The Boy who saw Jesus.

This kid was hopping across the church hall with a loose shoe lace. So, a young pastor beckoned and called the boy. “Over here kid, what is your name ?”  The boy answered. The young pastor bent down to tie the lad’s shoe lace and the conversation continued. “ John, always check your shoe laces, especially when you are about to run. Do you know why I am telling you this?”  John responded with a horizontal oscillatory head movement, signifying that he doesn’t know why he should look at his own feet before running.  You may step on stray laces and injure yourself by falling when running . "I am sure we both don’t want that to happen", the pastor said.

The boy gave the typical kid’s nod.

The young man gave the kid a fondly ruffle on his locks and said "off you go John and be care…” before he could finish the kid was pacing again and he was gone to his peers. He swallowed the remainder of his  statement , sighed and continued smiling as he looked at the boy enviously.

How priceless, the view of children playing in peace and harmony without the awareness of race, ethnic background, political affiliations, religious beliefs, sexual orientation or any other thing that tears the whole world apart as we know it today.

 These children will continue  to relate in peace and love  until someone tells them otherwise.

For long parents in the western part of my country corrects their children in this manner:

 ‘Ade, see the way you are shouting, are you an Agatu?’ or ‘Stop spitting all around the compound are you a Malam?’  This creates a certain illusion of superiority in these children's minds , which is the beginning of national disaster.

No  tribe is superior to another.

 I remember how surprised I was when I learnt that the vice chancellor of my school then was Ebira. I couldn’t believe it.  He was a professor of some kind of mathematics I have never heard of before. The Ebira people I met earlier in Ekiti were not so educated.They were mostly local farmers. So, it was entirely shocking for me to encounter an Ebira professor of Mathematics, but I was glad I did, because my ignorance was educated. I met a lot of classy Ebira people during my undergraduate days and don’t let us even get started about their girls, some of them own asses that could change the world.

Back to my story about a boy seeing Jesus.

The service  started and the children departed to the children’s church. After a while, the service was coming to the last phase, it was time for sermon and a senior pastor was the one taking the sermon. Some stray kids were coming back to the main church and of course, John was one of them.

 The sermon was going exactly as the preacher has planned. This man’s kinda sermon is not really one that excites the members of the church. He was not preaching about what members love to hear. He was talking about sacrifice, about members letting go of themselves in service to others. So, at the peak of his sermon, he asked a rhetorical question. ‘brethen, how many of you have seen Jesus?’ No one answered except  John ( the boy with the loosed stray shoe-lace earlier).  He raised up his little hands and said ‘I have seen Jesus. I even saw him this morning’, he said.

Everyone was so confused, there was silence and all eyes were on him.

“Jesus helped me lace my shoe this morning”. He pointed at the young pastor “see, that is Jesus na”. Everyone gave a loud roar of laughter and some kind of relief. Trust me, from what I have read about  the coming of  Jesus, a lot of people are not eager to see him come like a thief in the night as he promised.

The pastor asked the kid “Why do you think Pastor Ebube Emeka Obasi is Jesus?” everybody gave a laugh at the preacher’s sarcasm.

What really happened,

Earlier that day, in children school. The children teacher told them of the story of how Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. And he concluded that Jesus helps people with matters they can't resolve by themselves, especially matters related to their feet because he washed the feet of his disciples, and, that same Jesus helped him with his shoes. Hmmm, very smart kid.

We need to do so much good until kids start mistaking us for Jesus.