Waiting as a Servant Of God

Toyin Akolo

Lagos, Nigeria 

Greetings my sisters, my name is Mrs. Toyin Akolo, I am from the Lagos church in West Africa. I have been a disciple for 20 years and I have been married for 15 years, I came into marriage with a lot of expectation and planned out future. In my culture and society, once a woman is married the race for children begins, and everyone is watching your belly. We even have it in our wedding songs “In nine months time we will gather to celebrate again”.

My husband and I planned to have our children within the first 5 years of our marriage, and have fun watching them grow, and when nothing happened in the first 3 years I became anxious. Each monthly cycle was a sad time and a reminder of what I had not gotten. I stayed up at night crying and praying to God. People came to me with all kinds of advice and medical recommendations, I tried different fertility clinics with their recommended medications and ran all kinds of fertility tests, we just kept trying.

I am so grateful to God blessing me with a loving and understanding husband and mother in-law, who were always encouraging and comforting me. My mother in-law didn’t have her first child until after 15 years of marriage when she had my husband, so she understood what I was going through and encouraged me with her story.

After 5 years of trying, I got up one morning at about 2am and cried till 4am, my husband woke up and saw me. He came to encourage me and said “Do not wear yourself out before God answers your prayer” that was the moment I resolved not to be anxious anymore, at God’s own time He would answer me. I decided to look for ways to take my mind off it, so I got involved with the communion set up every Sunday. I opened up my home for meetings and anyone who needed a temporary accommodation. I decided to serve God’s people while I wait and it brought me joy and fulfillment. I did not stop my fertility treatment and had faith that God would answer my prayers at His own time.

This didn’t stop concerned parties like my mother, sister in-law and friends, from coming to me with their own ideas of solutions. For my mother and sister in-law it was about going from one church to another, whose doctrines and prayer methods I did not agree with. This tested my faith and conviction a lot. It was even more difficult because I knew they were doing these things out of love and concern for me. At a point they had to bring the “Christian Spiritualist “ to me because I refused to go and meet with him. They tried to convince me by saying “we are all praying to the same God”. But I knew, those prayer methods were not right. This almost caused a rift in our relationship but I thank God for his wisdom in handling the whole situation.

After 10 years of waiting the Lord blessed me and my husband with a beautiful baby girl, she brought joy and comfort to our home again. My husband and I were filled with joy and thankful to God for His blessing to us. Just when we felt like our joy couldn’t get any bigger God blessed us with another beautiful baby girl 5 years after our first daughter! Our joy knew no bounds with her. We are so thankful!

In all I am most thankful to God taking me and my husband through this path to help us build our faith and conviction in Him through this wait and helping us learn to serve as we pray and wait upon Him

God sees and hears us