While praying for me earlier this week, someone said something along the lines of: God would compensate Ugo and I for the two years we’ve had to be apart by giving us twin babies. I almost laughed out loud but I knew that they meant well, so I settled for an internal chuckle at the audaciousness of Nigerians’ interpreting the circumstances of your life, deciding how the rest of it should go and then telling God to make it happen as they wished. It made me think about how we interact with our time on earth – because that’s what it is – our time here, not life in its entirety. Time here, after which we move on to a different place to continue our life. However, seeing as we can’t be in two places at once, we have to end here to start there.
I thought about the things we place value on here. What we consider successful living. You’re born, you go through school, get a job to sustain a decent living, get married, reproduce, train your kids, maybe see some grandkids - then you're said to have lived a successful life. And maybe you have. There’s nothing at all wrong with this path if it’s the path written for you; you aren’t less or more important than the next person. But people have different paths, and what’s important is walking your own path and going home when you’re finished. For some people it happens over the span of 100 years, for some others, 30 years, others still, 5 years.
Some babies are stillborn, yet the mere expectation of their presence impacts their parents’ lives in a significant way. Sometimes the doctor/nurses that guided them here will be affected, depending on the circumstances of their own lives at the time. Perhaps the stillborn child changes the course of their parents' lives which then leads to something big that impacts thousands of people. Your life, no matter the path, is a necessary story in a delicately intertwined tapestry of stories, orchestrated by God.
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