My dear Jack, you’re subjecting yourself to all sorts of spiritual influence. I already told you this marriage divination thing is not in the Bible. Your pastor should not be functioning as Ifa or juju priest divining who you should marry. I belong to the Christian faith and I find no such thing in the Bible. It’s extra-curricular and if I were you I’ll be careful about extracurricular stuff. Of course you’re going to start having funny dreams through the power of suggestion. Don’t you find it curious that before this spiritual consultation you never had such dreams? What is troubling about the whole issue is that you’ve inserted fear into your relationship. If you go ahead with the wedding and you dash your foot against a stone during honeymoon you’ll attribute it to those dreams. And if there’s late conception in your marriage you’re going to attribute it to what your spiritual consultants warned you about.
You’ve been dating this lady all this while – almost two years now. You’ve had no issues with her character, you’ve had no fears about her. And now suddenly there’s some “ancestral” stuff in her background. You are subjecting your life to fear with all these funny spiritual consultations. Before you know it even your mum will be diagnosed as a witch. It’s always like that.
Fear is a terrible thing. It preys on our imagination, appropriates it to blow things out of proportion. Fear is paralysing. It has torment. All you need do is visit a mental health facility and you’ll see what fear can do in extremities. You need to learn to conquer your fear. It’s a capacity you must develop. Learn to replace fear with faith.
Your whole life seems governed by fear. Mixed with all that spiritual stuff at some point you’re going to be afraid of whoever you marry. You’re going to bind yourself with all sorts of fetters at this rate. Soon, even your receptionist at work will be labelled a witch. You have to be careful about putting yourself under spiritual controllers. I don’t know about other faiths but it’s antithetical to the Christian faith. It’s marriage divination today, tomorrow it’s going to be business divination. And then other divinations. Before you know it you won’t be able to travel without consulting your spiritual adviser. You’re in bondage.
There’s something you found in this lady that made you want to marry her. You’re supposed to be making wedding preparations but instead the whole thing is being derailed. All because of a warning from your spiritual counsellor. Put yourself in her shoes. She’s been dating you all this while, went through thick and thin with you. How does she rationalise this! And you’ve put yourself in a bind. It will be hard for you to disobey your pastor not to marry her, even if the rationale given has questionable spiritual quality. There’ll be all that fear about what if something goes wrong if you disobey. The usual negative stuff that happens in life as a matter of course would then be blown out of proportion. Associative events will be deemed causative. Let me explain what I mean.
Remember that well known saying about the clamorous cry of the witch yesterday and the suspicious death of a baby the next day? Folklore says the witch definitely killed the baby. But that might not be so. There’s not necessarily a causative link between the death of the baby and the cry of the witch. Might have been coincidence, after all there were so many other things that happened since the witch howled. It’s a classic case of the fallacy of post hoc ergo procter hoc. That’s Latin for “after this, therefore because of this.” It means since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X. Which is why conventional wisdom says the witch murdered the child. But the two events may just be associative in timing. It’s the same issue you have now. If you have nightmares after your wedding you will deem it caused by your wife. And dreams can be funny when generated from fear. That you dreamt about it doesn’t mean it’s real, or will happen, or has any spiritual significance. You may just be projecting your fears. In saying this I’m not being sceptical about spiritual realities. And I’m not saying Satan doesn’t exist, or evil doesn’t exist, or witches don’t exist. I will have to deny my Christian faith to say otherwise. What I’m saying is, the spiritual intelligence you’ve been given is so suspicious and so doubtful that it’s likely counterintelligence. Because you’re susceptible to erratic fear you’re a good candidate for suspicious spiritual diagnosis. You’re willing and ready to believe negative possibilities. For the sake of this lady don’t decide to go back into the relationship without conviction and disavowal of suspicious spiritual intelligence. You’re going to make her life miserable. If you’re convinced in yourself marry her. If you lack conviction for whatever reason, not least because of the fake spiritual dossier handed to you, don’t marry her. What is troubling is that the dossier doesn’t even say anything about her. It’s all about some indeterminate spiritual entities in her ancestral lineage. And fear is self-fulfilling. What you fear you will begin to exercise faith towards. Which when it comes true becomes self-confirming. What that does is it reinforces your confidence in your worrisome spiritual source, not realising you’re bringing all those things to pass by the exercise of your faith.
Let’s flip the coin. What if she had been told not to marry you because of some malevolent forces in your ancestral lineage? How would you feel? What will you say? And isn’t this prophecy rather imprecise, and too vague and wide? Doesn’t everyone in Africa have some ancestral powers operating in his or her lineage? Doesn’t everyone come from a village? Or were some born in Shoprite supermarket? You should be able to see through these things. Before you know it you’ll be fasting and praying against a veritable list of ancestral demons. It will never end as you seek to cover every imaginable circumstance. There will be no shortage of spiritual consultants. There will be endless night vigils till your eyes are red and bleary. You will soon lose concentration at work, get a reprimand, which of course will be interpreted as spiritual attack. Before you know it you can’t drink water without speaking into it. Your conversion into a native doctor has just begun. You won’t be able to make one investment decision without your spiritual counsellor. And there will always be conditionalities.
Soon other spiritual consultants will find you out. Your mum will of course be going from prayer house to prayer house. There won’t be shortage of visions, some contradictory. It’s a matter of time before you start waking up at 12 midnight to speak to the four corners of the globe as you pray naked. This despite the fact Jesus didn’t recommend naked prayers. It’s alien to your faith. It’s a syncretism of some sort – the merger of African traditional religion with your Christian faith. It’s a short walk to henotheism. You will justify it as giving unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. By this time your home will be conflicted. Your wife will not understand her husband. The marriage will only work if both of you are subject to the same spiritual controllers. Otherwise there will be conflict. Which will only confirm what the spiritual controller said at the beginning. But it’s not the ancestral demons causing the conflicts it’s the confusion caused by your abnegation of wisdom.
I can’t tell you to marry her or not to marry her. That’s your decision, has to be your decision. I’m not an oracle and I loathe to serve as one. It’s charlatanism. If I give you the answer you want I will be no different from all those spiritual consultants of yours. Haven’t they confused you enough already? I keep telling you to learn to take responsibility for your life. Take responsibility for your marriage decision. If your spiritual consultants turn out to be wrong you will bear the loss.
There’s nothing as bad as realising you’ve been deceived down the line, and that you’ve lost a wonderful woman. Your sorrow will be yours and yours alone. You’ll go to functions years later, after she’s been scooped up by a better valuer and she’s looking all radiant and wonderful… You’ll turn to someone in regret and say, “That should have been my wife you know!” And when he asks you what happened you won’t be able to say. You will sound so stupid if you tell the truth. You’ll just say life happens. God help you if at that time you’re having marital issues with the person you ended up marrying, possibly the one recommended by your pastor. It will turn out your pastor didn’t really know her, only knew her as a good usher in church. But ushering is not a marital qualification. She’s just a human traffic warden in church. It makes no sense to use such considerations as parameters for choosing a wife. Any more than to imagine that because someone is a good choir member she’ll make a wonderful wife. The factors are not remotely related.
Why don’t you go away on a private retreat and think through. Make up your mind what you want to do. Come back with a qualitative decision. It’s always about the decision. Let it be your decision. That way you can take responsibility. You took the decision by yourself for yourself because you know yourself and you know what you want. It’s always about the decision. When are you going? You can’t keep her life on hold forever you know; you can’t keep her waiting.