I wished the leakage had happened in another section of our mansion and not in my room. But then, I became glad that the puddle had formed on the floor and not on my bed, on my laptop or on my piano keyboard. I just had to be thankful for small mercies.
Since I am not good at scaling walls, I asked a farmhand of ours named Mwangi to check if there was a hole on the iron-sheet roof above my room. I was sure he was up to the task because before then, he had climbed trees on our farm in order to cut off their branches.
Alas and alack, Mwangi didn't find any hole on the roof. That made me think I had probably sprang out of bed at night, taken the water I keep for drinking and spilled some of it on the floor.
You see, I had a habit of getting out of bed in the middle of the night and doing things while half-asleep. Things like feasting on leftover food, taking off my sweater and switching on the lights. It was a weird behaviour that bothered me.
A few days after that morning I saw a puddle of water in my room, it rained heavily again. Small drops of water dripped on the floor of my room as the rain pelted down, which made me conclude that I was originally right to think the roof was leaking.
I prayed about the leaking roof and then requested Mwangi to re-check it. He promised to do so later. While I waited for him to look into the matter, the familiar feelings of depression washed over me. But I found solace in the following words of William Law:
If anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to all happiness and all perfection, he must tell you to make it a rule to yourself to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you. For it is certain that whatever seeming calamity happens to you, if you thank and praise God for it, you turn it into a blessing.That quote must have soothed my heart, for even though the roof continued leaking whenever the heavens opened, it never concerned me much. Fortunately, a roofer repaired the roof this year with an expertise that impressed me.
My experience of the leaking roof toughened me, or so I think. When I faced two challenges last month, I endured them without getting depressed. Okay, let me tell you more.
Two weeks ago, I lunched two chapatis and a flavorless stew of a plant we call "mafaki" in my mother tongue of Kikuyu. Later that day, I felt a little frail. Thinking the lunch I had taken was the cause, I vomited the most I could.
Soon after vomiting, I developed a sore on my tongue. The sore became painful as the days wore on. It made me eat and drink water with difficulty. Even talking became somewhat stressful, making me envious of the people I watched singing joyfully.
On one of the days when the pain was most intense, I hesitated crooning hymns while showering, as it is my habit. But on second thought, I resolved not to let the damn pain keep me from singing to my God. I therefore crooned my favorite hymns.
Then last Friday, I updated something on my blog. And yikes! Doing the update made me accidentally delete all my blog stories, stories that I had labored diligently to write over the past eight years.
Anxiously but prayerfully, I contacted my web hosting company to find out if there was a way I could undo the deletion. Although the deletion was undoable, I was grateful that I could restore my stories from a backup the company keeps.
The backup covered the writings I had done up to Wednesday. So I lost the changes I made in two blog stories on Thursday and Friday. But that didn't depress me. In fact, I enjoyed working on those two stories again.
Challenges - not many people like them. Why lie, I also don't like them. Come to think of it though, the challenges I have faced have molded me into a better person. I am now a more patient and thoughtful person, a big milestone for a young man who used to run away from home at small provocations.
************************
RECOMMENDATION: If you've enjoyed the above story on growing through challenges, you might also enjoy another one on "Dealing With Life Challenges" which I wrote some time back. Just click on that link in blue to dive straight into the story.
