MY STORY

While in the US, I worked as a Chaplain Assistant at Lebanon County Correctional Facility (LCCF), I also worked at a Half-way house called Transitional House where the formerly incarcerated who were also on parole were housed for a period of six months as they looked for a job and saved some money to help them as they transited to the “external” world. I also volunteered on Thursdays and weekends at a Thrift Store. All these stations of work were all under one roof, JUBILEE MINISTRIES, a very wonderful Christian Ministry organization that created and still creates the needed impact in that part of East Coast of the US.

One morning while attending to some of the incarcerated men in the prison in a Bible Study, I remember one member in my class asking me,” if the God you say exists and loves humankind so much, why did He allow my two sisters to die of leukaemia ” Another one in one of my closed door case studies asked me,” You say God is there and watches over, why did He then allow me to keep the drug paraphernalia that got me arrested again and I am back here in the prison?”

The above mentioned questions are just but a few of the difficult ones that I grappled to answer. How could I justify God’s LOVE for the few mentioned above! How could I convince them that God indeed was watching and that God not only loved them but LOVED them so very MUCH!

I have been back home for now one and half years now, I haven’t had a job for a very long time, close to a year now, I have been engaged long enough and ought to have been married by now, I have my pursuit for further education pausing if not stopping, a lot of “bad” things have happened that I haven’t liked and never thought would come my way. Jobs knocks at my door step sometimes and eventually slip off again; opportunities come and before my very eyes and many others that are more personal and dear to my heart.

I have asked for God’s provision, fasted, prayed and asked God to forgive me of my sins that at some point I thought were blocking my ways, I have served in church and in my neighbourhood, may be I haven’t done enough.

But as a staunch Christian who has walked with the Lord for many years and having been brought up in a Christian family and set-up, now, regardless of my shortcomings, I have always known that God’s LOVE is UNCONDITIONAL and true, I have always asked knowing that He will give, sought and thought I could find, knocked and I have been waiting for Him to open. I have known God to be very faithful in fulfilling His promises, many are the times that I have lost sight of this fact. I have asked for signs, I have asked Him to literally speak to me and be given direction but in vain.

Many are the times now I have found myself asking the same questions the incarcerated were asking me then! I have asked whether He do care, whether He watches, whether His LOVE is still UNCONDITIONAL. Some of the times, I have asked and petitioned Him to prove that His words in the Holy Bible are not lies. I have asked Him and told Him, that, yes, I haven’t been so diligent enough in my service to Him coming from my human background of culpability to sin but at least to reward me and stand out to the many that don’t trust in Him that indeed He does reward His people. I have complained that He has taken too long to answer my prayers.

The question that has always lingered in my mind is, “Am I asking for too much?”

I will leave it at that point.