Dear Agatha,
I am 40 years of age. My life has been a huge struggle as far back as I can remember. Both my parents for reason best known to them didn’t bother. They seemed to prefer my immediate younger brother to me and gave him all the encouragement to succeed. I, on the other hand, had to go into trade to enable me go further in my education.
Tried as everybody in the family did to make my mother especially change her mind about me and help speak to my father on my behalf, fell on her deaf ear.
After a certain age, I stopped feeling sorry or angry with them. Through the help of the church, I accepted it as my faith in life. Being the eldest of three children, I saw it has God’s way of making self-sufficient hence invested myself into making my life the success it is now.
Apart from sponsoring my education through school, I also was able to establish my own business, which by the grace of God and the help of the only true friend I have is a huge success today.
This friend happens to be a girl I met when I went to re-sit my Ordinary Level exams.
I was the oldest in the class but unlike others, didn’t join them in laughing at me. She would go out of her way to explain and teach me things I didn’t know. Being so busy learning a trade, it was a struggle keeping up with class work.
I was almost giving up but she gave me all the encouragement to continue.
Throughout the examinations, she helped me with answers. I made my papers and would not have continued but she insisted I enrolled for the Joint Admission Matriculation Examinations (JAMB). When it became obvious to her that I was foot-dragging, she obtained the form, filled it for me, stole my passport-size photography and submitted it. I only got to know about the whole thing when she brought the examination slip.
She also helped in that examination. She registered me for Business Administration. Once I gained admission, it was easy because school was giving the knowledge to do what I loved best, trading.
Throughout our stay in school, she was by my side. I got to know everything about her. She was not only a very generous person but has the fear of God. I began to call her my angel because she touched me in a very special way nobody had ever touched me. Being from a very comfortable family, I told her father everything about me who in turn offered to pay my fees. Her mother was dead.
At graduation, he gave me N3m to add to my pay-off money from my master who also was very supportive.
The girl’s father also gave me my first shop. He didn’t do this without attaching any conditions beyond being a hardworking boy, who reminded him of his early days, struggling to survive.
He equally gave me good contacts, which today made me the huge success I am today.
Through all these, my parents never asked or bothered about me. They were only after my brother who graduated before me. They also treated my only sister with disdain, forcing her to marry a man old enough to be her father. They didn’t bother to sponsor her beyond primary school.
In keeping with tradition, when I wanted to marry, I went to inform them but for what they cared I shouldn’t have bothered. It was my uncle and his wife who stood in as my parents. They took the backstage. Having prepared my woman and her father, they handled the situation well.
My brother didn’t bother to come. My sister was my only sibling that did.
After that, I decided to stay away from them. When my wife put to birth, it was my uncle’s wife that came to help with the set of twins. She became the mother I never had.
I don’t know what happened between my parents and my brother but I only got to know through my sister who is now widowed and back in school through the encouragement of my wife and I, that he sold off the family house to a bank and that my parents were thrown out of the property.
He is also nowhere to be found. Meanwhile my parents have been turned into squatters in their own village.
The elders of the village led by my uncle have come pleading with me to forgive them and help them out with a house. They want me to forget the past.
My wife too has been pleading with me but how can I forget their meanness or refusal to send me to school? How can I forget the undeserved beating, starvation, and their hatred for me? What did I do to deserve such a treatment?
If it weren’t for my wife and her father, where would I have been today?
Agatha, religion is one thing but this is another. After the way they treated me at my wedding, I have sworn never to have anything to do with them again? This matter has been on for two months now, I really don’t know why I am writing to you or what I want you to say when I have already made up my mind not to listen to anybody on this issue but I can’t help the force inside of me telling me to share it with you.
Michael.
Dear Michael,
I empathise with you and understand the deep struggle within you over the injustice of your parents’ treatment. I also understand the confusion especially at being able to fathom why they acted that way against you and your sister.
Being their first born, their first son, if you decided to act on the way they have treated you from birth till date, none of all those people coming to beg you would really blame you because they all witnessed your pains, rejection and humiliation. Having gone through your story too, I won’t blame you if you stick to your guns not to help. After all where were they when you too needed them?
But where would such hard-line posture leave you? What would you gain by repaying their meanness with another meanness? If you do that, you would have taken your pound of flesh, wiping the slate clean and stripping yourself of the cover of mercy God has wrapped you with through your years of struggle and now.
God knew all about your pains hence dotted your path in life with people to help you realise His plans for you. He never included your parents among those to help you succeed. Their role in your life was only to give birth to you, carry you from heaven into the world.
What you should never forget is that those things, which are not included in the plans of God for His children, no matter how much we desire them will never happen. Your parents didn’t have any reason to hate or reject you. If you ask them now, they will never be able to explain their indifference to you and your sister. They simply did it to fulfill the plans, which God has for you and your sister.
Your brother was the only one God wanted them to train. The situation in your family is meant to teach you and others lessons, an important one that all children should be given the same level grounds by parents because nobody except God knows which one would turn out to be useful in life.
Not to forgive your parents is to tell God that He made a huge mistake with you, that all the while He was catering for your need through the people He blessed you with, He was simply wasting time on you.
Showing love where there was once hatred is the only way to make complete God’s reasons for doing what He did in your family. Your parents have to learn this lesson too because nobody can tell the story better than the victim of a crime. You have to show them the unconditional love and mercy in your relationship with God.
Being a Christian without demonstrating the attitude and attributes of God is an empty journey. Why do you still hold grudge when God has blessed you beyond curse, raised you above condemnation, displaced the plans of man in your life?
Why do still hold grudge when God has vindicated you above powers and principalities, favoured you even beyond your imagination? The God you serve is a one that strives in Love and specialises in absolute forgiveness and strives in complete justice. Why else would He allow this to happen if not to make it possible for your parents to humble themselves before you?
Can you imagine their shame, the disgrace and pains of having the child they invested so much on, placed all their hopes in life selling the home and exposing them to this base condition in their old age? Do you know what it is like to live as refugees in your own country?
They can’t come to beg you; the shame would be too much for them, hence the interventions of the elders.
If for nothing else, consider this uncle who with his wife have always supported you like his own. Think of the grace of your wife and family? God has never for once left you to suffer, so you have no reason to be bitter.
Even if you don’t go to them, provide everything they need to be happy and comfortable within your means, else if they die before you forgive them, you would never be able to forgive yourself later in life. You may not suffer any repercussion whatsoever but the conscience is such a terrible thing, would never allow you be at perfect peace. Don’t, through your own folly, rob yourself of the peace and happiness you enjoy today.
Think, were your children to abandon you to fate, how would you feel? It may look impossible but it can happen if that is the way God designed your end to be.
So make sure you provide them with a roof of their own. It is the least you can do for all the favours God has bestowed on you.
There is no way you can fight your own battle and win. Continue to give your battles in life to God to fight for you because it is the only place you can continue to be on top of your enemies as well as situations in life. Hard as this appears, give yourself to God through prayers and He would provide you the grace to do it right.
Good luck.
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