The Unhappy, Blessed Day

“And as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” — Genesis 50:20 (ASV)

It was a fair morning in 1821 in Osogun, a Yoruba town of about twelve thousand people in what is now south-western Nigeria. A boy named Ajayi, about thirteen years old, was at home while his family got breakfast ready. Around nine o’clock a rumour ran through the town: the enemy was coming.

The Yoruba country was falling apart. Its old empire was splitting, and armed bands were roaming from town to town catching people to sell to the Portuguese and Spanish slave-buyers on the coast. Every town that fell meant more captives, and every sale meant more guns for the next raid. By the time anyone in Osogun could run, the raiders had surrounded it. After three or four hours of fighting, they were inside.

Ajayi described what came next years later, and it is one of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of a slave raid ever written. Mothers ran through thorn bushes with babies on their backs and children clinging to their arms, dropping their loads, then finding they could not save all their children either. Ajayi had a bow and five arrows. He lost the bow in the thorns before he could use it. The last time he saw his father was when his father came from the fighting to tell them to run. The raiders threw a noose of rope over the neck of every captive and led them off “in the manner of goats tied together.” Ajayi, his mother, his two sisters, one of them a baby, and a cousin were led out through the burning town. He caught sight of his grandmother in the crowd for a few minutes, and never saw her again.

Sixteen years later, now a Christian and a schoolmaster, he sat down to write about that day. He called it “the unhappy, but which I am now taught, in other respects, to call blessed day, which I shall never forget in my life.” Unhappy, because he was violently torn from his family. Blessed, because it was the first step of a journey that would bring him to Christ.

Read that carefully, because it is easy to get wrong. Crowther never said slavery was good. He never said his losses didn’t count. He ended his letter by saying the day was blessed “when considered in this respect; though certainly it must be unhappy also, in my being deprived on it of my father, mother, sisters, and all other relations.” He held on to both halves of that sentence for the rest of his life.

That is exactly how Joseph spoke in Genesis. His brothers sold him to slave-traders. Years later, when they were terrified he would take revenge, he did not tell them it had all been fine. He said, “ye meant evil against me.” It was evil. Then he said, “but God meant it for good.” God had been at work inside the evil, for purposes nobody could see at the time.

Maybe something has happened to you that was simply wrong: a loss, an injustice, something done to you. Christians sometimes rush to tell people that “everything happens for a reason,” as if the reason makes the wrong thing okay. Crowther and Joseph are more honest than that. You are allowed to call it unhappy. You are also allowed to hope that God is not finished with it.

One thing to do this week: think of the hardest thing that has happened to you. Write two sentences about it, starting the first with “It was unhappy because …” and the second with “God could still …” Don’t force the second one. If you can’t finish it yet, leave it blank and come back to it when you finish this book.