I read a recent report about a woman who killed her own mother; the woman was said to have been told by her pastor to kill her mother because the mother is responsible for the setback in the woman’s life.
I don’t know her true story beyond what I read in the paper but I’ll tell you one thing that is true, some of these pastors can enter your head, enter your brain, enter you so that you won’t even know what is reality and what isn’t.
Let me tell you a story about me and a pastor!
When I was done with secondary school, awaiting awaiting WAEC and JAMB I was 17 years old then when I became sick; I was having a burning sensation all over my body as if somebody put fire on me. My mother took me to the hospital, they did tests, they found nothing wrong with me and yet this burning sensation never stopped. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t go out, I couldn’t do anything, didn’t even want clothes on my body because I was always like sizzling from inside out.
I just kept telling my mother to help me or I would die!
So my mother ran from pillar to post, we moved from hospital to hospital, later people told us it was a spiritual attack, that my mother should take me to either a pastor or imam.
We are Christians but my mother did not care who could help, she took me to every pastor, imam or herbalist that could help me…none could! After several concoctions, “drink this, smear your body with that, sleep like this, rub this on your stomach…” nothing worked.
After almost 2 months or so into my sickness, my skin turned to scales! As in like a desert, you know how the surface of a desert looks, caked and dry? That was my skin.
So it was as if I was being cooked from the inside and my skin was drying and cracking on the outside…I was gaunt, no matter what I ate, when I managed to eat, it never showed…I was in this state for more than 8 months!
Then one of my relatives came, told us there was this ‘man of God who is a miracle worker’…my mother picked me up because I was too weak to get up or do anything for myself…I was just waiting to die. My mum took me to meet this prophet on top of a hill.
When we got there, the prophet told her I wouldn’t die but that my mother had annoyed some people who couldn’t get her and so they were attacking me…I am her only child.
Now, I was young, almost 18 by then; I didn’t believe in all of these “they are doing you and you are doing them,” all I wanted was a cure, which I believed that the doctors just weren’t able to find, so they couldn’t cure me.
Long story.
Anyway, after several weeks of dry fasting and some weeks of white fasting…I began to feel well.
The pastor was kind to me, he told me he didn’t realize I was such a pretty girl because as I began to get well, my skin healed, I could eat better and so, I gained some flesh to my bones. I was then asked to go home after the pastor made my mother and I promise I would start worship at his church…he said he wanted to keep an eye on me.
“You must return to my church if you don’t want another calamity to befall you. I want to be seeing your face.”
He told my mother to make sure I attended his church no matter what.
I said “Yes, sir.”
My mother said, “Before nko, pastor, we will not go elsewhere.”
We meant to…
I just thought, you know, like a doctor would tell you to come in once in a while for checkups, this was a man who helped to save my life, I would have joyfully been going to his church even if he never asked me to. I mean, that was where I got healed.
We attended the church regularly where I met with prophet who always paid me compliments that I thought nothing about…
I got my JAMB result, passed and went to university. That was when I stopped going to pastor’s church because my school was up north but even during my holidays, I began to go with my friends to other churches… and especially after my mother passed, I stopped completely. I joined a Christian fellowship in school and realized that our prophet had been doing some things that were like fetish…’bathe in the river,’ ‘throw your new sponge way’…’walk with your back away from certain entrances’…
Even at that time my mother and I were still going to that church, she wasn’t too comfortable with it but because the prophet had been instrumental to my cure, couldn’t stop we kept going.
Anyway, I did my service in the east and that’s when my problem began. I met a guy who I knew I wanted to get married to. As soon as we began an affair, I began to have nightmares about the prophet.
In the dreams, prophet would be chasing me, telling me I belonged to him!
At first, I thought it was just a bad dream.
How can the prophet be chasing me, that church is big, there are thousands of ladies among the congregation that the prophet could take for himself…and yes, he was married.
So I dismissed it as a nightmare, maybe it was another person using the prophet as a guise. But the dream continued several times, I would wake up screaming. After sometime; the proohet would run after me, catch me and have sex with me; not once but several times and I knew this was no ordinary dream.
I didn’t even fancy the prophet so where was this coming from? And second of all, why would he be having sex with me and telling me I would not have a happy marriage with the guy I wanted to get married to?
So I told my boyfriend the dream; he dismissed it, telling me no prophet would stand between us!
The sex dreams stopped for some time, especially when we both immersed ourselves in another church and we were prayed for; we got married and had two boys… then the dream began again!
Prophet would have sex with me and the following morning my husband would tell me I was moaning in my sleep!
At first, he would laugh at me, he would say, I was missing his lovemaking that is why I was moaning…I couldn’t tell him the truth and believe me, in all of these years, I never laid my eyes on that prophet. So why the dream?
I would wake up to bind and cast the spirit of the prophet away from my life. I had joined a church that believed in deliverance and I was prayed for…but the prophet still came like every quarter for sex…
I have been living this cycle and like I told you before, he vowed in one of my dreams that I would never be married…today my husband and I are divorced…after 13 years of marriage.
Now you will ask, is the prphet behind it?
I think so but I have no concrete proof! Do I still see him in my dreams? Yes. In fact, we had sex yesterday!
(stories written and edited by Peju Akande and based on true stories)