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Finding Love in Strange Places

April 26, 2024

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The first place where one ought to find love is within one’s family

If you find it here you will truly know what it is and your thirst for love will be satisfied and trained the right way

You will know love is free and requires no price from you apart from acceptance and reciprocity

If you can’t find love here, you will look to relatives outside of your nuclear family

Perhaps mummy and Daddy got it wrong but one uncle or aunt can fix that

It is rare to find love here but some do

When you fail to find love here you then turn to strangers

The love strangers offer is often not for free

You get to pay in hard currency in cash and kind for this love

Many have found themselves in relationships that cost them too much to share in the name of looking or searching for love

Just to have somebody that will be devoted to making your life worth living

Somebody to keep a good record of you and tell you everything will be alright, somebody to look back and see that even though you didn’t deserve it, they went all out for you in order to ensure you become someone of value in life

Imagine being a teenager and not finding love at home as you ought to, your aunt fell ill with typhoid and you were one of those who went to the hospital to wait on her and cater to her needs out of the goodness of your heart

After hours of waiting, you fall asleep on a mat by her hospital bad and your grandmother comes in to care for her

While you were sleeping, your aunt and your grandmother started talking

You were roused out of sleep on the mat only to hear them talking condescendingly about your family, especially your mother

They thought you were sleeping but you heard the most unpalatable stuff while lying there

You could have behaved like your other cousins and disregarded her sickness as adult business, you could have chosen to go play football or go on a hunt on the farm like the others but you waited on her and that was your prize

What a family!? What a memory!?

You swallowed it and moved on but you know there is no love lost there

There was no love, period!

You then go on searching, hoping someone would love you and care enough to allow you to love him or her

You were searching for something you ought to get at home but which you never got

You were searching for something that ought to be obtainable from your extended family but which they didn’t know how to give

But you wanted love, you wanted to belong, it is in your nature, it is the air you desire to breathe, but it was never on the menu

A family that does not know how to love and encourage one another is where you have found yourself

They only thrive by tearing each other down

If one has the upper hand today he or she would lord it over the others

Nobody has a good story to tell of one of them building up the others

Your father and his siblings were all mad cats, all they did was hunt and tear up their prey relentlessly and in an unforgiving manner

This is not the stuff you want to become, this is not your nature

“Why do I have to tear others down to believe I am great?” You wonder

But nature is nature

You notice the same attitude in your own siblings

They couldn’t find love so they found the opposite of love

Schadenfreude is the pleasure one derives from the misfortune of others

This was a pattern you noticed from childhood

When you were in the university they had a meeting with your older relatives and concluded your school fees was too much and they could not support you in any way because your father was biting more than he could chew by sending you to university that was worth more than they thought was good enough for you

They always questioned to condemn, never to understand and make better

Your mother was never good because she came from a particular tribe, your father was never good because he did this and that

Your uncles were never good because they did this and that

You couldn’t find one example of where they all banded together and loved each other except at funerals

The funeral of this and the funeral of that

They all contributed money and acted as a family always after one of them died or when they were going to bury a member of the family

They didn’t know it was a form of witchcraft but you saw the pattern and you felt it was evil and ungodly

People go through several seasons in life which can be positive or negative

The family was supposed to be a place to hide your head and get an “it is well” or “you are not alone” but this is not the case in your family

If anyone dares to dream big, his dream is ridiculed and goes unsupported even when it is obvious the dream can be achieved with a bit of encouragement

Their song is, “It shall fail or we will soon see the end of this”

You didn’t take offense, you just decided this is not the kind of future you want to gift to your children and their cousins

You wanted to reorder things, make a new reality for those you can help and let the ones with gall in their veins fade out of circulation

If you can’t change them, you don’t have to join them

You have seen enough evidence to know that love has been redefined in that circle to mean “impose your will and your way on him or her because he can’t make a decision for himself”

Their idea of love and family was alien and devilish in your assessment. so you decide you will be like Abraham

You will start another lineage and dismiss the old way that your other siblings have embraced

You will be a guiding light that will set in order the lost way of what ought to be and what is in your own generation

It is not an easy feat but you are determined that when Christ shall come he shall find faith in you and call you a profitable servant

This is your agenda and to achieve it you have to ruffle feathers and go it your way Or you could just stay with the norm and conform

These were the options Jesus faced in his lifetime

He came into a divided world

A world in which the Jews saw the Gentiles as unworthy

A world in which the Gentiles saw the Jews as arrogant and deserving of all the bad things that could happen to them-a  world of strife and pain

The Bible says Jesus broke down the wall of hostility between the Jews and the Gentiles and formed a new nation by his blood so that love could bind them together and they could become one entity

This is the essence of the love of Christ

A love that refused to continue in the segregative and discriminatory way of Moses and the law but decided to offer a new approach to saving the world from sin

Jesus came with grace and truth

Grace canceled out all sins and faults of the past, present, and future

The truth opened the heart of the believer to the reality of the possibilities in Christ so that in it every believer was empowered to get saved and live a life full of love and joy for eternity

This is the greatest gift of love in history and no other sacrifice can eclipse it

It is a love that is far above any other sacrifice ever made or that can ever be made

It answered the issue of racism, classism, creed, language, origin, and colour

It created a whole new species of divine beings and called them a royal priesthood

This is love at its best and it is the only kind of love that can endure times and seasons from generation to generation

This is the only kind of love worth celebrating from Arkansas to Abidjan and from Jalingo to Djibouti

Love so amazing, so divine

Amazing Grace, Amazing love

Many of us find ourselves searching for love in strange places, in strange beds and strange arms

We subjected ourselves to vanity in the hope of finding the substance that will define our lives as worthwhile

We find ourselves stalking strange DM’s and strange inboxes

We know we just do not want to end up living our lives by ourselves without someone to bear a record of our lives and seasons

We want to matter and we can only matter to that one special person before we matter to others who are drawn to the light we are shinning

Many have gotten lost in their quest to find true love

There is no love that can beat that which Jesus is offering and has always offered

It keeps you warm at night and is not jealous or antagonistic of you when you find another kind of love with someone else while in it

It is the right kind of love

It does not choke or hide behind the devil instead of saying sorry when it has overstepped its boundaries

It is the perfect love

The love that we all deserve to have this Valentine’s season

PS: Enjoy the Valentine’s Day celebrations, please

Life is short and its joys in the flesh are very limited

Make the best of each day

Make sure your heart beats for someone other than you

Jesus recommends it, so embrace it

When we give others a gift on a day like this, we show that we are mindful and thoughtful of such a person

We declare that the person’s well-being matters to us and that the person’s life is worth celebrating

It is important to make one another feel special and loved

Valentine is but an excuse to express our love as we ought to do daily in Christ Jesus

Happy valentines day to you

 -GSW-

 

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