Forsaken by John Ebute

You share so much with the young man sitting like a dead log of wood in a corner of his living room, five empty bottles of beer lying in front of him, a listless gaze in his eyes, his shoulders slouched as if bearing the weight of the whole world. About forty minutes ago, he had gone online— this isn’t a phrase you can particularly understand— and seen the following words posted on the WhatsApp status of his girlfriend, ex-girlfriend actually:
Bye-bye to yeye boyfriend.

Four words that hurt him deeply, deeper than any words could express. But what hurts him even more is that she had made the post only the next minute after she ungracefully walked out of his apartment and his life as a whole. Hadn’t their relationship meant anything to her at all? And how could she be comfortable sharing a thing so private and delicate on her social media handle?
Accompanying her biting words were dancing and celebratory emojis. You want to ask what emojis are? Well, it will be quite difficult to explain. Just know that they express the mood of the user. Social media handle and WhatsApp, too? They are means of communication in this era.
Don’t get this wrong. He was pretty much used to rejections, something you only got to know at the latter part of your life. But his girlfriend had been the only one who seemed to understand him, who was willing to tolerate and be around him. She knew he was “yeye” but she accepted him that way. What happened to all her promises of “forever together” and “happily ever after”? What had changed between them?
But he really couldn’t blame her. After all, his own parents, the ones who had brought him into this chaotic world, had severed all ties with him a little over a year ago. His kid sister used to visit him secretly but she had stopped about five months earlier. She had become bored with him, overwhelmed by his excesses. Tina leaving him now was the last straw. There was nothing else to live for. There was nothing else worth fighting for. His life was now nothing but an endless stretch of misery and void.
You are starting to feel the connection between you two, right? Empathy for this young man is building up in you now. You remember that stage of your life when your existence was robbed of all essence, when you literally felt like one of your father’s many sheep that had lost its way— alone and vulnerable. You felt abandoned, used, sucked of all value and then discarded like a piece of trash.
But there’s a difference in how you two choose to react to this significant moment in your lives. While you chose to live as an animal, he has decided not to live at all. He is considering an overdose. That way he can go without feeling much pain.
There’s a way life can bruise one that death becomes a blessing. You know this quite well.
You grew up in plenitude, surrounded by the luxury of your father’s wealth, servants at your beck and call. Every taste bud in your tongue was used to the flavor of sweet things. Your stomach didn’t know what it felt like to be without food for a moment. Your body was always robed in the finest of wears, and your feet in the best footwear. What’s more, you lived in the aura of your father’s love like an ever present fragrance.
You were never alone. If you were not surrounded by servants, eager to attend to your every whim with the sort of alacrity that is devoted to a deity, your many friends were hovering around you, looking you over with priceless admiration as if you were a newly discovered jewel. The way they worshipped your skin with their eyes, you feared they might lap at you as calves do milk.
The only thorn in your flesh was your elder brother, of course — a self-righteous bore. Even with all the servants swarming in your father’s stately mansion like flies, he still insisted on taking your father’s cattle to the fields for grazing himself.
“You don’t have to do it,” you were glad when your father told him one day after his return at dusk. “That’s why I pay the servants.”
It was such a relief to know that your father wasn’t taken in by his ostentatious display of virtue.
“No Father, let me do it,” he replied. “This is the least I can do in gratitude for everything you do for us.”
And to your disappointment, your father nodded, gave him a warm smile and said, “You are a wise son. You will eat the best of the earth.”
They both turned to look at you, and the silence that followed was heavy with their unspoken disapproval.
Your brother was always up at the rooster’s first crow and he soon made it a habit to wake you up too. The first time it happened, you almost took down one of his teeth. You didn’t joke with your sleep; it was nature’s best gift to you.
“It’s morning, lazy bone,” you heard his gruff voice float into your sleep, yanking you back to consciousness. “You were not created for the sole purpose of sleeping.”
