Abayomi G. Omotayo
I travel to church on Sundays. From Lagos to Ota. This I consider a shorter and ‘Eazi-er’ journey than Accra to Lagos. When people ask me why I travel that far to worship. I usually quip, “life itself is a journey, so if we journey through life whose course can be very unpredictable, tedious and long everyday what is journeying to Ota once a week?” What follows usually is a nodding of head and silence. Whether my reply is very deep or very stupid to elicit this kind of response I cannot tell.
As a single guy, going to church on
Sundays was the simplest task. All I needed to do was wake up, brush, dress up.
Thirty minutes tops I’m done. I always preferred the first service because by
11am I am back home and because the day is still young I have ample time to
indulge in extracurricular activities as a young man. My Church conducts five services.
Now, with two soldiers and a deputy commander, preparation for church is no
mean feat and my battle to keep to my service preference seems like a ‘never-winning’
one. I have not given up yet although I must confess it has been a while since
I attended first service. In fact, my
service schedule these days are as erratic as the British weather but the
battle continues.
First service starts 6am this means
we must leave the house latest 5am. The first sign that first service was no
longer feasible was the incessant nudging I and my wife discretely gave each
other so as not to be caught dozing especially by the camera. God forbid that
we will be beamed live to fifty thousand worshippers and hundreds of thousands of
online viewers. And the screens? Very gigantic. Sometimes my wife nudges me, it
comes with a look which says “If only you had excused yourself from having a
pre-service in the ‘other room’, you will not be here dozing” and of course
when I nudge her back I’m saying “you see yourself, you couldn’t say No?”. At
other times, it is the sudden increase in the pitch of the Bishop that does the
nudging for both of us. With this seemingly insurmountable challenge and
constant disapproval from my boys by their drowsiness all through the service,
the door on first service seems closed.
Over the past one year, it has been a
mix-match of service times all with peculiar challenges. The second service
comes with second degree traffic after service which means fatigue after
getting home. Forget food, sleep is the next best thing after that kind of
experience. The third, fourth and fifth services come sometimes with higher
degree of traffic while going. Fatigue sets in as soon as one sits in church.
This is back to square one of battling sleep just like the first service. The
air conditioned auditorium makes this more inevitable. I am still constantly
trying hard to be a first service candidate albeit with little success. The
truth is; asking me right now the best service time for me and my family is
like asking if I know when the second coming of Jesus Christ will be.
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