Just two days ago, I sat down to examine the chaos that has been my life and it just dawned on me that I can name a thousand reasons why God should not make sense to me. I even saw a video on TikTok where a former fervent Christian itemized dozens of reasons why she stopped believing in God and I cannot lie to you, she made very valid points. I have seen people lose faith because of loss and pain. I have even had moments where I held my faith to light and questioned the potency of it. 

I don't even know why I am making this post, if not to tell you that I have tasted a life where my faith in God was not the center of my being and I felt like a fish out of water. When I say faith, I am not talking about organized or performative religion. I am not even talking about being a churchgoer or posting scriptures on the internet - I am talking about the fierce and unflinching belief that there is a God, and that God knows exactly who you are by perfect love, purpose, and design. I cannot even rationalize it to you, I just know I am not an evolutionary science experiment or a product of the big bang theory. I chose to believe that I come from a perfect entity who gave life to the nullity of this world. It's easier that way. 

Belief is powerful, it helps you power through. For some people, it helps them make sense of grief - to understand that a person they care about, has found peace in a place that is beyond this world. It can be a painful, yet hopeful thing. For me, it is in my heartbeat. As I breathe I know it, as I wake, I know it, as I move and love and grief and cry, I know it. I know there is a supreme being and He exists beyond my intellect or contradictions. It's almost like a burden. I have not been able to pray or study the word as I would like to lately, but today I did, and I just found myself shouting, 'God you are so real, it hurts.'  Not that His existence is hurting me, no. It's just… I am fresh off a sea of doubt and this sudden wash of truth that has overwhelmed me feels surgical to my heart. 

A series of events led up to this, but one of them is my writing. I feel more like a child of God when I write. It doesn't matter what I am writing about, it can be murder, sex, love, or history. I just feel like a god when I turn letters into stories and sentences. 

I don't pretend when I write to God.

I say - hey God I don't trust you today because I am tired of life, help my unbelief.

I say - God, I am horny for no reason and if this body is truly the temple you say it is, help me worship my way out of this raging desire.

I say - God, I am jealous of my friends' progress, teach me to be happy for them, for I am not a witch.

I say - God, I don't like my body today, why didn't you create me without extra skin?

I say - God, I am not one of your strongest soldiers, is it not enough to bleed every month, why not take this severe pain away?

I say - God, representation matters,  some people make serving you look like suffer head, I need more examples of your fervent daughters & sons enjoying this life.

I say - God,  am I a rebel for believing that men and women are equal?

This type of honesty keeps me grounded. Because I am baring my heart in its broken and contrite form and you know what God does with a heart like this. He balms it with answers and courage and hope and love. I don't have all my answers yet, but what I have is peace, that I am led by light. That  I am on a journey with the God of all heavens and earth and my answers are in the number of steps I am ready to take with this God. 

This post is already too long. I just came here to say that if your faith is failing start with honesty, no matter how brutal, God can take it. Don't pretend because you don't want to look like a bad person or question God. Tell him exactly how you feel. It's therapeutic to talk to God. God would meet you exactly where you are. 

I have more to say. But later. Talk to me in the comments. 

I write to complete creation; to lend my hands to the moulding of this temporal space I am made to dwell in. 

I make sentences because my father left me with a head pan of letters and a shovel of words. He named me a builder and asked me to draw light from darkness, to invent and cement a storyline. He threatened to throw my birthright to the dogs if I do not create a soft landing, a base, an accessible megaphone to allow for koinonia among my brethren.

 I write with the audacity of a god, an heir to an empire the king left at foundation level and ascended into divine space. I write because I carry a yoke on my fingertips, a light burden that unearths itself in a form devoid of emptiness and ready to give the world shape. 

When I write, I am obeying the last wishes of my grandfather, a gentle spirit and king in a small village in southeastern Nigeria. I like to believe divinity sent him as my forerunner to deepen and uproot languages with his tongue, to travel across dynasties, and baptize royalties with moonlight stories so that I can be worthy enough to unbuckle the straps of people who have walked through timelessness. 

They say writing flows in my ancestry; that my mother and the mothers before her wrote on sands, that they registered shivers down the spines of men and scrawled threats into the palm wine keg of the drunkard who dared to beat them even before paper was invented. I write because I want to summon them, to make them have breath in this new world they are not accustomed to; to continue their legacy.

In this world full of limitations, writing is my escape route, my oxygen of confrontation, and my freedom lounge. When I write, I embody the temerity to call things that be not as though they are. Like a true daughter of a royal father, I give breath to clay and dare them to turn to dust.

I have the power to create life and take it, to transport bodies across continents from my favourite armchair and sprinkle diverse traits over the characters I have formed.

 When I put my pen to blank paper, I feel like a god with the bravado to build anthills in the savannah, to come out boldly and declare that the beautiful ones are not yet born, to look at the yellow sun and slice it in half, to behold the severity of chaos and still declare that everything good will come. 

I evade prosecution with my words. How I can boldly declare my sister a serial killer without facing the full wrath of the law or look the future in the eye and tell it that tomorrow died yesterday. I write because I can reinvent, alter time, build up, and tear down.

I write to remove the thorns of misogyny for daughters like me who will walk through tough paths on their journey to becoming unbreakable. I want to give them a weapon to bruise society when it tries to shrink them; to make them reject the suffering type of comfort that keeps them in anxiety with its claws around their necks.

I write to squeeze the necessity out of darkness until it is drained to comprehend the light. I write because, in a country clouded by bad judgment where I can be stoned to silence or death by anything that dares to fall apart, it is not my time to die. 

I wrote this essay as a student at SprinNG & it was edited by my Mentor Ìbùkún

Art by Laura H. Rubbin

Here is my version of the lord's prayer