I have a thing for Nigerian diaspora music
There is Joy Oladokun, there is Nneka, and there is this lyric from a song Dinachi sang sometime in 2016
"When the lights go out, who will be there? Who will be there for us?"
When I envisaged a birthday tribute, I had hopes for something more flowery and colourful and longer.
The marking schemes for Pastors in our circle are pretty clearcut, very similar benchmarks
"He teaches the word of God with clarity"
"She is given to miraculous demonstrations of the Spirit"
yada yada yada
All very beautiful and it's a good thing he ticks all of these boxes, but things like these can matter so little to people like me
Pastors don’t mind a hardened sinner, some even think of them as a welcome challenge. All of them adore a devout Christian. But someone like me, who is never quite here or there is a different thing altogether, a headache of some sort
Some days, I’m a stellar example of what a Christian should be like. Other days, I want to curse God and die
Perhaps headache is not the word I was looking for, perhaps migraine is.
Imagine my confusion then, when suddenly, out of nowhere, this man appears and goes ahead to try to convince me that I’m migraine worth bearing.
He tells me words to that effect everytime. And everytime he says it, he says it with a smile on his face
But they weren’t just words
I like to think of all my midnight texts he has responded to
Or all the things he knows about me and how they have never made him flinch
The day we took a walk, sat under a tree and talked
The day he parked his car in the middle of a U-turn so we could talk
All the personal things that I cannot say
I like Dinachi's song because they remind me of someone
When my light went out, my pastor was there
