It went down like hot eba with slippery ogbono soup. Quick, fast, fleeting, barely leaving any taste in the mouth; Just the brief memory that something had slid in and gone down quick as lightening. It should have done the work it was meant to do, but it didn’t. And she didn’t understand it. She didn’t understand how something that was meant to be quick and powerful turned weak and feeble inside her. She willed it to life. Manifested it into being. Held the image of it in her mind’s eye until she felt the eye of her mind turn red from not blinking. She was exhausted. It was supposed to work. They promised her it would. She was only meant to believe they said, and it would happen. She believed. She really did. She felt her sinews and joints coursing with the belief, she really did. But still, she felt deflated too, as if the course of belief stopped shy of inflating her flesh with its presence. She was exhausted. *************************** Someone should have
Photo by Melanie Wasser on Unsplash To the abused: You know how they say it takes great strength to leave an abusive relationship? I think it takes great fear to stay in an abusive relationship. Fear is the currency abusers trade with, the misappropriation of the power they have in a relationship. Because at the end of the day, that is what abuse is. It is the misappropriation of power. For men who name themselves Christians and abuse the women in their lives, the power given to you is one that is meant to be gentled. True power is knowing that you have the ability to destroy everything but deciding to protect and grow the weak things around you. It is not identifying weaknesses and using that as a spear to thrust through the side of the woman you have already pummeled into a shadow of their former selves. It is not using the same mouth that is meant to produce God-life to speak death into the life of the woman with whom you are meant to reveal God. When you abuse you