not enough....

PROLOGUE

PROVERBS 24:10
If thou faint in the day of adversity, then thy strength is small.
Amen.

It was something I couldn't help but p do. My roommates had always laughed about it. They said I spoke too loudly, I laughed too loudly and teased often that I must have been bred by the sea where the crashing of waves were too loud to make anyone speak or hear simply like the average person should.

Well, I took it as light humor. For me, my loud voice was a special gift God had given to me to preach his gospel.You see our hostels were in two, three and four storey buildings. How was anybody ever going to hear a weak voice when I shouted at four in the morning to preach the Good news of Peace. That was why I endured the taunts; I couldn't despise a gift.

I was at it again this morning.
"...and the reason why we fail to work for God is because we are looking at ourselves and not at him, we fail to regard Him as Adonai, the Master and Owner ."

I had been preaching like this since last two semesters when God showed me the vision. I had told my classmates of how soon the Christ was coming, the only response I had incited was laughter, an out burst of rogueish, mocking laughter. They jeered and said even if Jesus was being driven in a wheelbarrow down to earth, he should have been to his second coming already and spared us the misfortune of being born.

To add salt to injury, someone told my psychiatric teacher that I was a girl talking to a God. Almost immediately, the topic in psychiatry class changed from psychotropic drugs to schizophrenia and I immediately begun receiving diagnosis from most of my classmates and categories of psychosis: hebephrenic schizophrenia , schizotypal and what have you.

People whom I had at one point in time, shown immense kindness to. People I would have (except for my Christian values) considered myself more beautiful and more brilliant than , were now handing down insults and psychiatric diagnoses to me just because of the Name, just because I kept telling them what God told me.Yes the vision..it had terrified me a lot that day but again, it was the basis for the hate towards me today.

The tutor interference hurt me a lot, it made them feel they were right. Nothing like God, it was good to fornicate-just use a condom, it was okay to lie- just don't get caught....after all he was the superior and I was just a student.

Lunch time became a nightmare, every day coming to school was a nightmare. People pulled all sorts of stunts...and the way they sneered at me.I felt let down.It was God's message, not mine, saying it should have somewhat made me feel better, not like one who had some noose tied around her neck, ready to be forced into suicide.

I guess people just hated my guts but really, I set my face as steel against them and at dawn, once again I was at their hostels preaching the Good news of Peace.

But then it started, the depression, low self esteem ,the poverty at home that was dictating how many times I should starve in school and how many times my principal should drive me away from lectures all because I hadn't been able to afford my tuition fees. I heard the sniggers as i walked out of the lecture.
They were scornful people, hateful and too happy to know they were better of than me.
It was a class of 140 students studying nursing and they all hated me, they all were looking forward to bring me down.

Paranoid Schizophrenia, I diagnosed myself playfully.

At first I used to walk out of the lecture with my shoulders squared and my head held high but with time it wasn't anymore. My head hanged in disgrace as I walked out, my shoulders slumped and tears I was fighting to hold back . I was numb with pain, I had been praying for so long without any answers that I had grown accustomed to the pain and the shame, and numbened by it.

Slowly I felt the colour drain from my life when the only friendly uncle i had who supported my Abuelita and I turned his back on us, also calling my Abuelita a witch, and me a hoard of unspeakable insults that further deteriorated my physical, spiritual and emotional well-being"

Where was God in all these disheartening times?

I was defeated. Utterly. Utterly defeated.