I've never been one to judge things (scenarios, events, and happenings) based on just what I see, I always want to know until I understand (if you follow my previous posts you will agree). They say don't judge a book by its cover, I say I've read quite a number of books, most of which had no cover. This is just an intelligent way of saying; I love to always judge from a closer perspective. However I wasn't always like that, and It took quite a bit of lessons to get me to stop concluding too often. I learned the hard way that truly not all that glitters is gold and I'll be sharing one of such experiences. So without further ado, let's jump right into it.
I'm one to fall in love with a people's personalities very easily especially when there is an act of service involved. But I learned the hard way that a nice person, at first sight, could turn out to be someone you might regret meeting in your life. I learned this lesson when my family started attending a popular church in Warri Nigeria (name withheld). A time came when we needed a place closer to home for a place of worship because we lived at Agbarho(outside Warri). We were introduced to a smaller church pastored by a spiritual son of the church we attended and after a lot of recognition, praises, and recommendations from the pastor of our church, my family started worshiping there.
We became devoted members of the church and blindly followed everything the new pastor said without trying to checkmate those instructions. As I grew older, I began to notice some strange characters in the pastor, but I was just a boy, so speaking out was kinda hard. First of all, I saw him as another father and a spiritual leader, so it was hard for me to conclude that there were some dubious acts he was engaging in. I started noticing that his pastors were womanizers, which is totally against the doctrine of Christianity. I was still planning on gathering the courage to meet him without talking to my parents until I started noticing his relationship with some women in the church.
I decided I was going to tell my mum afterward because she was the only one I could trust for such matters. I saw she took it to heart though in disbelief because of how much she loved and respected the pastor. She began to confirm my speculations when she started noticing the assistant pastor throwing shades at her whenever she went for prayers. But then we hadn't cut the head pastor in the act so there was no way to confirm whether our speculations were true or not.
A time came when I noticed the pastor would call me to ask about my family. I will tell him whatever he needed to know like; how my dad's businesses were fairing, whether he was doing something new to make money. I would innocently tell him everything I knew majorly because of how cunning his questions would come. Something like; "Your dad really needs prayers for the hotel, do you know if there's any new development there?" From there I will begin to open up and before you know it I have said more than I should.
My mum noticed that he would always ask for money from my dad whenever my dad had some money, so my mum told me and my sister to always say we don't know if he asked us anything about the family. When we started doing that, I remember him asking me angrily if I was hiding things from him, and that was the last time he ever asked me about my family. Later on, we discovered our speculations about him were true, but this was after my dad's business collapsed, of which he orchestrated everything to get my family's properties at a cheap rate through the help of money lenders he introduced to my dad.
He pulled a lot of strings to ensure any money my dad borrowed was useless just so that they could acquire our properties. It was sad because my dad especially refused to realize he was being used when my mum and I told him about our speculations about what he knew as his spiritual father and mentor. He was focusing on the praises and recommendations from others and used them as bases to judge him as righteous instead of watching out for who he truly was. It ended up that he wasn't only a dubious and womanizing person, his actions had led to the death of his wife and her brother when they discovered his true identity. After we discovered his true identity, he came after my family so badly that we had to drive at night on a 9-hour journey to Ogun state, Nigeria. So sad that it ended that way, but I'm glad my family and I are all alive to tell the story.
