BEFORE KARMA

Dear Diary,

I wish people know that the way you treat others will directly or indirectly affect you.

 Beyond the laws of karma, it’s only human when people treat you the exact same way you treat them. Call it “Garbage in, Garbage out, if you want; but the shit is real.

A couple of days ago, MJ, my friend, went to do her registration at school and was number twenty-something on the queue. We had planned to wait till she was done before we got lunch, but 2:00pm came and it was not even close to her turn. I decided to walk to a nearby supermarket to get myself something to eat in the meantime, because I was hungry.

So I walked into this store and took a McVities shortbread and a drink (someone must've used this combination to curse me🤦), then walked to the cashier to pay for my goods.

And this was where the devil had planted someone to try to ruin my day.

The cashier, a woman above thirty, eyed my goods and opened the cash register. Then looked at me and said, “I don’t have change.”

“Okay,” I said, “Would you have change if I dropped the drink and took only the biscuit?”

She sighed impatiently and said, “No.”

If I wasn’t so hungry, I would have gone back to shelve the goods and just walked out of the store to go satisfy my hunger somewhere else.  But I was so hungry, and the next store was far away.

“Just pick a sweet.” The woman said to me. She had a look on her face that said I was disturbing her.

I glanced hesitantly at a transparent jar of sweets. I didn’t like the idea.

If it was a different store, I wouldn’t have been irked. But I was a regular customer to this particular store and they did it every time! I found it annoying that they didn’t always have change, and the fact that they always “coerced” their customers to use their change to buy sweets.

As insignificant as the “change” was, I believe it was still my call! And if since I started patronizing them, the store had made me use lose up to two-hundred Naira in total, buying sweets, I had a right to be annoyed.

What exactly is their plan? To make me a diabetic?

These thoughts ran through my mind when the woman said, “See, if you’re not ready, move to this side.” She pointed to the edge of the counter, and started attending to the next customer.

Do they tell these people that it is unprofessional to treat a customer that way?!

I didn’t think so, but I was not going to be the one to tell her. I overlooked her actions, paid for my biscuit, drink and (very annoyingly,) sweets.

But I didn’t forget the woman’s face. I forgive, but rarely forget.

Maya Angelou was spot on when she said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Anyway the point is, later that week, I was an usher at an event, and I was in charge of serving guests food. Our team’s slogan was “Treat them like royalty.”

The professional that I am, I adhered strictly to that rule and tried to make everyone I came across truly feel like royalty.

But I was to serve the table near the stage, when I sighted a familiar face. Guess who was seated in a purple lace with an oversized gele on her head?

You guessed it! It was her. The cashier.

Dear diary, all I have to say is, ‘Thank God for Jesus.’ When negative emotions began to well up inside me on seeing her, the love of Jesus constrained me.  

In the end, I treated her like royalty...Courtesy of the Holy Spirit, of course.