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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.


 

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I finally called God Daddy

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