Metanoia.

1.

February 27, 2024. Circa: 2:50 a.m.

The nudge was intense. A mighty force ploughing me to implore this God I’d not spoken to in years. My rebellion breaking into shards, I tried to hold on, to revolt. But I was powerless in the face of this nudge.

What do you do when He begins to grind down the plaques coating your heart and have you budge?

Total surrender.

A few sentences twined into a prayer. Then more sentences. Then a flare of tears – the kind plied with heavy breathing.

My chains fell off. My heart was free.

Iruoma was online on WhatsApp. I sensed. I’d halted the prayers to text her. I wasn’t sure why. I could have texted later that morning. Or the night before. But this timing felt perfect.

After the fleeting conversation we had, she left me with Hebrews 11:6 and said: Let your faith take you wherever.

Hebrews 11:6, NIV —

“And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”

I mulled over this verse, dousing myself in each word. It was hard to believe, but it was all I could do.

Believe (v): to plunge deep into an ocean or clutch a feeble rope at the edge of a cliff, knowing He will save you.

The following morning, the Assistant Course Rep called me saying the Attendance Officer needed my matric number and the list of courses my attendance score didn’t meet up with. Startled, I asked her, “are you sure it’s me?”

“Then why will I call you with my credit to lie?” she said.

I sent my details to her. She sent them to him.

The dean was a distinct version of himself when I walked into his office that morning, wielding tiny grains of faith in my hands. I was shivering, waiting to hear his Get out of my office! But he did not wear a scowl. He spoke to me, his air affable. He told me to present a doctor’s report while he was writing the letter to waive my attendance issues. And I was startled.

I wondered how a two-month-long crisis tilted into the affirmative in a few hours. I had been going to his office, getting Nos to There’s nothing we can do to You should have done this before you went home to take care of him.

It meant one thing.

Only one thing.

“This is nothing short of a miracle, Nonso. What did you do? How did you get Professor [redacted] to listen to you?” My friend, Charles, an alumnus, said. He knew the dean. He, too, was a witness of what the dean was capable of. And, like Charles, the people who knew were shaken and awash with glee. Before then, my close friends and seniors garbed a foreboding sadness even though they told me in that rather obligatory manner to keep going to the dean’s office to appeal. Only a few were brave enough to tell me to defer the semester. They knew the dean. I knew the dean. I’d seen people beg and wail before him, yet they couldn’t write exams. People had extra years because they failed to meet the attendance prerequisite. No appeal, not even lecturers or professors or parents, could pacify him.

I’d missed nearly a month’s lectures because of my father who slumped into a coma due to a second ischemic stroke one morning in December. In my faculty, the faculty of law at the University of Lagos, the attendance register is an uncompromising prerequisite for writing exams. I knew I wouldn’t meet up to it. But when I resumed school in January, I made sure to print a letter, attaching a picture of my father in the hospital.

The first day I went to the dean’s office, climbing the towering stairs and thrusting up pants, his secretary told me he wasn’t around. On the second day, the secretary asked for narration and said the dean wasn’t in the mood to see anyone. The following weeks and months were wrapped with loud and daunting No, I can’t help yous, but I did not waver. My mates were at the library studying; I was finding a way to clear off my flecks.

When the list came out, I didn’t meet up with the attendance cut-off point. I grew numb. I cleared the courses from my portal and planned to carry over the courses, spreading them across the years, hoping it wouldn’t segue into an extra year. I changed my mind the next day and wanted to drop out because the weight posed as too heavy.

“These don’t seem like the Chinonso Nzeh options, man,” my friend Bolu shunned me that evening over a call when I was about to fill out the studentship deferment form on the portal.

Until God.

2.

Unbelief sat so fiercely with its sharp talons in my spirit. Never lurching. Even when I watched how globules of blood dropped slowly from the IV blood bag trudging into the drip chamber to my insentient father’s vein at the hospital. Even when his succeeding hospital bills tripled into millions. When we could not access his business account. When we had to rescue his dwindling business and reimburse his workers who were already resigning.

