THE cock crow sounded loud like the herald’s gong today, as Jephthah woke up from a drunken sleep.
It was morning and it was still raining outside the cave where the ex-fighter lived in Tob.
It had rained a heavy downpour all night. But here was Jephthah fagged out from rounds of drinking through the night.
Jephthah woke up sober. He sat up on the straw mat where he’d laid and observed his surroundings.
Here in that dim-lit cave were four big men sleeping like a dead log of wood around him. The men laid on his own cloths spread out on the ground.
But those men were the four friends he’d just made among the vagabonds that frolicked around him. They were the ones that wouldn’t rest till they’d made a pal of this loner.
Jephthah’s eyes roamed away from those four as his gaze settled on the stone at the head of the mat.
Beside that stone that he’d used for a headrest, and a little away from it, there were two empty wineskins.
They were still dripping wet with scant drops of liquor.
The young man picked up the empty sacks and brought them close to his gaze in a curious study. He turned the two skins upside down as if to confirm if anything remained inside.
But the wineskins were empty and Jephthah knew it. So he threw the bottles away, looked at himself and broke down crying.
Jephthah teared up like he’d never done since he became a grown man. He cried, and sobbed, and whimpered like a child.
He simply looked at himself, and cried.
That moment when the ex-champion surveyed his surroundings and observed himself, he’d quickly calculated the situation that made his new acquaintances sleep there near his drunken self.
But these were the friends he wasn’t even open to as much as to know their names by heart.
Yet it’d been months since the gentlemen had been proving themselves friends of the lone walker.
Jephthah connected the dots.
The last things he recalled from the previous night was him drinking from street to street as the rain gathered in the sky. Then falling over into a stinking pit of garbage to sleep as the rain began to pour.
That moment when the downpour beat on him the previous night, right before he drifted to a fast sleep… Jephthah had felt an exhilarating glide down a water sky.
It was ecstasy he felt. It was paradise.
But the drinker was simply bathing in rotten sewage.
That was about the last thing Jephthah recalled. Except, perhaps, a moment when he jolted up in a bid to empty his bladder in the dead of night.
He recalled this moment also and observed now that he woke up from his own bed in that cave where he lodged. And saw four men sleeping around him that time.
Yet Jephthah hadn’t processed anything then. He’d simply went over to the wineskins, picked up the first and found it empty.
Then he picked up the second which was almost empty, un-cocked the bottle and gulped down everything left inside.
Following that, the hooked drinker let himself collapse to bed in a huge slothful fall.
Now Jephthah recalled these things when he looked around. And when he looked at himself, he remembered the height from which he’d fallen to ground.
So this what was made the former hero cry. He cried and cried till he could find the words to prove it.
Thus, Jephthah knelt down on the mat now and bowed his face to the ground.
He prayed: ‘Have mercy on a squandered soul, Lord of Heaven and Earth! Pick me up again and I will for ever cherish this deliverance!’
But Jephthah kept going. He wanted the root cause dealt with, so he bared everything to an attentive God.
He raised his head right then and looked as if to sky.
‘I realize where exactly I fell today, O Most High!
‘But You are upright to bring down this proud hill to dust. You are gracious to call back Jephthah with this humbling fall!’
He sunk his head now in a contrite moment. ‘But what is Jephthah the son of Gilead? What am I but dust and nothing?
‘Was I not mere dung when you raised me to be my father’s heir? Was I not the least when you made me great?
‘But I named myself Slayer of Giants, and Gilead was proud to call me so! I grew too big and confident. I grew too assured about myself, about my place!
‘My God, I quickly forgot that You were everything me!’
He raised his head again and clasped his hands together.
‘O God, only You can forgive! Only You can pardon a proud soul as I?
‘Please forgive my haughtiness to You and to a fellow man as Elar!
‘Please forgive my self-reliance and pride! And I’ll ever depend on You alone!’
Following that, Jephthah fell prostrate and cried the tears. Till the heavy rains ceased and the morning light shone.
Now his friends woke up to see something else.
Copyright © April 2022 by Kayode & Tola Olla
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