I became a soothsayer at 23.
It was an unusually cold evening in March, a few weeks after I had been offered employment as a presenter and producer in a TV station in my final semester of university.
Nobody had told me it could rain like that in March the evening I became a soothsayer.
In a Primary Four Ga lesson, Mr Ayibontey, our Ga teacher taught us, “March is the sunniest month of the year. ‘Otsokirikiri.’” He syllabified the word – O-tso-ki-ri-ki-ri – on the blackboard and said it was so-called because the sun burned with a fiery blast.
The only thing I had grown to associate with March was its ability to birth unfathomable heat with the anger of its sun. Never with rain. But the evening I became a soothsayer, there had been a downpour. Accra was wet.
As I reclined in bed, I imagined my glamourous, promising future career in media and journalism and pictured myself on set. I also imagined my mother’s Thanksgiving Service on a bright Sabbath day and even imagined the kente she would wear.
The thought of how she was sure to say to friends and well-wishers and anyone who cared to listen that the Lord had dealt pleasantly with me roused a smile through my whole body. On my skin, the smile appeared as goosebumps as the thought surged at the surreality of my grand vision.
I dreamt of an elegantly crafted grand future and waited to see it come to life with bones and breath and limbs, to live and breathe independently of me.
But man proposes.
The delay has lips, I tell you. And the audacity to call you by name and even touch you with his hands like uncles touch little girls in their sleep when their mothers are busy looking elsewhere.
The two years I spent at the TV station were years of absolute draught. Nothing came in, nothing went out. Gates of fortune securely shut. A personal Jericho.
My feet had learned a sad dance of delay and stagnation in endless circles. Life had come to a standstill and I felt the heaviness of this standstill in my feet. An unbearable weight of loss and defeat hung around my neck. A burden lay on my shoulder.
The delay slumps you gradually until you stoop to the shame.
My fears had crept in on tiptoes and invaded my life. The shame had moved in, too, that clandestine stroller, and had swallowed my voice whole. Uncooked.
I couldn’t lift my head and had begun to walk through my own life with the demure countenance of one passing through a foreign land. I was afraid of life.
When a real job came in through a friend, I was fatigued. Not a pyrrhic-victory kind, but a certain exhaustion I cannot put a name to. I was too drained to celebrate this goodness of God. I had set off on this journey at dawn, yet, here I was, at dusk, still moving in circles in the marketplace of life.
I was 29 and no longer a soothsayer.
I was 29, but still hadn’t understood life and grace and the ways of God, though I was born and raised a Christian.
In the many teachings of the Church on grace and other blessings, we are often taught only the forward-moving graces of God and never the other side of His spiritual blessings.
Sometimes, this grace (always on the move) moves us forward. At other times it stalls us. The grace may even move us to the backseat.
I didn’t know that grace could speak backwards, and that it had the right to walk backwards, even use her left hand. I believe a lot of people in the church don’t know this, too, because they probably haven’t been taught by those who preach the grace message.
I had become so fixated on having been stripped in public that I didn’t consider, for a second, that God didn’t need my permission to move me from my premium seat in the front row to the backbench.
Nobody is too important to be stalled, neither is God obliged to work with anyone’s schedule.
One of the most dangerous things about us humans is our biased, static description of grace as a thing that should move us forward all the time. Not only is this description flawed, it is, I believe, a deadly thing to hope in.
Nothing ever solely moves forward, not even time. And memory is a kind teacher to hold our hand in this lesson.
While grace is allowed to walk backwards, there’s a striking difference between retrogression in its essence, and stalling or back-benching from God. The difference is the grace factor which is embedded in the purpose of the latter.
Back-benching is a bitter blessing that comes to clear our path in our waiting period. In the clearing, there may be stalling. There may be stagnation. Delay even. But that is far from retrogression – that downward spiral that takes us deep into an abyss.
It never gets better with retrogression because grace doesn’t live there.
The thing is, the stalling power of grace shouldn’t be warped; it’s a part of your blessings. The change will come, eventually, like it did in my case after nine years. And when it does, you will experience a speed that may scare you: ‘wasted’ years restored in days and weeks.
I do not know a lot of things. But one thing I am certain of is this: there shall be breath on your dry bones. And your dead things shall spring back to life. I know you will dream again.
It may happen when you’re busy working on yourself. Or when you’re sleeping. Or when you’re awake and doing nothing. Or when you’re full of doubt. Or even when all hope is lost. God doesn’t need your faith to resurrect your dead years.
Grace understands the language of the Spirit and knows that the weight of what we are called to do sometimes requires a certain catapulting into the future. And, what better way does a skilled hunter shoot a sling than by drawing it backwards?
