We Lived with Bated Breaths for Almost a Year

Girl behind a flower

When my husband and I got married, we couldn’t afford a place to stay, so we moved to where my husband used to live. While looking for an apartment, he had met a kind woman who had an eight-bedroom flat. She took a liking to him and generously gave him a room in the flat. Her son and his wife also lived there. We lived peacefully for a few months until her son started troubling us. He demanded rent and warned us to keep it a secret, else he would throw us out before we were ready to move. The guy was infamous for his misconduct so we took his threat seriously and started paying him. Our properties became his’ to use whenever he liked.

When we could no longer pay him the money he demanded, he threatened to report us to our pastor. True to his word, he came to our church one evening, waited till the service was over and announced to the church that we owed him money for months. That was the most embarrassing day of my life. I wished the ground would just open up and swallow me. Eventually, a kind-hearted church member paid the money for us.

But that didn’t stop the severe maltreatment from him and his wife. He took to eating our food without permission because I store it in his mother’s fridge. Many times, he broke into our room in our absence and things went missing, but we didn’t have the boldness to confront him. We just kept praying for a miracle.

The following year, in August, he asked us to leave the house after I finally summoned the courage to tell his mum about the mistreatment. I wish I never did because it made no difference; she just kept mute about what I told her. That morning, it rained heavily and I remember crying bitterly because we had nowhere to go with my new baby.

By September, God heard our prayers. My husband secured a job that would pay him the exact amount we needed to rent our own apartment!

I still get upset thinking of how they treated us, and I am not sure I have forgiven him and his wife. I am glad we could leave when we did.

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