The man by the canal

“A thousand may fall at your sides, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only observe with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked.” - Psalms 91:7-8
There are times when I read stories in the Bible and I feel like, “man, I can’t relate to any of these” but a few days ago I read the Bible verse above (Psalms 91:7-8) and it triggered a memory:
On January 27, 2002 in Lagos, Nigeria, three days before my twelfth birthday. I remember vividly what I was doing that fateful day when I felt the first shake and heard the first sound. The first two sounds didn’t faze me because I thought some idiot was playing there music too loud. Yeah that doesn’t really make any sense…oh well…
A lot of people fled their homes that fateful evening and I was amongst them. All members of my family separated during the chaos: my grandma, male cousin and aunt went their separate ways, and it was just my female cousin and I. We didn’t know what was really happening and nobody wanted to stick around to find out. Electric poles, building and trees were falling down. People emerged from different directions. Our goal was to get as far away as possible from the fire and the blast.

The two way street……
We got to a two way street: the road on the left leads to the highway to…God knows where, and the road on the right covered with overgrown grass also leads to the highway but it’s a bit of a shortcut & it’s faster. If we’re going to get to our destination faster then we better take the road on the right so we headed towards it only to stop dead at our track because there was a man standing there. He stood there staring at us in a cold-like manner as people pushed past him. The first thought that came to our mind was, “oh my God he is going to kill us….don’t get any closer”… and we didn’t instead we took the road on the left.

The Aftermath….
It would be a day later at a friend’s house in another city that we would find out that the whole chaos from the previous day was caused my bombs at a military cantonment.The explosion is said to be an accidental denotation of military explosive in a storage facility.
The road on the right where the strange man was standing was indeed an concealed canal that has been dominated my overgrown grass. And in this same canal more than 1,000 people died and more than 2,000 were wounded that day. We could have been one of the canal causalities if it wasn’t for the strange man standing by the canal.
Its been ten years since this incidence occurred and I can’t help but wonder why i never realized that the man by the canal wasn’t just someone who was interested in our blood, but someone sent there to save our life. Call me crazy but I think that man was an angel of God and you might wonder why he didn’t stop the others from going through that canal…I honestly don’t have an answer for that.
on a side note: the city we ran to that night would take approximately two different buses and approximately three hours to get there. The people that walked through the canal didn’t notice that the other people were sinking or weren’t making it across all because of fear. The spirit of fear can cause us to do irrational things.

(to be contd….)