Take 1: I've been thinking about God lately. Not that I don't think about him often (not thinking about Him is like saying we don't think about oxygen, even though we're constantly in need of it—and yet, that is often the case). But this time, I was thinking about Him in the way one thinks of a particular thing about a person.

Take 2: I've been apologetic lately, and not in the way that I've been offending a number of people on several issues, but in the way that one is apologetic about religion, defending oneself, and what one believes. There were five of us, each with questions that most of us were afraid to ask in God's presence with other people or questions that God's people were afraid to answer in His presence. One of us wondered if God was still the Old Him, striking things and people down. The rest nodded the thought away. He does love us, right?

Take 3: I heard it's called Christian Polemics, when it's Christians with different views and questions on the Bible, faith, salvation, and all that's in between. So there wasn't a need to apologise to anyone that was there with us. The Apologetics happened with people of a different faith. I could see why an apology sounded like Apologetics; having an argument where one had to say sorry almost constantly was valid, in my opinion, especially when you both saw things differently. 

Take 4: So under the wake of night, we hid beneath a lecture theater in school and asked ourselves many questions, hoping to learn the truth. And so we asked: What was free will? Was man free, indeed? How did the devil get sin in his heart? Is man good? Was this life a movie, and was God standing out of time? Already in the past, present, and future, all at once? What did all that mean for us? 

Take 5: I tried, once again, as I always have, to do something sensible (although that didn't always work). I asked that we walk carefully around the borderlines of the box God put us in, the Bible, and other supporting texts. I had heard people say that we shouldn't put God in a box, and I found that funny because I think we're the ones who've always been in the box from the beginning, more for our own good than because we're insignificant. 

Take 6: I tried to talk about it from a place we could all see it. Explaining things is easiest in the language people belong to, like how talking to computers works best when we use the base zeros and ones. So I related our lives to a book (with an author, of course), one too magnificent for human minds to grasp. We were characters who knew there was an author because He revealed himself so. Macbeth could never know Shakespeare unless Shakespeare wrote himself into the play. But oftentimes, because we're either unreasonably oblivious or proud, we tend to think that this author was one of the characters, like our lives weren't already dictated by the Being who still stood above, despite once living within the pages of His own book. We went ahead doing our own thing, like we were the writers. They all nodded at what I was saying, trying to make sense of it. We all were trying, really. 

Take 7: At some point, one of our members decided playing the Devil's advocate was easier. Sighing in resignation, he said, “So all of now, na film we dey be that abi?” To which we all sighed in response, and I said, “Probably, yes. That's one way to put it.”

Take 8: As for the business of the devil and evil, well, let's say I tried to use the cause-and-effect theory. That the value of one is vivid and felt solely because its inverse exists. Or the absolute absence of it. That we only value and understand love because there is hate in the world. We love and hold people dear because we're aware of hate and sometimes, hate or lack of love has happened to us. Evil, was the absolute absence of God, because God is good. And if I remembered my theological classes well enough, the devil probably went strolling in a park too far away from God, and hence, that absence of good, entered his heart, and so, sin was born. 

Take 9: They all looked at me funny, like I had said something treasonous. Then they asked if God was the author and did stand outside of time, then perhaps, they asked hesitantly, “He didn't know it would happen?” I took a deep breath and sighed in the way it was difficult speaking Mandarin to a Nigerian from Kawo expecting them to understand was, and said the most controversial answer: He knew. Then why? they asked. “Because He does it all for His pleasure, His glory”, I responded. 

Take 10: We all left feeling like we ought to be defended from ourselves rather than God because the first response to what I had said was that “God was selfish”. We mumbled it and hid it under our statements, hoping He wouldn't find it. But we didn't have the courage to say it. But I asked again, “When we tell the greatest stories in the world that live through to the end of time, who do the people remember when they search for the source, our characters or we, who told the stories? Why do we write our stories and make men bad? Why can't we make stories with just the good? Isn't it because central to all the reasons we may want to give, it's that glory be ascribed to our genius? Because we want to make out the most of the glory from most of the story?”