Bawa: Origin Story - Part 2
THE GATHERING
Mayowa Ojo
6/10/20265 min read
PART 2
One week after his uncle got healed, Bawa joined aunt Christy one Saturday morning on an evangelism trip. He was told to be an observer as he’d never gone out to preach to anyone and he was more than happy to do just that. At the end of the exercise, on a whim, the leader of the group of about 9 people, decided that they should all go into the hospital down the street and pray for those who were sick.
Without thinking, they all marched into the hospital and, upon receiving permission from the hospital’s administrator, they split up into three groups of 3. Bawa, aunty Christy and a third member went into a female ward to pray and the first person they approached told them off. Without skipping a beat, they all moved on to the next bed space but Bawa wasn’t having it.
He walked back to the elderly woman who had told them off and stood beside her bed. The woman looked at him with immense disgust and waved her hand in front of him as if to swat him like a fly. Bawa stood there unflinching.
The lady called out to the other pair and asked them to retrieve their baby evangelist and all the time, Bawa stood still looking at her.
Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his stomach that almost left him lightheaded. He held on to his stomach as he bent over in pain. Aunty Christy turned around just in time to see him bend over forward and she rushed to help him.
Bawa could hear them asking him what the problem was and if he was okay but it felt very distant. What was closer to him was a stench that was so bad, he thought that he would vomit right there and then. Just as potent as the stench, was the pain that gripped him and then, just as quickly as it came, the pain and stench vanished.
Bawa straightened himself and looked at the woman on the bed, completely unbothered by aunty Christy and her concerns about him.
“You are feeling pain in your stomach and the doctor said that you will soon die and go to heaven. That is why you are not happy,” he said as he walked forward till he was an inch from the bed.
The confusion on the patient’s face was evident; she neither affirmed nor negated the young boy’s diagnosis. She just stared at him in shock.
“In Jesus name, pain go away,” Bawa said and he laid a hand on the woman’s stomach, directly on the spot where her pain was most pronounced, just as he felt it in his tummy.
Immediately, the woman felt relief flood her body, converge in her tummy for a few seconds and then peace all over.
“What did you do?” she whispered.
“Jesus showed me where your pain was playing hide and seek in your tummy and he told me to put my hand there.”
While all the adults around the bed looked at Bawa, he casually walked to the next bed space to pray for the patient.
********
A week later, Bawa was home one Friday afternoon and about to nap when a sharp pain seized him in his leg and in what felt like a split second, he was in the hospital, in a male ward, staring at a man whose leg was gangrene. He could feel the man’s pain and corresponding plea for help to a being he could not see. Without a conversation, Bawa knew that the man’s leg was scheduled for amputation the following day and the little boy wondered if this contributed to the man’s pain. He concluded that it did and with that he was back in his room, sleep banished from his eyes.
Little Bawa got up from his bed, put on his tiny slippers and started the ten minute walk to the hospital in search of the man. Once there, he told the nurse at the reception that he wanted to see the man whose leg was about to be cut off and he wanted to pray for him.
The nurse did a double take and looked around wondering who the brazen small boy was and how he happened upon a piece of information that the patient’s relatives were not yet privy to.
“How did you hear about that,” she asked.
Bawa shrugged, unbothered by the nurse’s question.
“Jesus told me.”
After an eternity of staring at each other, the nurse again looked around and, abandoning her training, she walked Bawa to the patient’s ward.
Once at the man’s bedside, Bawa looked at him and was filled with compassion even though he did not understand was happening to him. He looked at the man, their eyes locked and Bawa began to cry because somehow, he could understand the man’s pain. With tears welling up in his small eyes, he stretched out his left hand to the man’s bandaged leg before the nurse could stop him from doing so.
The patient flinched with the small boy’s touch and then a sense of calm washed over him.
“Get better now in Jesus name,” Bawa said, crying with his hand on the man’s leg.
The patient in bed started to whimper, then he started to yell. The Nurse pulled Bawa backwards to herself as they watched the man start to vibrate in bed and then suddenly he started laughing. With shaky hands, he reached for the bandage, unsure if what he was feeling was exactly what was happening to him. He grabbed a loose end of the bandage and began to pull it off.
“Stop,” the nurse said but she made no move to stop him or call for backup. It was as though she, too, wanted to see if anything had happened.
By the time Bawa left the hospital, five other men with varying illnesses were healed and the only reason he stopped was because it was starting to get dark.
Bawa told his mum casually when he got home that evening just before his family started to panic about him. His mother listened carefully, wondering what was happening to her son but it was the third time in about a month that she was hearing of such an occurrence. First, it was her brother-in-law, then aunty Christy from church shared similar news and now Bawa himself.
Over the next two months, Bawa would occasionally walk into the hospital to pray for random people as he was led to and they would get healed. He was young and the impact of what was happening through him did not sink deeply but he knew it was important because he’d felt the pain of more than one but not all.
One day, Bawa was on his way to the hospital to pray for some of the sick when the security guard stopped him and, with a sad face, told him that the owner of the hospital did not want him to visit the hospital anymore.
Bawa cried.