by Fowowe Damilola

My Church is the funniest church you can ever attend. It’s not like we parade A-list comedians to come do holy comedy. Basket Mouth doesn’t make an appearance. Not Bovi Not Akpororo. It’s just that when you come to my church, you can be sure you would get pointers on 100 ways to kill the enemy.

I would love to mention the name of the Church save that I would be the next target of the prayers. So it’s only in my church that we pray creative prayers on how we want our enemies to die.

I have been in the Church for over twenty years now and have been praying against the same enemy (that same old woman). Whether God has stopped answering prayers or maybe or the enemy is just bent on ruining lives—I don’t know which it is.

It’s in my church we pray that God, the giver of life, should pull the cord that holds the life of our enemies little by little till it cuts.

Or we up the ante a little, since our enemy has made us suffer for long periods of our lives, we then pray to God not to kill the enemy as that would amount to giving the enemy an easy way out, rather God should inflict the enemy with a sickness that cannot be cured which he or she would nurse till eternity. Or God should render the enemy vegetative, or the enemy should keep stooling, all manner of things you can think of.

We also call nature to help us in our struggle against these enemies.

There’s this nice combination we invoke: thunder mixed with fire.

One assumes that if it were in North America or Asia, it would be supported by snow then guest featuring a tsunami.

Then we have songs to back up the whole thing.

One goes thus: “E mi ko ni mo pa o, ota mi lo para re, nibi toti n rejo kiri, lemimo ti pa” which translates into ‘I did not kill him/her, My enemy killed himself, while he was talking about, the Holy spirit killed him.’

Now the Holy Spirit too has to join our killing spree.

The funny thing is, the enemy in question is not even the devil, it’s a fellow human being.

It’s either one old woman from our maternal side or from our paternal side. One woman that has been on your case for all these years.

Always the clichéd and the stereotypical – the ones that already look like enemies.

There are enemies, of course, but didn’t Jesus settle it all for us? Didn’t He expressly commissioned that we pray for and love our enemies, so that it’s either we are the disobedient ones or the enemy is stronger than our God?

When I asked this question, the grey-headed people in my church took a slow hard look at me and shook their heads in pity.

‘Omode lo n se e, o mo aiye*,” they said; these old men who are wiser than Jesus.

(Translation: “You are just young you don’t know what terrestrial powers are capable of .”)

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