By Ezekiel Mutua
We serve a God who makes our setbacks the greatest come backs. My graduation at KU 25 years ago was a sham, full of pain and distress.
I was robbed at OTC in town two days before the graduation day. I had just picked my pay from Nation Centre where I worked as a journalist and was heading to the bus station to KU to pick my graduation gown, only for some robbers to pounce on me and disappear with everything – money, clothes and my identification documents.
The unfortunate incident would delay my mission to pick the gown and prepare for my graduation. I would eventually get the gown the morning of the graduation, but the entrance to the Graduation Square had been closed and ceremony was already underway.
I hanged on the fence and followed the proceedings from outside the Graduation Square with my mom, brothers and sisters and a bunch of villagers who had come to celebrate me.
It was a humiliating experience. But today I entered the Graduation Square as a VIP, in the procession with the Chancellor, the Vice Chancellor and other dignitaries and was sat at the high table.
As I sat at the front row of the KU Graduation Square, I gazed at the corner where I stood in the fateful morning of October 1994 and shed a tear, not of pain but profound gratitude.
God has raised me and healed my pain. May anyone going through their graduation today feeling low and dejected know that God can turn their situation around and honour them at the very place where they experienced the worst pain.
Writer is Ezekiel Mutua.
