MIRACLES STILL HAPPEN II
Cold sweat.
It was all over me and dripping to the floor. I was literally shaking as I sat on that seat, confused and under heavy pressure, not knowing what to do.
The hall was silent, save for the silent whispers here and there, the chirps of happy birds that had their nest near the exam hall and the footsteps of passers-by.
The face of the invigilator was unsmiling as he went round like a hungry predator, looking for the answer sheet of any unfortunate student to rip apart.
’30 mins more,’ he announced with glee as the students murmured their complaints.
I didn’t have time to complain. I just stared at the second to the last question in the theory section I was yet to attempt, trying to figure a way to solve the problem. I had read about it the previous night but was totally blank on how to go about it. Painfully, that was the only question I knew I had a fair chance of solving right; the answers to the other questions I had attempted were an embarrassment to look at.
What was I going to do? I moaned as I placed a hand on my pounding forehead and aching eyes. How did I get myself to this mess?
Well, it all started rather innocently.
***
It was the first semester of my 3rd year in school and I began it with so much hope and enthusiasm. I had seen my results of the previous semester and I was pleased, bagging the best result of the department by a mile.
I wanted to keep up with that performance and begin an excellent streak. I strolled into the department at the beginning of that semester and looked up the courses we would be doing. I noticed that, among them, there was a course we would be borrowing from the department of Civil Engineering.
I made a face. I didn’t like that department and the course was all about surveying. To make it worse, we would be taking the course with four other departments; there’s nothing I hated more in school than sharing courses with many departments. The rowdiness and discomfort faced in attending such classes never sat well with me.
In the course of the semester, my concerns were more than justified.
The tutor of the course was very competent, I must admit. But the madhouse and disorderliness the class had was very discomfiting for me. Hours before the class, most of the seats would be taken, leaving the seats at the back of the big hall and the floor available for who cared.
I never saw well from the back so I had to make do with sitting on the floor near the front and it always made by back hurt me.
At a point, mid semester, I made a decision I would regret. I stopped coming to classes for that course. I decided to do self-study with text books from the library. I found the text book the lecturer was using and borrowed it for the rest of the semester, studying from the comfort of my hostel and feeling so clever.
Exam day came.
The previous day, I had looked at the notes of some of my friends who faithfully attended the classes. I saw weird questions that were not in the text book I was studying. I didn’t bother with them (mistake number two), I stuck to the mantra that we all had about engineering lecturers - ‘the textbook the lecturer uses should be your bible for exams’.
Well, ten minutes after seeing the questions, I knew I had messed up. Big time.
Oh, the multiple choice questions were very ok. Most came out from the textbook I has so faithfully studied. But the theory, it was made in hell!
I didn’t know where he got those questions from but I could recognise that they followed the same patterns of the weird questions I had seen the previous day.
’10 minutes more,’ the invigilator’s voice shook me out of my reverie. I had to act fast. There was only one question left to answer, question 4, and I had to try my best at it.
The question demanded that you solve two different sub questions differently and arrive at the same answer for both of them. If your answers were different, then you got it wrong.
I tried, following the faint idea I had. When I was done, my first sub answer was 4 and my second sub answer was -135. I swallowed. There was no time to recheck where I had gone wrong as time was up. I submitted and went home, almost in tears.
***
Second semester came and I heard the lecturer was showing results to students who visited his office. My departmental colleagues wanted to go but I tried to dodge without success as my friends wanted to know what I got in the almighty engineering course.
When we got there, the lecturer told us to stand in a line and call out our names to him, while he searched for our grade. I kept going to the back of the line as I was too scared.
Finally it was my turn and he looked at me and asked, ‘What is your name?’
‘Tobi Ademiju, sir,’ I replied. My heart was in my mouth and I could barely recognize my own voice.
He looked through the list for a moment. ‘Tobi who?’ He asked again.
‘Ademiju, sir,’ I answered. My knees were weak
.
‘Ademi…ade..,’ he murmured as he searched at the top of the list.
Then he looked at me and I will never forget what he said next.
‘You scored ‘A’’.
‘Ehnnn?’ I replied, shocked to the bones and putting respect to one side.
He got puzzled and asked, ‘Is it not Tobi?’ I nodded. ‘It’s A now.’
I placed my hand on my mouth and it didn’t leave there until I got to my hostel.
***
Why am I telling this story now, after many years? It’s to prove that indeed God can do the impossible when we least expect him to. I didn’t even pray for God to help me after that exam because I knew it was my entire fault, but yet that is where His Grace comes in; taking away our faults and wowing us with results unmerited.
Yes, they were papers I wrote that I marked as ‘A’ in my little book then, yet they came out as ‘B’, and at one time, even ‘C’. At those moments, God was still God.
They were papers I wrote too that I sincerely expected to fail, like my WAEC maths, the worst exam I ever wrote, yet I passed and He was still God.
Still they were times that I got exactly what I expected and yes, He still remained God.
That is the beauty of God’s majesty; the independence to intervene when He wills and how He wills, a testament of His Potency.
And like I said in the first post of this series, I believe miracles exist, not just because the Bible says so, but because I have experienced it myself. An experiential knowledge leaves a mark on one’s life that time can never wash away
See you next week.
Tobi
#MiraclesStillHappenII #LiveTheFuture
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