Be wise.
Today, I remember one of my aunties, not that she’s dead, but she just vanished and there have been rumours from people who claimed to have seen her someplace. Her trauma started at the age of twenty-one or thereabout. She was a staunch christain, who love to worship God. But she was always so secretive; no one can guess what is going through her mind, not even my mum who is her older sister. She is the type that believes everybody is her enemy, especially her relatives. Back then I used to wonder why she was staying with us if she did not trust any of us enough to confide in us, even when is sick.
One day she decided to relocate to another city (Lagos), after a few months there she called my mum to inform her that the man she wanted to marry will be coming down home with her for introduction in a few days time. Then their father was still alive and my mum told her that while their aged father is still alive, she cannot make decisions on his behalf, that it will be better if she can come home first to discuss with their father and let him fix a date for the young man’s visit. She refused and she eventually had her way. About two weeks after that, she came back to inform the family of her marriage which was already fixed for two weeks from the day of her visit. Then every body in the family warned her about the consequences of marrying a man whose relatives were not known, that according to our culture, when the man was coming for the introduction, he should have come with some of his family members, he did not and that was overlooked simply because of the way she tried to hurry everyone into the ceremony. What transpired that day I can never forget, she bluntly told everyone that her husband to be is a pastor who does not need his family’s consent to be married. On the day of the wedding, no member of his family was present, only his church members.
Few months after the wedding, we were told of their transfer to a remote village for pastoral work. Mind you, she was about four months pregnant then. Communication between us after their transfer was almost non-existent, as we kept writing letters upon letters without getting replies. Around the time we suspected that she must have been delivered, we wrote again, but still no reply, then we started getting worried and had to go to Lagos in search of their old friends who told us a very shocking story; she said the man had left the ministry that sent him on transfer, and that means they also left that village, they moved to port-Harcourt, his hometown. But that before they left the former village, the pregnancy (twin baby) disappeared. On getting to port- Harcourt, she suffered a mental illness as a result of the pregnancy’s disappearance and the husband left her there to move back to Lagos to start a new life. We heard all these precisely seven years after their wedding. Nobody knew where to look for her; we set people to look for him, but all to no avail.
My mum called me one day to tell me that, this woman just walked into our house one day out of the blue, saying all sorts of incomprehensible things, it was immediately clear that she was stark raving mad.
We all gathered round to look for solutions. We took her to all the mental homes we could think of for treatment, even churches, but no way, at a time she seems to be getting better but one day she just plain disappeared, and since then we have not set eyes on her. My mum and other relations did all they could to find her, the only thing we heard from people who claimed to have seen her was that she said she was going to look for her husband and children.
Since this incidence, I have series of unanswered questions, one of which is how it was possible for a matured pregnancy to disappeared, no miscarriage, nothing.
Then how is it possible that when our parents advise us on love matters we always turn deaf ears? Believing we know better, also forgetting that what an old man sees sitting down, a child cannot glimpse while standing. Agreed they could not tell us who to marry or not to marry, but then there are some advice they could give that may be useful in ensuring the success of the union.
Remember that wisdoms is to lay hold of God's ways and to operate at God’s frequency. It means applying the right measure for every pressure measure.
Be wise.