Surprise… It’s real!

For a while now, I have been pulling blanks on ideas for my son’s 5^th birthday. Last year, we organized a birthday party at his martial arts club and he loved it. However, that was too macho for me because I did all the preparations but then everyone kept calling on his dad to make a speech and all the thanks were showered on him. Understandably, martial arts clubs are full of testosterone… and there was a lot of beer which I hate for a kid’s birthday party. So Sept 23, 2015 came and passed with no party for my little champ. I felt so bad for him because he had framed the picture of a perfect birthday that he had shared with his cousin and us.

Sept 25, I had an epiphany… cupcakes with frosting and stuff written on them. Ok, I know I am good with making cakes and cupcakes (yes I am!) but I have never attempted icing or frosting. I have the accessories still sealed up like I got them from the shop and I thought this was a great opportunity to redeem myself from the guilt of letting my son’s birthday pass without a party. I’m not a fan of frostings as they just add calories, but who cares – it’s a birthday. If there is any day to sin against your diet, this is it! Again, being on the moderate side, I decided I won’t use butter for the frosting, I’ll do simple icing. I headed to the shops and bought the ingredients and balloons, including a blue balloon!

 Saturday evening, I bake the cupcakes. On Sunday as God will have it, my hubby took our son out and I stole that opportunity. I iced the cupcakes and I’ll say for a first timer I didn’t do too badly. I wrote ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY EJ’ on the cupcakes but it was sloppy (but visibly clear) because my icing mixture was runny and set up the living room. When they returned, I handed him the blue balloon in hand and yelled ‘surprise’ as he was entering the house. He was so shocked he ran and hid his face against the sofa. And then he saw the cupcakes, the candle, the birthday sign on the wall and more balloons and he ran to me and asked if I did all that for him. When I said yes, he hugged me and went to blow off his candles and the rest is history.

Have you ever had a dream that came true or almost? His dream didn’t come true on his birthday, but eventually it did. Relate that with your life, sometimes things happen almost the way we wish but not at the time we wished it, because God has better timing than us. Oh, I haven’t told you his dream yet – I’ll try to quote as best as possible:

“On my birthday, I will be sleeping and Mommy and Daddy and Aunti Elvin will come and wake me up and say ‘surprise’ and give me a blue balloon. I’ll get up, take the balloon, run downstairs and let the balloon fly up into the sky, and then it will burst in the sky. Then I will come back upstairs and everyone will sing happy birthday and I will blow out the candles”

He didn’t take his blue balloon downstairs though – remember when make promises of what you’ll do if something else happens and it does but you forget your part of it? Oh well, life happens… God stays the same- Faithful as always.

Thanks for allowing me to take you through this journey of my son’s birthday. He means the world to me, and I am happy sharing part of my joy with you.

Friday Sept 18, 2015 or Is it?

Friday 13^th is a myth! Friday 18 Sept 2015 has been real. I decided to blog this because my niece, Joy, says I am a drama queen. When I narrate things that happen to me, she says it happens to everyone, they just don’t narrate it like I do. I love her, but I think she is wrong – I think I am unique going through unique experiences.

Today, I left the house around 6:50am, which normally should be a more or less smooth ride across town at that time. Alas, as I was approaching the hill to Quartier General, I noticed the queue of vehicles and took a decision I thought was smart – go through Cradat, then Chateau, Emia and then into town. Easy ride to Cradat, then the traffic begins. With a stick shift on a hill with an almost still traffic, that is a nightmare. I eventually meander my way through traffic and secondary roads and decided to park until the traffic started moving. That was at 7:20, a distance I would normally cover in 7mins had taken me 30. I called my husband and he says he’ll bring the other car, which thank goodness is an automatic drive. He eventually arrives a few minutes after 8am, and gave me the car. 300m later I feel a jolt to the right, and there is this small-ish blue car resting against mine. The driver, a lady came out asking me ‘tu es pressé pour aller où? I stared at her, dumbfounded by her defensive attitude since clearly she had cut infront of me illegally with no warning. I told her to check out the position of her car. She told me ‘mais tu m’as cogné par derrière’. At that point I just stared at her and I knew she was trying hard not to look like the guilty party that she was… This stupid notion of driving in Cameroon where someone cuts sharply in front of you and their rear gets your fender and they scream that you hit them from behind… God bless my soul!

