Edward Aikobua
God is great! Although born in Jinja (Uganda) on Saturday, 7th January 1984 to Anglican Lugbara parents who forced me to go to Church on Sundays, deep down inside, I wanted to practise magic, plus start Uganda's pioneer 24/7 Porn TV station, besides playing soccer as a pro.
I believed in God (like Moses and other Bible characters), but also wondered why there were so many religious denominations in my country, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses (whose colourful magazines I adored), Seventh Day Adventists, Pentecostals, Muslims (who bowed down in worship without seats and women covered themselves more decently than most Christians), Hindus, etc.
I did not like my greed, occasional theft, and first slept naked with a girl in her bed around age 7; she died a few years later in the mid-90s, but I didn't know until my mother informed me one night in Arua during December 2001. I was not addicted to alcohol or cigarettes because they tasted bland to sour, but I could not quit pornography.
After Primary 7, I started masturbating as a teenager. I joined a Roman Catholic school for Senior 1 and sang in the chapel choir, but by the end of the year, I felt so rotten inside that I quit without apologies. Why couldn't I stop lusting and managing my belly-burning anger, plus irritability, which sometimes spilled out as unclean vulgarity?
Singing to Mary and asking dead saints to pray for us felt like necromancy. While watching Carman's music video for "Serve The Lord" - broadcast by the six-month-old Lighthouse TV in Kampala on Tuesday, 2nd December 1997, I gave my heart to Jesus and made a personal vow to remain silent (renew my mind plus clean my tongue) until I had finished reading the entire Bible plus Apocrypha.
I knew some Bible stories from Sunday Service readings, films, cartoons, and Religious Education tests in school, but had only read the whole of Proverbs for wisdom in P7 after being made Headboy. There was no other book I had reviewed in full. I started with the New Testament, which I finished very fast during the 3rd Term holiday, then embarked on the Old Testament, which I finished in Senior 3 (two years later because of schoolwork).
When chosen as Timekeeper, I asked God to wake me up in time to ring the first bell (scheduled for 5:30 am every weekday). I would see vivid movie-like dreams before opening my eyes at exactly 5 am, with enough time to bathe and wear my school uniform.
That is when I started recording dream visions and realised how prophetic they can be. My mother told me I was the most disrespectful child among her seven kids (5 girls, 2 boys), and I apologized to her in 2013 with uncontrollable tears running down my face, because I worried based on a 2003 dream that in a decade, one of us might leave the earth. She departed on Friday, 16th December 2022.
Growing older beyond hatred, cussing, singing carnal music like "Sweetest Taboo", exorcism of an ancestral dragon of pretended holiness in Y2K, criticism, conversion to Islam in 2002, backsliding, fighting temptations, meeting the Devil in 2006 and new spiritual discoveries, I have not been 100 percent holy in my rebirth journey, but strongly trust that Jesus is the Way.
