Chronicles Of Flora

Snippets from Believers Equip Conference, 2021.

-If your Christianity is permanently in your heart and cannot be seen, it is a fraud – Rev. Gideon Odoma (because you know, nobody truly encounters God and remains the same.)

– In the kingdom, being a strong man is never by accident – Apostle Arome Osayi. (this prayer and Bible study that you don’t like is the only way, sorry. We are strengthened by constant fellowship with Him).

-You are not a spiritual man if you’re not careful not to eat any meat that will make your brother weak – Apostle Arome Osayi. (So, yes, be patient with thy brethren, God was and still is patient with you).

– Fornication diffuses concentration – Apostle Arome Osayi. (I mean, apart from the fact that you will not want to talk to Jesus outta guilt, ko worth it.)

-What legitimacy do we have to call a fallen world when we’re a backsliding church? – Rev. Gideon Odoma (may this be as personal to you as it is to me, may it prick your heart the way it pricks mine.)

– Don’t seek to be deep, seek to be fresh – Rev. Austin. (And so God, help us not be stale)

– The speaking in tongues that will heal the sick will not happen on stage – Rev. Gideon Odoma. (you must build alone, deliberately , unless you want to meet nana from Ghana😌)

– You don’t need a microphone to be a minister – Rev. Gideon Odoma (one of my favorite hymns came to mind here; “let none hear you idly saying there is nothing I can do, while the souls of men are dying and the master calls for you”. The field, the field is too vast to reduce to the pulpit).

– If you’ve not seen how insufficient you are, you’ll not see the reason why you need a God – Apostle Arome Osayi (And so, from my heart, I pray for you that every day reveals to you what a frail entity your humanity is).

This is like so little out of the so much but I wouldn’t want you to miss out completely on BEC because truly, it can only be experienced.

You’re welcome.

#Shalom

Mi Amor,

Someday, when you’re old enough, you’ll fall in love with a boy for the first time, and when you do, it would actually feel like a fall, you will literally feel the adrenaline surge through your entire being at the sound of his name. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be shy, awkward, unsure of what to do with this emotion foreign to you. You may wonder – how dare he make you smile so subconsciously despite your strong resolve? Who gave him the audacity to violently bring your walls crashing down? No, I hope you’re not like me, scared and desperate to kill it, this emotion you’re not familiar with. I hope you’re like your grand mother, thrilled, clutching unto every bit of this beauty until it led her to having me.

   Someday, when you’re old enough and unsure of what to do with this emotion, I hope you let me in on it, I hope you can trust me with it because it’s okay for your eyes to glitter, it’s okay for your smile to linger a little longer, it’s okay because you are human. Your emotions are inherent, you are meant to feel.

    No, I’ll not tell you about how if he touches your pant, you’ll have a part of him growing in your womb. You my darling would already know this to be a lie because your generation is that smart.

    I’ll tell you about how unsure I was too, I’ll tell you about how the first boy to ever make me feel butterflies made me want to learn Yoruba, I’ll tell you about how his mother asked me too many questions that made me tremble but didn’t stop me from seeing him again, I’ll tell you about how he’s the first boy I ever bought a gift for, I’ll tell you about how he went to the studio to sing me a song asking me to be his girlfriend and it was such a romantic grand gesture in my books. Then, you’ll understand that it’s okay to love a boy for the first time because it’s beautiful.

  If you’re anything like me, he’ll woo you with poetry and still be your biggest fan because he’ll make you learn to write, I mean, all of what you feel must find an exit point and if you’re anything like me, it’d be through words.

     Mi Amor, I can almost not wait to love you. ❤️

Yesterday, I woke up past 8am to this client’s knock on the door. My alarm had tried to wake me up twice before that but I hand? Always too swift to dismiss that attempt, almost asif the alarm was a nuisance. There was no class, in truth, I didn’t even check before sleeping. I just hoped. It had been a long week because I attended CME (Continuing Medical Education). That’s a whole different story.

