In the red dust of Borno, where the baobab stands scarred,
a child’s sandal lies split, sole peeled like a prayer unanswered.
The muezzin’s call fractures at dawn—
not with peace, but with the wet click of machetes
finding collarbones in the dark.
They come hooded in night,
voices low as hyenas,
chanting Allahu Akbar over the hiss of kerosene.
A pastor’s throat opens like a red hymnal;
pages of blood flutter to the ground.
His wife clutches the baby to her breast—
milk and plasma mingle,
a baptism no font could hold.
Maiduguri’s market smells of charred yam and gunpowder.
A girl’s braid, still ribboned,
smolders beside a sack of millet.
Her mother keens in Hausa,
the syllables sharp as broken glass:
Ina yarona?—Where is my child?
Yet in the ruins of a mud-brick chapel,
a boy hides beneath the altar cloth.
His fingers trace the carved cross,
splinters entering skin like tiny nails.
He whispers John 16:33—
In this world you will have trouble—
and the words taste of iron and smoke.
Across the Benue, a farmer sharpens his cutlass
not for weeds, but for the day
the sheep become lions.
He sings an old Yoruba hymn,
voice steady as the river’s pulse:
Jesu oluwa, wa fun wa ni agbara.
Jesus, Lord, give us strength.
The earth here drinks deep—
not just blood, but memory.
Every drop a seed.
Every grave a furrow.
From Kano to Plateau,
the ground remembers:
the slain do not vanish;
they rise in the throats of the living,
a chorus no blade can silence.
So let the radicals come.
Let them burn the pews,
scatter the ashes like chaff.
The wind will carry those ashes
to the four corners of Nigeria,
and where they fall,
new churches will root—
not of wood, but of bone and fire.
For the Lamb who was slaughtered
still bears the marks,
and every wound in His side
echoes in the side of a girl in Sambisa,
a boy in Gwoza,
a mother in Michika.
This is not the end.
This is the kindling.
Heaven is indeed weeping
regarding this demonic,
heinous, Islamic atrocity!
Passionately Pursuing Christ 