Even when, weeks before that night in February, my friend, Chidera Robinson, told me one evening while we stood beside the board of lecturers’ names, checking to see who we could beg to speak to the dean on my behalf: “You need to take your prayer life seriously, Nonso. Maybe God might be using this to draw you to him.”

Even when my friend, Toba, spoke about the many times God showed up for him; when he begged me to try God. To believe God. To hold God.

Nothing could make me succumb. I didn’t want to do the Christian Bullshit.

Until God.

3.

A newer issue emerged: I had deleted my courses from the portal before the dean waived my attendance, and now the course registration portal had closed.

I couldn’t go back to the dean to tell him. I reckoned he would get furious and rescind the attendance he waived. And it was no longer a Faculty of Law problem; it was a University of Lagos problem. A friend in the English department told me that she had quite a similar issue where she wrote letters, but it was never resolved.

My anxiety entangled with sadness and frustration at God, I said, “Then why did the dean waive my attendance if it would end like this?”

“I can never bring you this far to leave you,” He told me. It was clear.

As though to clarify His words, a pastor preaching Hebrews 11:6 appeared on my Instagram. I was disturbed because my Instagram was curated in a way that would shield me from religious posts.

But I knew it was Him.

As though to further the clarity, on my way home from school, I discovered I had forgotten my (expensive) charger, so I went back to school. My friend Mofe saw me and expressed happiness tinged with puzzlement about my attendance, but I told her about the deregistered courses. She said, “God cannot bring you this far to leave you.”

I knew it was Him.

The next day was long. People were printing examination dockets; I was tottering around. First, met with the Faculty’s president, and he said he would try to see what he could do. I went to the Center for Technology office; a woman told me nothing could be done at the moment. I went to the Dean of Student Affairs’ office; he wasn’t around. I went to the Deputy Vice Chancellor’s office at the Senate Building; her secretary said she was in a meeting. I went to the Vice Chancellor’s office; she, too, wasn’t around — I told her secretary about my courses, and she said, in a rather callous manner, “Ehn, you have deregistered them, na. There’s nothing they can do.”

It was so hard to believe God.

A test was set for 3 p.m. that afternoon. I was hesitant about writing it. I wasn’t prepared. I never had the time to read. And what even is the point of writing the test? I thought.

I scoured through some pages, largely absent-minded, and went to the hall when it was time.

The topic I grazed through came out, and I poured my assertions into paper, although troubled that the test would be fruitless since I had deleted the course. There were still grains of faith left; I held on to them.

After the test, I checked my portal; all my courses had appeared back. I was screaming and crying, not minding the many eyes that must have peered at me. I would write my exams (and it would be my best session yet).

It was Him.

4.

I’m currently thinking of Sinmidele’s song, After All These Years, which encapsulates how I feel about God these days. How much he cares for and watches me. This God. Even when I didn’t believe. Even when I was fast-bound in sin. Even when I would fling derisive words at him (without any knowledge that I would be here, loving him today). This God.

I am undeserving of his love. Undeserving of his mercies. Of his grace. And he’s so worthy of all my life. All of it.

5.

I abhor things that defy logic. At the risk of sounding foolish, I write this essay. I left the faith in 2020, and I came back in 2021. I left again in early 2022. But the truth is that there was a schism in my theology, and my premise was frail: I was so bent on reading apologetics and proving there was a God (not like this is bad, but priorities) instead of fixing my eyes on Jesus and watering my faith, simply because I wanted to sound philosophical. But if following Jesus is to be indexed as foolish, let it be so.

6.

There are so many recent things – dreams, miracles, stories, words from God I want to share, but this is what I was directed to write. A writer acquaintance, Demilade, says this is the first time God is breathing consciously through me as I write; he’s not wrong.

7.

Metanoia:

[meh-ta-noy-ah] • HEtávoia (Greek).

(n.) the journey of changing one’s mind, heart, self, or way of life.

(v.) the act of reforming; becoming new.

8.

I’m ready to be a good soldier; I’m ready to follow Him, however unbearable the journey gets.