Clearly
I hadn’t heard right.
All this
was taking place in the kitchen which is my Central Commanding Base - it’s my office, my
hospital, my News Centre (radio is always ON) and my security watchtower
because from up there I can see the whole
front yard plus the gate - and he knows exactly where the First Aid Kit box is - but instead of him heading towards
where the Dettol and Hand Sanitizer were stashed, he insisted on moving towards
the cooking oil.
Me: Son,
don’t you mean Dettol for your finger?
SON: No.
I mean OIL
Me: Silence
SON: I
don’t want to get Tetanus or a bad rash
Me: So
clean it with Dettol…
SON: No,
oil is better.
Me:
Silence
I’m
thinking random thoughts…
He’s 12.
He ain’t
dumb, no way, not by a loooooong shot….
…. so
where was all this coming from?
Me:
Eerrr, where is all this oil business coming from?
SON: I
will put oil then pray to Jesus and I’ll be fine.. I’ve done it before.
Wham
bamb! A bulb lit up in my head like a flare gun! Aha Moment! My eyebrows shot
up while my eyes opened wider and my diaphragm contracted and I took a deep
breath into my lungs..
Reader: This
is where you take a sip of your coffee or tea…
Ok, so 2
(two) Sundays ago at our Church (The Ocean) we had what is called Family
Sunday. That’s when kids don’t get to go to Childrens’ Church but instead sit with
their parents during the Main sermon. On this particular Sunday, the preacher
was old ‘Babu Bob’, as our regular pastor-don’t-call-me-Pastor-call-me-Charles
had travelled..
Here is
a compressed Zip file on Babu Bob’s sermon:
“We used
to be dirt poor, so poor that we could neither afford medical insurance nor to
go to a hospital, so every time the children got sick, or grazed or cut
themselves while playing outside, my wife and I would get some oil, pray over
the children in Jesus name, anoint them with the Holy Oil and then tell them, ‘there, you’re healed in Jesus’ name,
now go out and play!’ Well it so happened that one day I had a rather severe
accident. I was mowing my landlords lawn (we lived on the edge of his property)
with his lawnmower, one of those posh tractor-type of lawnmower that you sit on
and drive as you trim… well, at some point I yanked the steering wheel too hard
to the side and it toppled over while I was up on it. I fell off, but as I landed
on the ground faster, the engine fell (in slow mo) smack – on my outstretched
hand – breaking it at the wrist. I think I heard the appalling ‘crunch’ as my
wrist bone was mashed and subsequently shattered. My 5 year old daughter happened
to be outside playing and she seeing
what happened, she rushed into the house screaming to my wife, ‘Daddy got hurt
bad, Daddy got hurt real bad’. Cradling my throbbing arm, I hobbled painfully
to the house through the back door which led into the kitchen with the terrible
knowledge that since we didn’t have money for a trip to the hospital, all I could
do was to take some pain-killers then go upstairs and lie down. My daughter had
other ideas. She rushed in to the kitchen and climbing a stool, snatched down
the container of cooking oil. In her hurry to open it, she poured half the
contents on the floor, ran back to me and grabbing my throbbing shattered hand
(ouch!), she pushed back the sleeve, poured oil all over it (and in the process
spilt the rest of the oily contents on the floor) and told me sternly while
massaging my hand, ‘Daddy, close your eyes, I’m going to pray to Jesus’. And
she did. ‘Jesus, please heal Daddy’. She
opened her eyes, looked me straight in my eye and announced firmly, ‘Ok Daddy,
Jesus has healed you, you can go out and play now’. Oh! My word, I couldn’t
tell her that it didn’t work quite that way for a broken and smashed bone. But
as I looked into her faith-filled innocent and trusting eyes, I could not, I simply
could not tell her that it was
impossible for cooking oil to heal a broken hand. She believed Jesus had heard.
She believed Jesus had answered her simple prayer. Who was I to take that away
from her? So I nodded, asked my wife for some pain meds, bandaged my now very,
very swollen hand plus wrist, and went upstairs to rest. The next morning while
my wrist was still sore and painful, the swelling had subsided. A little
surprised, I took some more pain medication and used my other hand to eat and do
simple jobs around the house. That afternoon, I remembered that I had
volunteered to help in a building project and since my hand wasn’t hurting so
bad, I went, deliberating that I could use my left hand to hammer in a couple
of nails here and there. I recall clearly that half-way into the afternoon, I
switched the hammer automatically from my left to my right hand without a thought
– the pain and swelling had both diminished completely!
Now years
later my wife and I were in the Amboseli, Kenya which is at the foothills of
Mt. Kilimanjaro where I had an accident and broke my wrist again. Same wrist,
same place. But we were in the Amboseli, a 5 hour road trip to Nairobi, so
despite the fact that we were now more liquid plus we had Medical Insurance, I still
could not get medical attention. What to do? The day was gone, it was almost
dark. We could not do the trip at night. I grabbed a couple of Panadol and bandaged the
throbbing hand. The next day, my wife and I drove the 5 hour trip to Nairobi
Hospital where a surgeon examined my broken wrist. It was broken but the surgeon, on looking at my x-rays and examining
my hand minutely, gazed at me, extremely puzzled. ‘I can see that you’ve broken
your wrist before, here, and here, but your surgeon must have been exceptional
because I cannot see any signs of a scar where he operated to set the bone’.
The End
of Babu Bob’s short Narrative.
I sat my
son down on the sofa and spoke to him gently, ‘but that was a miracle story based
on the faith of Babu Bob’s daughter. That is why he was healed. The daughter’s
faith healed the Dad. Cooking oil doesn’t heal, otherwise we’d not need to go
to the hospital for any broken bones or health problems, we’d just use cooking
oil for all our health problems!’
Said he,
‘MOM!! I know that, but Jesus heals
and I believe that if I put oil plus pray, I will be okay. But it doesn’t
matter -
if there is no oil, I’ll still pray, and Jesus will still heal me.’
©NYAKIO MUNYINYI-OKALLO for The XpenSieve
Report. December 2012
