Skip to main content

The waiting room

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 told her that believing was only the key.

It opened the door to the waiting room.

In the waiting room, everything became fodder for the eye. It was part of the time you waited until your name was called and you could be ushered into the presence.

The waiting room. No one talks about the waiting room.

It is the place where time stops, and everyone is moving around attending to everything except you.

No one told her about the gnawing feeling of impatience that would be a steady hum at the back of her mind as she watched the activity in the waiting room.

Everyone was being ushered into the waiting room except her.

She felt like the forgotten child.

It was here, in the waiting room that she tried to will things to happen.

“Call my name.”

“Remember me.”

“I’m here”.

“I have been waiting”.

“what about me”?

Just, different methods of trying to make herself seen until she gave up and huddled into her seat.

It was then her eyes wandered around the room.

They crossed over the posters, the pictures, the paintings, the details of everything in the room.

Over and over again her eyes wandered around the room until she knew by heart which painting would follow, which poster, what it said, what it meant.

She was lost in this when she heard her name being called.

It was time.

*********************

No one tells you about the waiting room.

They talk about the presence but not the waiting room.

The place where the noise inside you must stumble to a halt of silence.

The place where you will have to go over memories that put up walls between you and the presence and where you will have to take those walls down one by one.

The place where it feels like everyone is getting answers except you.

No one talks about the waiting room.

The place of crushing, of breaking.

The place where you come with pride and settle down patiently because your timeline means nothing in the face of the eternal action going on around you.

The place where feelings that they say Christians are not supposed to feel spring up and we are confronted with our images in the clean sharp surface of the waiting room windows.

No one talks about the waiting room. But we should, shouldn’t we?

We all should. We all should talk about the impatience, the anger, the sorrow, the rejection, the pain, the hollowness, the rage, the bitterness, the resignation, the acceptance, the rejoicing, the trusting…just, the emotions that come with the waiting.

Because the waiting room is where everything that is us, gives way to everything that is Him, to everything that is God.


 

Comments

I finally called God Daddy

Extreme Opposites

In the third season of the series heroes, a new villain is added to the plot and he has a very interesting super power so to speak. He is ordinary until he smells fear. The scent of fear makes him develop super human strength and turns him into a deadly killing machine. I bet if he had a motto, it would run something like this; No fear, no power...more fear...more power! Fear most definitely empowers but you have to ask yourself, who is it empowering? You? If it were you, don’t you think you would feel a whole lot better than you do with all the excess baggage of fears you carry around with you? What are you most afraid of? Think about it...we all have fears. It may be that tiny nagging fear that you may not have enough money to eat dinner the next day or it could the all consuming fear of tomorrow. Whatever it is, fear is something that we all have to deal with...not live with. The minute you start believing your fears, it becomes a reality. Why? Because you empower it to e...

Opportunity costs of life

Often times as humans beings, we underestimate the depth and breadth of the human wonder called the mind. My mind travelled down a dark maze last week and strayed from snaking path to snaking path until it nearly drove me mad. I ran from one end of the maze to the other and screamed until my voice got hoarse; but no one heard me; no one heard me because all the while that I was screaming in that maze, there was a huge smile plastered on my face. I laughed at the same jokes, cracked the same jokes and did the same things I did each day I got to work in the morning. I suddenly realized that I had become a creature of habit and I didn’t like it one bit. This dark time in my life made me realize that there are countless of people lost in their own personal mazes, trapped in their own nightmare; their emotions twisted and their feeling frozen in a sheet of ice; but no one hears them thudding beneath the surface because they have mastered the art the enemy has gotten us to master in a ver...

Pulled back from the edge

I’d been smoking pot and having wild sex for the past ten years without an iota of remorse and it was all fine by me until I ran smack into T-boy. Now, he wasn’t what you would call good looking but he had that appeal that made you want to get close enough to find out what was on his mind all the time. He had that gentleness that made you want to prove that he was nothing but a fraud. He had that patience that made you want to test it until the monster you were so sure was inside him came out raging and looking for blood. He made me want to be good when all I had ever been was bad and that infuriated me. I pushed him away from me with a violence that was nearly as breathtaking as it was brutal. But he kept on coming right back. I had my male friends give him a beating that put him in a hospital. I had my female friends throw themselves over him in a shameless display of wanton lust...I screamed at him in public and slapped him more times than I care to remember...but he didn’t budg...