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Is love blind?

By Charles Ighele
21 July 2019   |   2:05 am
I had an experience as a teenager that I will never forget in my life. My plan for my life was to marry early. And when I came across a girl during the last year in secondary school

Bishop Charles Ighele

I had an experience as a teenager that I will never forget in my life. My plan for my life was to marry early. And when I came across a girl during the last year in secondary school, I decided to grow with her and marry her in the nearest future. The relationship was not sexual at all. The love was so much that I would lose weight when I did not see her. I could hardly eat.

There was a day something happened and I thought she was dead. I was preparing my mind to kill myself, when news came that she was very much alive. The instance I mentioned above is the only time in my life that the thought of suicide ever crossed my mind. I give thanks to God that I did not kill myself because of love that was blind.

For the sake of those who may wonder how a secondary school boy would think of marriage, I started secondary school at the age of fourteen. I was about getting out of my teenage years in my final year in secondary school. I was, therefore, neither fifteen nor sixteen years old, as is the case now.

In order not to make a short story long, I wrote the West African School Certificate Exam and it turned out to be a fiasco. Who else did I need to comfort me than the girl I was blindly in love with? She was the first person I broke the news to. But instead, she sacked me. She sacked me. She sacked me with immediate effect and “automatic at once.”

I went back to my parent’s house. I put on Jimmy Cliff’s music titled, “That’s the way life goes.” I put on another one titled, “Not now, no baby not now.” I was almost sinking into depression, when I asked myself, “What is wrong with you? Why would you harm yourself and your life over a person that does not love you?” It was then I decided to pick up the broken pieces of my life. I decided to rewrite the West African School Certificate Exam with one of the best results in the school. From there, I went for my higher school certificate and finally, my university education.

I did not blame the girl for sacking me. We were about the same age, and I think she did not want to marry somebody who could not pass an ordinary West African Certificate Examination. One or two of my readers out there would also not want their daughter to marry somebody who cannot cross the school certificate hurdle. But I made up my mind never to fall blindly in love again. It was much later I began to see that I, Charles was blind and that love is not blind. When I looked back, I saw that the signals were all there, but I was too foolish and blind to see them. In Judges 16:4, it is written “and it came to pass afterwards that he (Samson) loved a woman…” In Judges 14:1-20, Samson had earlier fallen blindly in love with a girl. He kept ignoring all the signals, including attempts on his life because he was blindly in love. Nowhere in the Bible “Love is blind” is used to define love. “God is love” and His love for you is not blind.

I pray that anytime any member of your family is blinded by love, and begins to do stupid things, God will send someone to rescue him or her, so that he or she will not become permanently physically blind and harmed like Samson. Love you.

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