Lagos

After having been to Lagos, I can honestly say I have been through the fire and I’ve been through the flood. Like Paul, I have now been shipwrecked three times and have been in perils of robbers. Unlike Paul, thankfully, I have not spent a day and a night in the deep.

We planned our incoming and outgoing Nigeria flights so as to avoid Lagos at all costs. From all of the negative things I had heard and read about Lagos, I thought I would be pleased if I never had to shake “Lagos dust” off of my shoes. And then as fate would have it, we planned a side trip there while I was here.

We had the great privilege and honor of having my Pastor from the United States come to Nigeria to visit us. Truly, the only reason he wanted to come was to visit us. I was, of course, greatly humbled by his sacrifice.

Bro. McLean, on the other hand, decided this would be an optimal time to plan a “That I May Know Him” seminar in Lagos so he could present his excellent teaching on the Godhead to a wider audience there. In addition, it would be an excellent opportunity to utilize my Pastor’s evangelistic experience to the utmost, having him preach evangelistically wherever and whenever possible.

Time, and space, not to mention your patience as well as a dignified courtesy prevents me from narrating the entire tale of our adventures while we were there. But I will suffer a couple paragraphs of the highlights (or, lowlights, if you rather).

It rained and it rained and it rained and it rained. And the car that was transporting us from point A to point B was not well equipped to spend two hours traveling fourteen miles one way in pouring rain. With the leaks around the sunroof, I would imagine that my Pastor had a few liters of water drip or otherwise soak him each of the two days of the scheduled seminar. Neither was this car adequately equipped to drive through the lagoon that Lagos becomes after a very heavy rain. On both days we ended up “abandoning ship” in the middle of the road when the car reached a point where so much water had poured in on to the floorboards and up into the engine that the car was unable to proceed further.

 

Traffic in Lagos can be horrific. As I mentioned, fourteen miles to go two hours. Stop and go traffic like I have never experienced. And there are no emissions requirements here. Exhaust like you cannot imagine, that is, when we were able to have the windows down. Five lanes of traffic on a two lane road. No a/c in the car, and you can’t have the windows down a good part of the time because it’s raining so hard.

To top it all off, on our second night in the hotel we heard a series of gunshots. At times it sounded like they were coming from inside the hotel. For about forty-five minutes I lay there in bed (this is around midnight) scared to death, thinking this night might be my last. Trying to plan what I would say should the robbers break my door down… “anything I have is yours, only please spare my life.” I did hear someone knocking quietly on my door at one point during the affair, but I would not have gone to the door for anything. Bro. McLean called my cell at one point between series of gunshots and asked if I was okay. I timidly eked out a fake “I’m okay.” He was just as much in the proverbial dark (and just as terrified) as I was.

The next morning we found out that the hotel staff had called the police because the estate next door to the hotel was under attack by robbers. The police surrounded our hotel’s compound and they were the ones firing the shots in order to keep the robbers from entering our compound. The knocking I had heard was one of the hotel’s staff, wanting to let us know what was happening and that we were safe. They said they were not able to use the phone at that point in time. Figures.

And what of the seminar? Both days the attendance was dismal due to the heavy rains. But the Bible school in Lagos did end up with some new enrollees in the program from the advertising leading up to the seminar!

And my Pastor preached with his usual flair and there was a great response in all three of the evening services back on the other side of town!