Mother Keziah.

She is a staunch member of the women's fellowship wing of her local church. She does not hold any official post but she does not fail to contribute her own quota. You hardly see her making contributions during meetings. She is not also the type you would easily call up to lead in the prayer or summarize the prayer. She is just there to give support, be it moral, spiritual or financial she does not fail to contribute her own quota. 

 She will always hand in her donations toward church projects quietly to the priest and demand that her name not be mentioned. She is also a faithful member of the sanctuary group of the church, a group dedicated towards every Saturday cleaning of the church auditorium.

 She loves spending her money to buy flowers and other items used for decoration. Her absence any Saturday meant that she must have been sick or traveled to her children's place. Mother Keziah's children are all doing well. She has seven children, five of whom are women married and living in Europe. One of her daughters is in Australia very far from Nigeria. 

 These daughters of hers are happily married and well financially endowed. Her two sons are in Nigeria. One of them is an executive director in a blue chip company and the other who happens to be the last child is just finding his feet in legal practice after being called to the bar. I know by now you would be wishing that your case would be like that of Mother Keziah. 

 Mother Keziah is a woman who fought her way to prominence by dint of hard work and resilience. She has fought against prejudice and very bad ill-treatment from her late husband. Her husband who was not a Christian, strongly believed in African Traditional Religion. He was an educated man though but he hated everything about church.

Mother Keziah's late husband drove her out of her matrimonial home after she resisted her husband's attempt to marry a second wife. Her husband was an influential man in the community and he was able to use his influence to gather support from family members who teamed up to drive her out of the home. 

 You may be wondering why she was driven out of the home by the community. When the bubble burst that Mother Keziah's actual parentage was from a man whom tradition branded an out-caste, the late husband being a staunch traditionalist insisted along with the custodians of tradition in the clan that she must go. Keziah had no mother and father. She was adopted. 

 When therefore her aged father and mother showed up and it was proved beyound reasonable doubt to the foster parents of Keziah that they were her biological parents, her ancestry was also laid bare. This opened a new age of trauma for the then young Keziah who was pregnant with her seventh child. Her late husband rejected and disowned Keziah and all the children she bore for him and married a new wife.

Mother Keziah is a woman of inner beauty. She eventually left the marriage and vowed to train her children and give them the best education she could afford. She engaged herself in the popular bush market, where she went to the remote villages to buy foodstuff and sell in the urban market. 

 Having had a good secondary school education, she later secured a job with a company who granted her opportunity to work in Europe where she was able to secure scholarship to train some of her children.

 Her daughters did not just marry good men; her daughters were well read and were in good jobs. If you want to catch Mother Keziah emotionally just exclaim, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and she would immediately respond, “For sure!”

Mother Keziah despite her endowment is very generous. She does not have a store as she quickly shares out the load of foodstuff that her children send to her. She is generous to a fault as many would testify.

 Her house is never empty as it is filled with young girls she adopted for the purpose of training and mentoring them to university level. Every priest who is posted to her parish will attest to this as she does not fail to cook special food for the priests and all the children in the station especially during Mothering Sundays. 

 Do not say it loud, Mother Keziah's wish on her 80th Birthday would stun you. She requested her children to change the car of her priest and build the station's new block of nursery school, and this they did! She feeds the poor and it may surprise you to note that Mother Keziah forgave her husband and was instrumental to the training of the children born to her husband by her his second wife.

 Mother Keziah till today has refused to lay claim to any property of her late husband and the children do not have an iota of interest in same.

Now you may be expecting me to let you know where Mother Keziah is from. Mother Keziah is only a figment of my imagination… A big shout-out and God's blessings to all mothers whose situations are like that of Mother Keziah! 

Canon Chinemerem Uche 

(c) Christian voice newspaper.