I sat calmly at the dining table, picking my teeth clean and reminiscing
on the awesome meal of ugha & okazi soup I had just eaten, putting behind
me the battle of driving 130km from Uyo against a heavy storm and waterlogged
roads in Abia state, when I watched daddy make a request to mummy and he had this
boyish look on his face as if he was having “long-throat”. Lol! Mummy’s response played out as words
of a loving mother, scolding her child for being excessive, yet with acts of a
pleasing wife, in obeisance to his needs and presenting a small portion of the
same awesome meal to quench that appetite. As he dipped his hurriedly washed
hands into the plate, he started to make funny jokes about not sharing his food
with her in what sounded Yoruba-ish to which she responded to
the joke in a flawless Yoruba tongue. Mummy speaks the 3 main Nigerian languages
awesomely if I may add. It felt like what I had just seen was cute so I decided
to share my little meditation on Love & Family to you all.
My dear friends, I do not know all there is to human love. The truth is I’ve
given up on trying to know. But I can’t stop knowing what Divine Love is and I know the
first reproduction of Divine Love in creation is in the family of Eden according to the book of the beginnings (Genesis). Our Christian Faith teaches us the
mystery of the Godhead is a Family: The Father, the Son and the bond between
both which is so real it exists in their very nature as the Spirit. One uniqueness of the
Godhead Family is Loyalty and this is the same virtue the Son and Spirit went
out to teach the bride to be in this Holy Family. We see it in their darkest hours, how the Father never abandoned the Son nor did the Son abandon the vision and
mission they shared for reconciling Humanity, the bride, to the perfect communion of the Family at Creation.
This uniqueness of Love is loyalty, long-suffering and Hope in the coming of
the Glory of perfection and it is the seeds of this bond that brings humanity
together for all ages into the one Faith and one Body. These are the seeds that were first planted over 4,000
years ago in the heart of a man called Abram. This is why the Patriachs of old
were obsessed with family names & genealogies that they would teach their
generations to be loyal to their family name and to the name of the LORD (YHWH).
I’m trying so hard to be as brief as possible. I wish I could open the layers
of scripture to teach this mystery.
Love was never mainly about feelings/emotions. Both of these are
necessary but making them crucial veils the true glory of love. Our
generation has lost this meaning and now more than ever they have reduced love
to trust in feelings rather than trust in the fact that God alone can make ANY
family perfect regardless of the difficulties they face in making their dreams
and vision a reality. The source of ensuring this Loyalty in the family
is the Family of God and just as it started from the Father and Son and was
poured out as the Holy Spirit, so also it must begin with a man and a woman and
be poured out into their children. I wish I could say my parents are a power
couple but they’ve been far from perfect. They have many levels of disputes, I
mean a whole lot, and yet they have endured together for about 30 years. Their
loyalty to achieving their dreams of raising successful children has kept them
together and that loyalty creates beautiful moments of emotions that make you
realise love is not only made of roses that bloom and blossom but also thorns that prick and hurt so bad. I
know there are families who have had awesome weddings or anniversaries and yet they can’t
seem to keep themselves together. Understanding this taught me that true happiness is not
having neither squabbles nor quarrels but rather making sure we depend on God
to keep those things as far as possible from our happiness while we struggle to live out our hope, daily as a family.
In my moments of contemplation, it finally dawned on me exactly what love means between a man and a woman. In plain words, it is agreements of value (codes of conduct, sharing a mantle). It is making a name. If you don’t understand this value at your core it will be impossible for you to keep your family together. When you understand Love you finally realise it is not a word or an emotion you turn on and off. It is a bond you can’t mess with because it is living and made up of people worth sacrificing so much for. On this beautiful eve of the resurrection, I pray that every family
would realise that the promises of the risen Lord is not only freedom and
prosperity, but hope and trust. May they realise that in sticking together
during difficult times, all of God’s goodness and mercies shall unfold to
them. What you hope for shapes what you live for. There would be
times we would have less faith in what God has given to us, but in those times
we must never lose hope because God is always there for us. Happy Easter!
“If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He [God]
cannot deny Himself” [2
Timothy II:13]
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