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Finding Love in Strange Places
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-