14/09/2025
MY STORY
By: Idikachi David
Title: The misery of the church boy ( Lesson bought with loss).
Ikechukwu stood at the front of the little brick church every Sunday wearing his uniform like armor and like a promise everyone else could believe in. Crisp alb tied at the waist, palms steady as he carried the candlesticks and the Gospel; meticulous in his movements, soft-spoken when he read scripture,hands steady when he helped hold the communion tray; a humble smile that never quite reached the tiredness behind his eyes. Mothers pointed him out to their boys—“See him. That’s how a young man ought to be.” Young girls whispered in pews that they wanted to marry someone like him when they grew up and tucked the idea of him into bedtime prayers. To the congregation he was simple goodness: a steady presence, a careful voice at the youth Bible study, the one who stayed behind to sweep the floor and fix the choir’s hymn sheets, the church community had folded him into its story: a living lesson in how Faith looks when it’s practiced.
No one saw the other rooms of Ikechukwu’s life.
He learned early that light came with expectations. Praise tasted like responsibility. When people praised him—when their faces brightened and they said his name the way you say a blessing—he wrapped himself around it. It was easier, he thought, to perform holiness than to risk the messy ache of being ordinary. So he performed: a servant at the altar, a dutiful son, a model in the choir photo pinned to the church noticeboard.
At night, in the spaces away from ritual and witness, he loved in ways the church would never bless. He craved tenderness with a fierceness he kept behind locked doors. The secret relationship fed him, and it shamed him, and because shame and hunger are both blunt instruments, he hid both with rehearsed prayers and practiced smiles.
When the girl who had shared those nights with him—Amaka—left, she took more than his laughter. She took patience. The breakup began small: arguments over promises, over what each of them might want from life. Then something meaner unspooled. Anger tilted into spite. Private words were posted to small screens. Bitter messages and photographs began to travel through the village like a fever. Rumors—little teethy things—gnawed the edges of gossip until they were whole stories. The digital world turned what was intimate into public entertainment.
The rumor ran faster and louder than the testimonies he had amassed by faithfulness. The confession arrived at church in the same way rumors always do—quiet, certain, far too eager. By Tuesday the sermon had turned its head toward “the fallen.” By Wednesday the mothers who once pointed with pride were lowering their voices, removing their boys’ eyes from the example. The hymns went on; the hands still lifted; but when Ikechukwu walked in, someone would shift the pew, or a damp silence would precede a cold glance.
He watched as an entire life of good manners and small kindnesses was reduced to a single thing he’d done in the dark. People who had once entrusted him with their children’s Sunday duties whispered his name like a scandalized prayer. Even those who had been helped by his hands—meals at a funeral, a ride to the clinic—turned away now, as if the ledger of a man could be balanced against one terrible line.
The weight of that new gaze settled on him like weather. It pressed him flat. Shame does something precise: it sharpens the smallest of faults until they look like cliffs. He tried, for a while, to pretend solidity. He hollowed himself out with extra service—arriving earlier to light candles, staying later to lock the doors, trying to remind people of the years he had given. But service, when it is performed to hide, hollows the soul further. His name, once spoken with reverence, became something of a cautionary syllable.
Late one night, when the stars offered no counsel and the church doors were locked against him. Tired of the performance and the hiding and the way voices could take up residence inside him and make a home of accusation, Ikechukwu made a decision he thought would be a release. He slipped away. He wrote nothing, made no speech. The news of his absence moved in the town like a sudden wind. People knocked on doors and looked longer at the younger boys who had once followed him along the path to church. A phone call, a hurried search, then the whisper that carries like smoke: he was gone.
Death unmasked them in a way gossip never could. As if grief were a cleaner that revealed what praise had painted over, neighbors began to tell new stories—the small mercies Ikechukwu had done without witness. The widow who got a basket of yams on market day; the boy he tutored until the stubborn numbers made sense; the afternoon he spent with the Sunday school kids, teaching them how to tie shoelaces and pray aloud; the quiet calls he made to the lonely and the meals he had carried to parishioners who were sick; the time he carried a sick neighbor to the clinic in a rain that refused to let them through. These memories came out of people’s mouths like contrition. The very hands that had turned away now fumbled for ways to remember him - not to excuse what happened, but to reclaim what had been lost in the scandal.
But memory is a late patient and guilt is not a tidy thing. It settled on Sunday benches and in the mouths of those who had pointed fingers. The Rev, Father spoke from the pulpit with a voice that trembled; his sermon was not theory but a confession of communal failure. For days and weeks the church pulpit held sermons about compassion and forgiveness as if the congregation were learning to say those words aloud for the first time. Candles were lit in his stead; flowers gathered at the gate. The choir sang his favorite hymn in a voice that cracked on the second verse. Mothers held their children a little closer, and some of the boys who had been told to emulate him for propriety instead learned the lesson that had been missing all along: that holiness is not a public costume and that kindness is not a shield against loneliness. The mothers who had once been quick to praise outward perfection learned to ask more questions about the interior life of their sons.
In the funeral’s hush, one elderly woman lifted her hand and said what everyone feared to say before: “We treated him like a sermon, not a son.” The words landed and did not evaporate. They sat with the congregation through the burial and stayed when the coffee cups were pushed around the parish hall. A few people—those whose pride had been the loudest—moved from whispered judgment toward action. They started to ask questions about how the church held people who faltered, about who the community was for when the cameras left. It was small at first—offering a visiting schedule, a phone line for the troubled, a youth mentor program that asked more about loneliness than about public appearance.
Ikechukwu’s absence was a long-running echo: the unswept corner of the sacristy where he used to leave his biretta, the unfinished prayer lists; it carved a hollow place in the church—an ache that could not bring him back, but which changed the way people looked at the rest of one another. As grief matured into reflection, they learned, painfully, that goodness and weakness can live in the same person, that public virtue does not cancel private pain, and that a single scandal does not erase a life of small, honest kindness.
Years later, a new altar boy would move in with a nervous smile the way Ikechukwu once did, and a mother gestured to her boy while pointing at the altar and said, “See him?, Be kind, but also be honest. If you carry anything heavy, tell someone. We look after each other here. Not because of how you shine, but because you are human.” The boy tilted his head, uncertain, and asked, “Why did they stop talking about him?” His mother took his hand and looked at the old place where Ikechukwu used to kneel. “Because sometimes we forget a person is more than one thing,” she said. “We must remember both the sorrow and the goodness.” The lesson had been bought with loss—but it had been learned. In the corners where gossip once fed, a small, stubborn thing took root: mercy practiced before it was preached.
HAPPY SUNDAY & HAVE A BLESSED WEEK.