I opened the door for the client and went straight to the bathroom to brush my teeth, my day had begun in full. I started braiding, I started small talk as well. This business has forced extroversion on me. She obliged. She was reading “pancreatitis”, I made a mental note to read it too. I should after this post. The room became still after a short while. I worked in silence. I texted my next client to ask if I could come by 11am. She said she was at work and asked if I could come by 4pm and sleepover. I was okay with that. I’m not so rigid with keeping to my schedules during the weekends, as I’ve come to learn over the years, if  I hold too tightly to time, I’d end up frustrated because there are so many reasons why that may change and my peace is too precious to me to allow someone(not even myself) ruin. I chose to do other things in the interim like have my bath, I noticed the sun was shinning really brightly, almost scorching too when I went out to take the picture below so I decided to wash the clothes in my bathroom. About washing, rainy season isn’t my best season of the year, there are fewer things I dislike above piling dirty clothes so I’m always washing, even if it takes the clothes five days to finally get dry. Not my problem as long as they are clean. So many of my clothes have gotten stolen during raining season.

  After washing and bathing. I went to pick something from a friend. I stayed there longer than I planned, her twin was around. We went back and forth with the whole, “you just forgot about me”. I don’t take such claims to heart, I’ve come to learn that sometimes, that’s how people say that they miss you. Wording may be different but the emotion is the same. And so I lingered, because at the end of the day, what is life but random moments? These are the things that become memories and it’s my duty to make them good. That at least, I can control.
   I went to buy things, the second reason I left my house. The man gave me a discount after my face expressed shock over half a crate of eggs now being N3000. Sometimes, my speech is a shadow of my looks. My facial expressions always betray me. I like to buy things from him. He understands business. He understands cordiality. Almost everytime I come, we have small talks, I ask about his nursing wife, he continues to ask “and what else?” to my “I want to buy…” 
   I came home and started to make swallow. I made bitterleaf soup during the week. When I miss my mother, I start to make the things that she likes, the things I otherwise wouldn’t. It’s a weird psychology but that soup made me feel closer to Kaduna, to my mother. While still cooking, another person asked if I could come make her hair, what she wanted was simple, so I obliged. The journey there was an experience and yes, I said journey because Lamingo to Tudun wada is a journey. I even met an acquaintance from YWAP. We talked about her busy life as a mother and mine as a medical student juggling business. My next client’s husband was eating an apple and asked me what looked like that on xray. I had no clue. He said colon cancer. Now, I know I’d never forget. I think this is what gleaning knowledge feels like, learning from the random things. I made another mental note to read colon cancer. I like to think that this is why I chose to do MBBS. I’ve always been a curious person. I had fun making that hair(I have no pictures because I finished past 6).
    I came to the third person’s house in Lamingo. She already asked if I could sleepover. Don’t fret, she’s my friend. I don’t go about sleeping at random people’s houses. Her husband came to pick me from her junction because I saw people in the dark smoking at the corner to her house and me? I’d rather lose hair money than lose my phone or worse, be sexually assaulted. My mum would have given me a whole speech on why I shouldn’t be outside in the dark. For someone who had been mugged at gunpoint in the past, you’d expect me to avoid the night. I got to the house. Husband and wife were both my senior colleagues at some point. We started talking like we were picking up the conversation from somewhere, except I don’t know where. I hadn’t come here in months. I had another round of “oh, you just forgot about us” and I simply “you know it’s not like that” my way through it. They fed me spaghetti, I can almost taste it again while writing this. The food was that good. I got to business, she had made most of the hair herself, I simply came to help finish the front. I was glad that ended quickly. I was extremely tired. The husband was holding a proton pump inhibitor and started to ask me about side effects. The only thing that came to mind was nausea and vomiting (I’m a first principle kind of person, for any drug taken orally, that’s my first response). He said it was anticholinergic. His wife gave me the mechanism of how it causes iron deficiency anemia. I learnt yesterday that it also causes hypomagnesemia.
   So yes, yesterday I learnt that for me, business is not just about making money. Sometimes, it’s about staying in touch, it’s about learning passively. I mean, I learnt so much about pregnancy while braiding my friend. Symptoms that Obsgyn didn’t teach me because there are so many idiosyncrasies with experience.
   Her husband said he was impressed with me balancing school and business. I don’t think I am. I wouldn’t even tag my business as thriving because I shut it down a lot for school. That’s the problem of being a soloprenuer, the business doesn’t survive outside of you. I envision the days when I’d send clients to the shop, to my workers but until then, I’d make these stressful trips and continue to show up because Paul says to not be slothful in business (Romans 12:11).

#Shalom