Life after your woman gets ‘born again’

A woman offers up a prayer during the Jubilee Christian rally on June 09, 2013. PHOTO | DENISH OCHIENG

What you need to know:

  • Slowly and surely, she will start spending more time with this new crowd that secretly wears self-righteous hats but judges you and your lack of faith.
  • Of course her dressing will change: suddenly she can’t wear anything too revealing. No more show of legs because that is the true workmanship of the devil.
  • Of course the sex will change. If you are not married she might suddenly say that it’s sin and stop. Or she might just make sex look like a dirty thing.

What happens when the person you are dating, or your partner, suddenly finds the Lord?

When they find faith, a new path, a new disposition and suddenly you find yourself cast away on the other side of the divide.

No doubt it can’t be business as usual.

She might continue dating you, but you can be sure she will get new friends because “you are the friends you keep and if you hang out with wolves you learn to howl.”

Then slowly and surely, she will start spending more time with this new crowd that secretly wears self-righteous hats but judges you and your lack of faith.

These chaps who all get together and speak this strange dialect and laugh at their own private jokes dug out of the book of Psalms. These are the type of folk who iron their jeans.

Subtle change

You will watch religion – or whatever that is – change her.

Slowly at first, then drastically. She will stop drinking; cold turkey. If you all used to do benders once in a while, that will go.

At first, she will continue to accompany when you go out, but she’ll sit with her arms crossed defensively across her chest and nurse soda water for a few hours, after which she will want to leave.

She will carry those little Bibles in her purse, which she will read studiously in traffic. She will quote Joel Osteen and memorise the teachings of T.D. Jakes. She will spend the whole day in church on Sunday.

You will, on her insistence, meet her new friends and there will always be some guy in that group who, you will tell immediately, is interested in her.

The one who “deserves” her, the one who is always sharing material and “supporting” her in faith.

He will look at you with those dead eyes when you are introduced then offer you the tips of his fingers in greeting. If he were any warmer he’d be cold tuna.

No more show of legs

Of course her dressing will change: suddenly she can’t wear anything too revealing. No more show of legs because that is the true workmanship of the devil.

She might even drop make-up. She will stop making any effort to look good because the true quality and treasure “lies in the hearts of men, not in what they wear on their backs.” You will Google that phrase and come up blank.

She will try to influence you to mend your heathen ways, because she saw a bright light that told her that her only mission is to get a lost sheep home.

That sheep is you. Subtly at first, she will offer you literature, drag you to church events (kicking and cussing) and then when all that seems to be taking too long to bear fruit, she will start praying for you fervently and furiously.

During meals, she will hold your hand at the table and instead of praying for the food she will say something like, “ – and Lord, as we sit at this table, please don’t forget your son here, don’t forget his lost soul, continue to herd him towards your light.”

You will, at this point slowly open one eye and look at her and you will not recognise her.

Strange diet

Depending on what church she has joined, she might even change her diet based on some weird scripture. She will suddenly call meat “flesh” and will refuse to eat anything but legumes and vegetables.

Of course the sex will change. If you are not married she might suddenly say that it’s sin and stop. Or she might just make sex look like a dirty thing.

Don’t even dare talk dirty to her, yet it was something she used to get off on in the good old days. Her former fetish will now sound pervasive, or even psychotic.

When she is praying for you, you will hear her mention the Lord, asking him to intervene in your dark perverted ways.

And then you will know that it’s time to either leave or seek an intervention.

Weird churches

Not all churches are sane. Not everybody who professes the faith is sane. Not all men and women of the cloth are genuine.

Some prey on the weak, the gullible, the desperate, the lonely, the poor, the rich and the in-between.

You read about the case of those poor dead kids who were caught in the madness of religion and faith, and it makes you so annoyed.

You hear accounts of how that chap started acting weird, how he started withdrawing and you say, wait a minute, we all know someone like that!

If you know a religious fanatic, who now walks around mumbling Bible verses, maybe she needs help, not another Christian bumper sticker for her car.