During my high school years I lived with my aunt and her family. My aunt and her husband were both active in the church we attended. One of the things they often did was ensure that when a pastor or leader would visit, they would have someone give them a ride home. The greatest thing about these rides was that the person doing the driving would often not want to endure the ride back home after the drop off alone and so would ask someone, to accompany them. I didn't know how to drive then and Taifa wasn't an extremely happening place so it didn’t take much to leap at such opportunities to get out on a slow, often uneventful Sunday afternoon. It was on one of such Sunday afternoon drives that the foundation of a belief or state of mind I had cultivated as a child was shaken at its core.
En route to our destination, there was an impatient taxi driver sharing the road with us. In his haste he proceeded to overtake our vehicle in a curve, almost pushing us off the road in his illegal move. I was sitting in the back seat behind the driver on this fateful day and the pastor sat in the front seat. That moment of reckless driving was also the moment that challenged my perception in what I have come to learn and accept as necessary. As the cab driver performed his illegal maneuver making our driver turn reflexively to avoid a collision, shouts of Jesus! colored the atmosphere, however as is typical of most “almost” fatal accidents, as soon as our car recovered to stay on the road, my sentiment was shifted from fear to anger towards the taxi driver’s recklessness but because of present company I painfully resisted the temptation to make some insults happen. To my utmost shock however, words of rage erupted from the pastor’s mouth, words of which I imagined pastors were incapable. One of such proclamations made was something like"driver kwasia bEn su nye eyi?" tr: what kind of a fool is this driver? In that moment I was silenced even deeper probably more by the comment than the fear that we had almost been killed.
Pastors were infallible in my eyes. This is a perception I had developed probably as a result of my upbringing. They were men of God who could do no wrong; they were incapable of wrong that I was capable of. Nobody explicitly told me this but in a way no one ever really needed to. Whether it was my own doing or not, my perception of pastors up until that point was that they were super human and were incapable of doing the same things I was capable of, they were to a degree, higher, better and cleaner. So to hear the pastor utter those words suddenly placed a fork in the road in my thinking and perception of humanity. For lack of a better expression, this event traumatized me. What I had believed about a particular group of people was in the moment being challenged.
I had two options either to believe that this pastor was an odd ball, a rebel so to speak or to do something radical and totally destroying a lifetime school of thought that pastors are a different breed of humans; that they are after all human just like me, that this occurrence was more norm than exception. The former would have seemed safe to do a thought and would have saved me any further cerebration but even at that age I knew it wasn't that easy... To be continued.
Note: I am adopting a way of writing that will allow people who can’t commit to reading long texts to be able to enjoy the blog in parts. I will break up some of the long entries like this one into two or three coherent shorter parts so that they wont be too long.
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