I became a soothsayer at twenty-three.
Or so I thought — a few weeks after I’d been offered a permanent position as a broadcast journalist and producer at a television station, in my last semester of university.
An unusually cold evening in March.
The kind that catches you off guard, forcing you to reconsider everything you thought you knew about climate from your Environmental Studies lessons. Back in Upper Primary and JSS, we had been taught that March marked the end of the dry season, which stretched from November and was driven by the northeast trade winds.
No one had told me it could rain like that in March.
In Primary Four, our Ga teacher, Mr. Ayibontey, had told us, “March is the sunniest month of the year.” He wrote it carefully in Ga on the blackboard—O-tso-ki-ri-ki-ri—and said it was so-called because “the sun burnt with a furious blast.”
March, to me, was heat, unapologetic and alive. But the evening I became a soothsayer, there had been a downpour.
Accra was wet.
I had just returned from my first day of training at the GBC Broadcasting School. In bed, I lay still, watching the rain trace its long fingers across the window. I thought about my future—the one I had already begun to assemble in my mind.
I saw myself moving through studios and stories, my voice smooth, my purpose clear. The vision thrilled me, making my skin ripple with goosebumps. My whole body trembled with a smile. An elegantly crafted life was what I had carefully curated.
But man proposes.
The two years I spent at the TV station became an absolute drought. A dry, unrelenting season. The gates of fortune were securely shut.
A personal Jericho.
Nothing came in, nothing went out. The company wasn’t doing well; salaries came late or not at all, and hope arrived only in fragments and broken pieces.
Yet, I kept planning, imagining, reimagining, rehearsing my eventual rise. I think God must have choked on His own laughter while I made lofty plans for a “someday” I so hoped in.
For five years, my life spun in circles—a slow, sad dance around the twin-city of delay and stagnancy.
Delay has hands.
It touches you by name, lays its palms on your shoulders, and presses until your feet grow heavy. I carried that weight for years—a ring of weariness around my neck, a slouch in my spirit, the familiar sting of shame.
When something finally shifted—a “real” job, my first true salary in five years—I was too tired to celebrate. It wasn’t relief that came; it was silence. The kind of hollow peace that attaches itself to a Pyrrhic victory.
I was twenty-nine and no longer a soothsayer. I had begun this journey at dawn, but by dusk, I was still running fast just to remain stuck in the same place.
In that waiting, fear moved in on tiptoes, without knocking. The weight had moved in, too, that clandestine stroller. It swallowed my voice whole. I became smaller inside myself—careful, quiet, obedient to defeat. Even when grace finally found me, I met it with the demure countenance of one passing through a foreign land.
I did not know then that grace could move backward.
I did not know that it could walk slowly, deliberately, and exchange pleasantries with you with its left hand. I had only known grace as something that pushed forward—bright, directional, victorious. But grace has a stranger rhythm. It moves as it pleases.
Sometimes it stalls, sometimes it hides, sometimes it drags you to the back of the room so you might learn how to see again.
We have been taught only one dimension of grace—the one that ascends, that multiplies, that opens doors. But there is another: the one that waits, withholds, and reorders. We mistake stillness for failure because we worship progress. Yet grace, in its backward walk, is not regression, but recalibration. A pause that realigns our steps to the will of God.
Nothing moves forward forever. Not even time. Memory folds back on itself, and grace, in her quiet way, teaches us to live with that truth.
The stalling grace is a difficult gift to receive. It strips before it restores. It unsettles before it strengthens. It feels like punishment, but it is preparation. When grace withholds motion, it is often doing its deepest work.
For me, it took seven years before the wheel turned again. And when it did, it moved swiftly, as if time itself had been gathering speed in the shadows.
In my long midnight, I came face to face with the idols of ambition, competence, intelligence, and self-reliance that I had built. I had made gods of my own gifts. I had worshipped the life I imagined more than the one I was living.
Grace had to walk backward, with her left hand, to dismantle it all.
Because sometimes, backward is the only way forward. The Skilled Hunter knows this. And that is why He does not release the sling until it has first been drawn back, taut and trembling, in the power of the left hand of His grace.
