FEATURE PIECE: Telling the Mind's Construction in a Friend's Face

As Shakespeare said, "there's no art to find the mind's construction in the face". Or is it 'in a friend's'? Have you ever wondered how certain people were wired? Wait till you read this story.

She has been married to this really nice guy for well over 7 years ( they celebrated their 8th wedding anniversary June this year). He loves her crazy and though he is a politician who has the lustful admiration of most girls as well as married women around, his moral compass is still very highly
tilted to the right direction and he tries his best to ward the admirers off. This, in turn, annoys them no end.

The politician's wife had this BFF who is a lawyer and whom she trusted so implicitly she tells her almost everything about her family. The relationship between them - that is, the politician's family on one hand, and the lawyer's family on the other- grew from strength to strength, until one day the lawyer called the politician's wife to tell her her husband was dating another woman outside. This call came few weeks after the man was elected into a new political office.

Now, politician's wife is one of the most fiercely thorough and protective woman I have ever known. You simply dare not say a bad word against her husband to her if you can't repeat same before him. She prodded her lawyer friend to confirm if she was sure of what she just told her and she insisted she was but begged her not to let her husband know she was the one that told her.

Feeling betrayed and heartbroken, she went home and confronted her husband about this extra marital affair with some strange woman but the husband denied it, swearing with all that he holds sacred that he was still the God-fearing husband she has been married to all these years.

Despite the morass of emotions that surrounded that questioning and denying moment, she was not ashamed to hold on to her trust for him. She promptly remembered once upon a time when she used to suspect her husband of using Church activities as a front for game-playing and how she trailed him on several occasions in her own car only to find out to her shame that he really was in church for one activity or the other.Presently, she held on to that trust and decided to turn the cards against her lawyer friend even against her husband's pleas to let it slide and take it as one of those rains that falls into marriages every now and then. But whosai!

Soon enough she got another call from a mutual friend of hers and the lawyer, this time, warning her to be careful of their friend, the lawyer. The friend mentioned something about the lawyer having the hots for her husband. That call set off the alarm clock in Mrs politician's brain.

She put a call through to her lawyer friend, told her calmly that she had confronted her husband who denied having any affair outside and if she could at least help her with the name of the 'outside' woman. The first thing the lawyer friend said was, 'so you believed him and you are stll fooling yourself in that farce of a marriage'? That was when Mrs politician's nut in the head loosened. She went stark raving mad, insisting that if the lawyer didn't give her a name she was going to give her a showdown in her house and office. And the story changed.

Lawyer friend denied ever telling her about any 'outside' woman somewhere, that all she said was that her husband MAY be having an extra-marital affair now that he holds an elective position.

So you see dear reader, always draw a strict line between your friends and your marriage. Wisdom is the principal thing. Some people's ministries are just for the sole purpose of breaking other people's happy homes, either because they don't have one themselves or they don't just wish to see someone else having one. And they have taken such ministries to the permanent site, no thanks to gullible and spontaneously-decisive wives who can't put two and two together.

Not everyone who calls you friend wishes you happiness. Thank God for communication and trust. If the politician's wife didn't have that, an ill-timed lie from an envious friend could have left an enviable marriage in smithereens. Again, thank God for communication and trust!