Love In Unexpected Places

I met my husband, Tosin Alo, at God’s Power Church, Liberty Road, Ibadan. I was a member of the choir and also one of the sanctuary cleaners. One day he was ministering in church and a thought dropped on my mind that the guy ministering would be my husband. Immediately, I rejected it. ‘God forbid that I marry this kind of man,’ I said to myself. The thought never fully went away and I persistently pushed it away. I didn’t know anything about him – I didn’t know where he was from or what he did – but I rejected the thought because he was a cripple.

One day, he approached me and told me that God revealed to me that I was his wife. The whole time that he was talking to me, I was sizing him up and thinking inside of me that ‘what kind of nonsense is this?!’ I couldn’t understand why a cripple would think that me, I will be his wife. For me, all that was nonsense talk. Ordinarily, I’d have lambasted him but because I was a worker in the church, I refrained. I endured the talk and when he was done, I told him we’d see later and talk better about it, and left. In order to prevent any further advance from him, I stopped attending that church.

I was sleeping one day and I had a dream.

In that dream, someone told me: ‘if I didn’t marry that cripple man you’ll never have a husband in your life. In fact, no one will toast you.’ I woke up from the sleep, convinced that the devil had orchestrated the dream and so I prayed fervently against the dream.

On another day, I had a dream, I saw this man again. In that dream, he was in a shop, making shoes and he had lots of apprentices. A few days after, I decided to find out from people who knew him what he did for a living. That was when I learned that he was a shoemaker. I was shocked by the correctness of the dream. Still I rebuked the dream and carried on with my life.

As time passed, God began to reveal things to me in different ways and through different people; especially about the kind of person that he was. It was at this point that I went back to the church to meet the pastor and told him all that had been happening.

It was at this point that the pastor informed me that the man had come to him a while back to declare his intentions regarding me and that he (the pastor) had told him that he could not say anything about the matter and that he should keep praying about it till God leads him. All along, I never knew this had happened between the two men. At that time, there was someone I had thought I would marry but when I began to see all these signs, I decided to let God’s will be done. In the end I said yes to him.

When my parents found out that the man I wanted to marry was physically challenged, they objected furiously. My parents preferred me to marry the other man whom they had known with me but for me, I just wanted to be at the centre of God’s will for my life; so I never backed down. Some family members even suggested that perhaps I was being paid to marry a cripple.

It took a lot of meetings within my family and deliberations with his own family for there to be a resolution that the union could go on. When my parents consented, they said they had come to see the hand of God in our coming together and that they couldn’t go against God anymore. It was after this that the issue was laid to rest. They prayed for us and we picked a wedding date.

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The #Sobolation piece this Friday will tell, in details, the story of Tosin Alo – of how he became paralysed and how the journey called life has been for him since then. This is a collaborative storytelling effort between Aderemi Davies of HO3D visuals and Awa Ti Ibadan.

(Ibadan, 2019)