SCHOOL MEMORIES: The price of eternity life

During Easter, on Good Friday, messengers of God would arrive at our school. They would come to give us the good news; that Jesus, the man who died for our sins managed to rise from the dead. And if we wanted to reap the benefit of this selfless act (the benefit was eternal life), we had to give our hearts to him. But some of our hearts were hard as stone. And the saying that you catch more ants with sugar than you do with a stick couldn’t be applied to us. Luckily for the messengers, they had the ‘stick.’ The stick was instilling in us the fear of hell. They came equipped with horrific images of the devil. He had long horns, a scarlet cape and with his fiery eyes, he stared hard at us. In the background, there were innumerable people agonizing while drowning in a lake of fire. If you listened hard enough, you could hear their screams. So of course we flocked the pulpit each time these messengers of fear, sorry God called us to repentance. We earnestly confessed our sins and asked God to write us in the book of life. It is necessary to point out that the main reason why our confessions were always earnest is because they were inspired by fear. Although they were said in calm tones, the parting words, “There is no way to know when your time will be up. It could be any moment. It could happen right now,” left us fighting for a place at the altar. Once they succeeded in pointing us away from hell, the messengers of God moved tophase two. Phase two was about ridding us of any and all traces of the devil. This phase was characterized by aggressive wall thumping and speaking of unintelligible languages in deafening volumes to scare the devil back to hell. There were tears, there was scary laughter and some devils stubbornly clung onto humans causing them to collapse to the ground and convulse. We were asked to participate in this phase as actively as possible, to pray without ceasing. We were motivated by the knowledge that the stubborn devils could jump from one individual into another. Once we survived this phase, it was time to burn all the things that had the devil’s imprint. A flowery t-shirt could easily be inhabited by the devil. Herbal jelly could be associated with witchcraft. A deodorant with a picture of a skull and the message, “Flammable!” was obviously pulling you to hell with every drop of spray. It had to be burnt. It all had to be burnt. By the time the time messengers of God left the school, on Easter Monday, we were always drained in all possible ways. We were insomniac because of the consecutive nightmares arisen by fear. We were lacking in clothes and other essentials because we’d burnt them along with the devil. We were distrusting of each other because some were said to be devil’s agents, trying to sell our souls. But that was a small price to pay in order to live eternally and to do it with our hero, our savior Jesus, right?

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SCHOOL MEMORIES: The price of eternity life