GOODNIGHT or GOODBYE

Three

As father looked away from me, I turned to mother, as I did, mother smiled so peacefully and lovingly at me. Mother was very loving, caring and a wonderful person. She was also a very strict disciplinarian but when she scolded you, she always had her arms open to draw you into her love.

Mother was truly a virtuous woman, you could see the God in her, feel Him, touch Him, I always prayed for a wife like mother but she always told me I would find one better than her and I always wondered how that was possible. I doubted that there was any woman on earth that was as perfect as she was. There was no way there could possibly be another of her much less a better person than her. I loved mother so dearly. So when I saw the smile on her face, I knew that no matter what the problem was, I would be able to handle it somehow.

Father then at that moment told us a bit about 1 Corinthians 13. Father liked to talk about love and the love of God for us. Sometimes he made the bible seem like fairy tales that you could never get tired of reading but to me, that's all they were. Fairy tales.

They never seemed real, never seemed like something that actually happened. Sometimes I read the stories in the bible and laughed at how impossible all of them sounded. I never really understood how people who were literate and very well educated could believe such stories.

I believed that with time, people would begin to see their foolishness is believing such fairy tales, such tales by moonlight, such fiction. Oh!! How I laughed at my family members especially. Sometimes when I teased them, they would all go with me and begin to tease me as well about how they would begin to turn water to wine right before my eyes and walk on water and raise the dead and I would be the one bowing to them and calling them Sir, Ma, asking for them to bless me and we would all laugh and then my eldest brother would with a serious face say to me we are praying for you brother and we are always here for you.

That always made me feel like I had just been poured a bucket of ice and I would just grin and nod and silently walk into my room, shutting the door gently so no one felt I was angry but truth be told, I was very very angry. I felt angry at how every one else must have thought I was an unbeliever.

After all, we were all brought up in a Christian home so why should they think they were Christians and I was not. I went to church, I worked in church, I gave my offerings, I even paid my tithes. I made sure I was good to people, I gave to the poor, I forgave people when they wronged me, i tried as much as possible never to tell lies, I wasn't rude to people, I never intentionally hurt people, I even stuck to one girl as my girlfriend and it was only that girlfriend that I ever had any form of foreplay with, no other, and I was always good to them.

Generally, I was a good person, I could pass for a very good christian, couldn't I? Then why did my siblings tell me they were praying for me like I was an unbeliever, like I was a sinner? I took very serious exception to that.