?
“The church is a rowdy place. How can I get an uninterrupted attention of this lady who’s occupied my dreams and all my waking hours?” said Jide scratching his head and pacing his bedroom floor.
The church was where Jide went to worship God, but now when he dressed up for church, he felt like a con man, for the excitement in his heart wasn’t for the sermons or the songs, but for the sister he had seen there.
Jide was no carnal Christian; on the contrary, he was a brother on the serious side of the divide. He did not want to involve a third party yet. He could not confide in anyone. The only one he could safely confide in was his mother. She believed in him. She would not laugh at him. She loved him and he was not ashamed in her presence.
Mama Jide lived 40 kilometres away from the city where Jide worked. When her son arrived bag-less early in the morning while she was getting ready for her shop, fear jumped into her heart. Searching his face ominously, she asked him, “Have you been retrenched?”
“No,” he replied curtly, and then with a rush of emotion, he gushed, “Mama, I’ve fallen in love with someone.”
Mama winced. “Where’s she?” she asked cautiously, her gaze towards the door.
“O, Mama, she’s not here,” Jide said like a schoolboy. “I’ve not told her. I don’t know what to do.”
Mama breathed down. “Where’s she from?” Her unsmiling face checked Jide.
“Are you not happy, Mama?”
“Not yet,” she replied cautiously.
“Why?” he asked bluntly.
“Shhh!” she hushed him. “You’re twenty-seven and should be getting married, but I don’t know the details yet. I don’t know the girl yet, and we don’t know for sure that she would want to marry you.”
Jide relaxed. He was afraid a while ago. He had heard of mothers who stood in the way of their sons’ marriage. Surely, his sweet friendly mother would not.
“Mama!” he began, “You’ll not mind if she’s of a different race or tribe, would you?”
Mama was silent for a while, her face deadpan. Then, she spoke. “I trust God. Once it’s God, I’ll accept His choice. After all, you’re the one going to live with her, not me.” Turning to her son and gazing into his eyes searchingly, she asked, “You’re sure you heard from God?”
Jide went cold. That was one of the problems of the church, he thought swiftly.
“No, Mama, I didn’t hear from anybody. I…I cannot tell you a lie. I saw her and…and fell in love with her. There was no voice, no lightening, and no thunder.”
‘I can’t tell you everything, but when I saw her the first time, I missed my step and almost fell down,” Jide said voicelessly.
“You know, my son, marriage is a serious affair. It’s supposed to be forever. (Her voice became stern) Love is a commitment, commitment, my son, lifetime commitment. It’s not about excitement, butterflies fluttering, hearts missing beats. (She hesitated) It’s not sex. It involves lives. Someone might get lethally hurt if not handled properly. One should be careful and make sure, it’s God’s will before taking that leap.”
Jide nodded, reassured of his mother’s love and understanding. He also understood where she was coming from.
“Have you prayed about it?”
Jide bit his trembling lips scratching his head. But, he felt it was better to have the awkward moments with his mum than with any other person.
“I would be a hypocrite to make that prayer, Mama,” was Jide’s shocking reply. “I feel swept off my feet. I…I… know… this… this is God.”
For a fraction of a second, something like trepidation crossed his mother’s eyes. She was alarmed at her son’s words and the intensity of his feelings. She had seen it before. Nevertheless, she gathered her thoughts together and decided to stand by her only son and help him. The last thing she wanted was to scare him away, to lose his friendship. She needed to be in on whatever he’s doing. She always prayed for his progress. Marriage is progress, isn’t it? But, lurking somewhere in the deep recesses of her heart, was trepidation.
“Your father left me,” Mama said quietly.
Words failed Jide for a moment. His father failed.
“I…I mean, he felt ‘in love’ with me, yet, he left me.”
“He left us, Mama.” Jide found his voice. “But, I’ve thought long and hard about it, and I decided that I will never leave my family. I will be a responsible father. I will love my wife and my children. I will be there for them, always, as long as I live.”
Jide’s words brought fresh trepidation into his mother’s heart. She would lose him to another woman, just as she lost his father. A wife claims all. She was aware that her son was watching her closely. She braced up herself. Marriage is an eventuality. Of course, her son would get married one day. She would skip that hurdle when she got there. She spared him a smile, the first since he arrived.
“I’m glad to hear that. But, you should also talk to God about her, as you’re talking to me right now about it. He’s your Father, the only One you have. You can’t go into this kind of thing without involving Him,” Mama said.
Jide nodded grateful. Although, what she said were not totally true. His father had been there for him, too. True he reappeared when he was 17. Sadly, because of the other woman in his life now, he was a stranger in his home. And because of his betrayal of his mother, he felt estranged from him. Nonetheless, as Jide had said, he made up his mind that he would be a better man, a better father and husband than his father.