You had been dreaming about Dinah, the stunning daughter of the blacksmith down the street whose almond-shaped eyes and midnight-black hair had always haunted your imagination, before he woke you up. Your punch at him was instinctive, but it carried all the passion your attraction to Dinah had. He skillfully dodged it and caught your arm in mid air. He literally shook the rest of the sleep out of your body.
“If you have no use to anybody in the house, you should at least be awake,” he pronounced before breezing out of your room.
From that day on, he made it a tradition to wake you up.
Your big brother didn’t approve of your friends either. Another thing you share with the about-to-become-suicide young man. His father was always tongue-lashing him over the friends he brought home.
“I will disown you if any of this weird guys shows up at my door again,” his father snapped one day when he brought a heavily tattooed guy home, the smell of weed fresh on his breath.
He brought more weird-looking guys home the next day, and they even partied hard the whole night. Most of the neighbors complained the following morning, and all he received from his father was an earful, which he was already accustomed to anyway. He did that a lot— neglected his father’s instructions and got away with it.
You both were alike in this way: you flout rules and got away with it. You took advantage of your parents’ love for you. You knew they couldn’t afford to see you hurt and so you did what you wanted, without giving a care how much your actions affected them.
Your brother was the ache in your tooth, but it was his mother who tried to play the sterner hand. But even she didn’t get far with him. She cried herself to sleep most nights, worrying about his self-destructive vices.
Your brother was the reason you took that rash decision. Or at least that’s what you told yourself. But Dinah had much to do with it, hadn’t she? You shattered your father’s heart when you told him your decision.
“Are you sure about this, Son?” There was tears in his eyes and his voice broke repeatedly. “I mean is there anything you don’t like here? Tell me and I will see to it that it is changed.”
“My decision is final.” Your voice, like your eyes, was flint-hard.
“Is this how much you want to see me dead?” he croaked in a final attempt at persuasion. “No one in the history of the world has ever asked his father for such a thing.”
The last thing you saw before you left the house was your brother’s gentle pat on your father’s shoulder, the look of accusation in his eyes as his gaze burned through you, and you heard the reassurance in his voice as he said, “We will be fine without him, Dad.” But you didn’t look back. You were all for the fun. You were tired of being boxed in by rules, and most especially, your brother’s overbearing attitude.
He, too, left the house. He, too, chose friends over family. But friends abandoned you both. When he became an addict and started doing rash, uncomely things, his family decided he was far too fractured to fit in again. They wouldn’t take him back.
You were too ashamed to go back. You saw yourself as a swine, and wasn’t that why you shared meals with them? And this is where both of you are different. He feels unworthy of life and wants to leave this world. You came to your senses, and decided to return home. At least you would be better off as a servant since you have lost your place as a son, you deemed.
Presently, he fills his hands with pills, about to gulp them down when his eyes fall on the tract that had been handed to him a few days back by a sweating street evangelist. He had tossed it aside while emptying his pockets on his arrival home, without any intentions of reading it. The bold title is what catches his attention now.
HE WILL NEVER FORSAKE YOU.
He pauses, picks it up and starts skimming through it. He reads your story, but this isn’t his first encounter with it. As with several others all over the world, your story is a familiar one to him. And as it has done before, it will once again inspire another thirsty soul to walk confidently into the waiting arms of the savior, the same man who had shared your story centuries ago to a crowd of needy souls.
He will walk, as you did, into the Father’s embrace and hear the words in his ears: “Yes, I have called you My own. You are My son, and today have I begotten you.”
Tears will stream down his face as it did yours. “I’m unworthy. I have hurt so many people.” He will remember his mother’s sleepless nights, his father’s perpetual anguish, the reproach he brought on his family’s name, and it will only make the guilt worse. “I’m unworthy,” he will cry over and over.
“No man is worthy before Me. It is I who justify all who appear before Me in the name of My son. My grace has found you.”
Only then will he discard the pills, rise up from the ground and the miry clay of his past, and head into a new start, this time with the savior’s light shining from him.