I get to the office at 8:40, and realized my husband forgot his keys in the car and he was going back home. I had to go back home and give him the keys and then came back to the office. Murphy was right: “if something has to go wrong, it will”

Does this happen to everyone?

Desire is… not all

Does this seem like a total 180 from my last post? Not actually. I mentioned I desired something so badly and I’ll let you know when I got it – well, here’s a spoiler… I didn’t get it!

I have just traversed the most challenging time in my professional life, a situation I thought I’ll have a grip over when it happened, but boy was I so wrong. I had desired something, wanted it so desperately I went out of character to get it, but all that energy didn’t hold at the end. I thought I had failed myself, thought the whole world can’t understand me and are too blind to see, etc. I have never been more in touch with my emotions, and never expressed myself quite like that before. People always tell me I am very composed and calm even in difficult situations – oh well that was put to the test. I seemed composed and calm but there was this raging wavy sea inside of me that I wanted to explode, or implode. I was so angry, and for more than a month was pondering about how easy it is to encourage others in difficult situations but you can’t apply those encouraging words when you are the one in a situation. All the stuff about: ‘when a window closes, another one opens’; ‘light at the end of the tunnel’; ‘everything works for good’; ‘God knows why’; etc., did not work at consoling me. Each time someone said that, I felt like punching them. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see that light at the end; that purpose; the good to that situation; the doors that were opening, and so on. All my thought was geared towards giving myself time to ‘heal’, I didn’t want to accelerate the process – I was letting time to time. It wasn’t until last Wed, that was about a month and half from the situation, that I felt like I could talk about the situation without feeling bitter or remorseful, and I felt then I could actually write this article. Then on Friday, I had a huge reality check…

On Friday I met my dear friend, mentor, God-fearing and one of the kindest human beings I have ever known. We were discussing over lunch and I told him what I had gone through. He stared at me straight in my face until I finished my narrative, and he told me the Truth. He asked if I was a child of God – yes of course (now I’m thinking, where is he going with this). I started defending immediately about how I know everything happens for the good to them that love God, etc. but then how I couldn’t see that when I had the situation. He let me blab on for a while and he asked/told me:

 “why do you fight over a small ‘thing’ like that when God has bigger ‘things’ for you?”

“The person who wanted that thing is that person you created, not you”

“A child of God doesn’t compete, they just get what God has made for them…”

He went on and on, pricking my conscience and the God-man in me, challenging me with the Word, and making me see how ridiculous I had felt and behaved in that situation and in the aftermath. He reminded me of who I am in God’s eye, and that I shouldn’t belittle that. He diagnosed my issue to the fact that I have been ‘spoilt’ by God and that I needed that experience – although I didn’t need to feel and act the way I felt and acted after it happened. He counted my blessings, something I couldn’t bring myself to do in the crossover service of Dec 31 2014, and asked me how ungrateful I can be being stuck because one thing didn’t work the way I wanted. As you could imagine, he told me things I can’t mention here, he told me THE TRUTH and called me out on my stupidity. Some of the things he said I can’t mention here because they were so deep I am still meditating on them and asking God to inspire me and enlighten me to see the purpose of the Words He said through my friend and how I can apply them to make me a better God-person. God is great!

I am not yet ‘there’, but I am working on it. God has challenged me to return to the place He had taken me to, and I intend to go back there and grow spiritually. My experience challenges Napoleon Hill’s definition of desire. Desire does not transcend everything, no matter how keen and pulsating it is – the love of God does. We need to buffer desire (which has no heart) with the love of God (which is God’s heart). This is my point of view and I am solely responsible for every word in this article.

This article is dedicated to my friend, Mr Tambe. Thank you and I love you sincerely. Not many people have the courage to look me in my eyes and tell me the truth without judging me or condemning me. I’m still contemplating some of the deeper things you told me, but I know with the Love of God, I will come to understand them and be a better me. First of all, I need to regain the level of confidence I had in myself before this situation, and then grow from there. Shalom!