Back to his base, in his house, kneeling by the side of his bed, Jide began to pray.
“My father and my God, thank you for life, for love, for Ifeoma. Oh, I’ve not really told you, there’s this girl, Ifeoma. I love her. Can I marry her? I want you to please make it possible. Or, is she not your will for me? But I feel strongly about her (remembering what his pastor taught the singles, he said) I want to get married now. And, I want a girl who’s averagely tall (like Ifeoma) with baby face, light complexioned, smiles like her…with dimples in her cheeks, behaves like…(He did not know her character. They were told to give God the qualities they wanted in a wife. He was afraid he might name the qualities she did not possess and would be denied) Oh, this is all wrong, Jide thought. He just knelt there for a long agonizing moment. Finally, he said, “Please, Lord, Holy Spirit, help me out of an awkward situation. Truth is, I love this girl, Ifeoma. I want to marry her, that’s the truth,” he blurted out.
At this, he felt relieved in his spirit. He must have dozed off for he heard a voice that said in his ears, “Why don’t you go and talk to your pastor?”
His pastor listened with rapt attention, his face pleasant and nice. And Jide was thinking, ‘I don’t know what to do if he says no or that the sister has somebody else asking for her hand in marriage. What should I do? Should I plead with her? Or do a twenty-one day fast like Daniel? Or forty days, like Moses? Please, help, me, God!’
Clearing his throat, the pastor began his visage pensive, “I sincerely hope that it’s God leading you because the sister in question is not an ordinary sister seeing she has an evangelistic call upon her life.” He paused for a long time and then released a bombshell. “Emm, she told me herself that three doctors had confirmed that she would not have any children because of an operation she underwent as a teenager.”
Jide sat up. He was an only son. His mother needed grandchildren. He himself loved children. Without children, a family would be incomplete. In fact, his father had confided in him when he grew older that he left his mum because the woman outside had triplets – two boys and a girl. He had no heart to leave them. But, his paternal grandma in her apology to Jide’s mother said that the woman outside fed her son love portion. Jide who was ten at the time his father left thought that if his mother had other children, his father would have stayed. However, Jide’s mother believed in none of the theories, all she knew was that her husband broke the marriage covenant with her. If she had a daughter, maybe, she would have talked her into remaining unmarried.
Suddenly, Jide saw his pastor on the pulpit saying, “The fact is not the truth. The truth is the word of God. It prevails against that which we see. Believe in the truth and declare it, and you’ll see it come to pass!”
Jide heard someone scream, “But, that’s a lie from the pit of hell!” – and realised it was himself. “It’s only God that can say a thing and it will come to pass. It is written that our faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. And the power of God makes the barren woman to become the mother of children!”
The pastor nodded and said, “You’ve been studying your Bible, son.” He tapped his pen on a jotter in front of him and continued, “You see, since Sister Ifeoma came over here from the headquarters church, a total of eighteen brothers had come to seek her hand in marriage. Out of that number, only two made it to the second stage, which is for me to talk to the sister and wait to hear her reply. The rest sixteen stopped at my table when they heard what the doctors told Sister Ifeoma. So, would you like me to proceed, son?”
“Very much, sir, thank you!” said Jide thinking, ‘I’ll marry that girl limbless if need be.’
Jide spent agonising three days and three nights waiting to hear from his pastor. He had all kinds of dreams while he waited, amongst them, the dream of seeing himself old and childless, his aged mother sitting empty-handed beside him. He had woken up in cold sweat his heart thudding. As the dreams of childlessness persisted, he began to grab his Bible and read some scriptures that promised the fruit of the womb.
Sometimes, he would see her in his dream, jumping up, saying, “Oh yes, you’re my husband.” Sometimes, she’d walk coldly past him, saying over her shoulders, “The Lord has not spoken to me.”
By the third day, Jide was a bundle of nerves. He never knew anything could reduce him to that state. He was by no means a sissy. But his physical strength, his psychological strength, his spiritual strength, all were no match to the power of love.
When Jide met his pastor on the appointed day, the man of God said to him, matter-of-factly, “Oh Sis. Ifeoma went to the camp to seek God’s direction concerning a matter. I’ll see her when she returns.”
Jide was stunned by the pastor’s indifference. It amazed Jide that the pastor sensed none of the tumult raging on the inside of him. He wondered what kind of man of God would not sense what he was going through. Where was his sensitivity in the spirit? But he had a strange feeling that he was observing him. He felt his eyes on him most times. Did he think he was mad to want to marry a girl pronounced barren by crazy doctors? Where is the place of faith?
His mother called. She wanted to know what was going on. They had not asked the girl he told her. She was full of reassurances. Jide loved her more for that. But she must not hear that talk about the girl being barren.
Jide lay awake all night trying to figure out too many things about Ifeoma. Finally, in the wee hours of the morning he drifted off to sleep with a certain resolution. He couldn’t face a day at work lest he did something stupid.
The ringing of his phone woke him up. It was his pastor.
“Daddy, Good morning, sir!”
“Brother Jide!”
“Sir!”
“I want you to start praying concerning the May crusade. You’ll be in charge of the Advance Team. The venue, the weather and peace in the area; in the country, etc., the equipment, all these should be mentioned in your prayers.”
Jide was stunned. How could pastor call him up this morning to talk about a crusade, two-months away when all he wanted to hear from him was Ifeoma’s response?
Jide went out that morning with a definite resolution to begin to make an inroad into Ifeoma’s life since the pastor had proven unreliable in this issue. He would find out what she loved most and buy them for her. Oh no, his pastor would object to that. It was like bribing her to say yes. Okay, he would be giving her gifts secretly, anonymously. All he wanted was to make her happy. No, what he really wanted was for him to be the object of her happiness, not her being happy without the source of that happiness being linked to him.
Although he wouldn’t want to go against church rules but it was not written that he should not accost her and say, causally, ‘Sis. Ifeoma, can I buy you a drink?’ – Especially, if she was standing before the Christian Women refreshment kiosk. And nothing said in the church’s constitution, that he should not take her to the Young Women’s Wellspring Cuisine and buy her fried rice and dodo with mutton peppersoup. And nothing said that he should not tell her where he worked or that she was beautiful or that he was… oh Jesus! Help, dear, LORD!
His heart was thumping seriously by reason of his resolution and because he was determined to carry it out. ‘Lord Jesus, help me, if I’m wrong. You won’t let me die of Ify fever, would You?’ Jide said in silent supplication.
He changed his mind about not going to work and went. In his office, he worked, surprisingly clear-headedly. He was happy; strangely so. He had settled it in his mind. Was he not a handsome young man? Nothing said anywhere he could not stop sister Ifeoma in church, greet her and ask her to help him…yes… follow up a new convert. Who is that? Okay, he would get one, a girl. They would spend time together discussing the new convert because men are not supposed to follow up women and vice versa. Maybe, being close to her will help her prayer life especially in the area of his interest. He swallowed hard.
Thank God it was a Tuesday. Surely, she would be in church for a week day service. His face brightened as a thought struck him. He would go to the Follow-up Department and look for a young girl’s card and ask Ifeoma to follow her up because… He smiled slyly – he was interested in getting the girl established. Thereafter, he sailed through his work and finally it was time to go. He took longer time in the Gent’s to freshen up before rushing off to church.
Sweet Jesus Christ born of the Virgin Mary, Sister Ifeoma came in later and walked straight down the aisle and sat beside him! Jide needed no other confirmation. Just as he was trying to search her out from the congregation she actually came, every step, directed by the Holy Spirit, and came and sat beside him! They exchanged nods because she came late. The pastor was already on, preaching. Jide lost concentration. He was faintly aware that the pastor was watching them throughout the sermon. What did pastor take him for, a rapist? He tried to listen to the sermon to no avail. All he could do was write and rewrite what he was going to say to her after the service. In his head!
That night, the service took eternity to come to an end and as the grace was said the next thing he heard from the loud speaker stopped him.
“Bro. Jide, see the pastor now. The pastor is waiting to see you now in his office.”
Sister Ifeoma reached out her beautiful well sculptured hand and said to him, “God bless you!” But before he could reply, she was already walking away.
“Wait!” he cried soundlessly but she was already out of his sight.
Pastor! Jide turned blindly and walked away towards the opposite direction to see his pastor. He knew it was about the crusade! His eyes were red with fury.
The pastor smiled at him a little too broadly. Jide frowned. He was upset.
“I saw you sitting beside Sister Ifeoma. And I thought I should do something fast so you don’t break church rules,” he paused, still smiling.
Church rules! Jide doubted his pastor’s sensitivity in the spirit – he cared more for church rules than his life? He was almost dead with love.
“Have you told her, sir?” Jide asked with his heart in his mouth.
“NO,” the pastor replied.
What! It was a wicked answer, in fact, the height of wickedness. His heart sank. He almost hated his pastor. Why, what happened? But Jide could not find his voice. He was very close to tears.
“Sister Ifeoma had come before you to announce to me that you’re her husband. And she had not allowed me and my wife to rest about it but the bareness thing she did tell….”
Jide was not sure he heard well. His eyes widened. His pastor nodded. As the light of understanding dawned in Jide’s heart, he made to run out of his pastor’s office to look for Ifeoma but his pastor’s next word stopped him. “Sister Ifeoma is in my wife’s office now. I asked my wife to detain her for you.”
The end.
