She Called Me Light (A Christian Speculative Short Story)

She Called Me Light 

by Emmanuel Mboro

Surprised? No. It was nothing. I stopped counting the number of ministers that prophesied to me.

"You will be a mighty vessel in a way the world will be both blessed and amazed."

I would smile politely, bow my head slightly, and whisper amen as expected.

Then I would walk away, wondering which part of me God planned to use.

The part that failed every exam?The one that could barely pray for ten minutes without sleeping?

I insisted on following her to the hospital as she spoke about the pains again.

What if the cancer had returned? What if all those nights of prayer, the fasting, the vigils, were only another lesson in disappointment?

The doctor spoke gently, like he was trying not to upset the wind.

“It’s back.” Three syllables. That was all but they held the weight of a mountain.

“The nurse will help,” Mama had said, the night we returned from the hospital.

I thought she meant someone from church or maybe a neighbour.

But when I walked into her room the next evening, I saw a woman already seated by her bed, white shawl on her shoulders, hands folded, like she'd been waiting. She greeted me with a nod. Her eyes held something ancient. I said nothing. Later, I asked, “Mama, who is she?”

She smiled. “She's the nurse caring for me.I don’t know why but I feel safe when she’s here.” She wore white, not the starched kind from hospitals.

Softer. Lived-in. Her voice was gentle as she talked about God like she had just seen Him that morning.

I asked Emeka one morning as we both fetched water. "Who’s that woman that comes in the evening?” 

He looked puzzled. “Woman? What woman?”

That was when I first paused.

"Don't you see the nurse that visits Mama?”

“I don't know her. Which hospital is she working? Where does she stay?”

I shrugged, as my hands felt colder than usual. “Don't worry about her.

Maybe she came from Mama's church. ” “Are you sure she is not a ghost?”

I laughed, then paused. “Now that you say it.Something about her doesn’t feel... normal.” 

That evening, I watched her from the doorway. Mama had fallen asleep with a smile on her face which was a rare thing these days. The nurse was humming something that sounded like an old hymn, one I couldn’t place.Her hands moved slowly over Mama’s forehead, almost like she was wiping off pain.

I wanted to ask her something, anything, but I just stood there, swallowing the questions. 

“You’ve been standing there long,” she said, without turning. “You can come in.” 

I stepped in, quietly. She looked up at me, and her eyes were deep. Like wells or fire. I can’t explain it.

“Your mother will live,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“I know. ” 

I looked at Mama’s face again. Peaceful. Too peaceful. Like someone who knew a secret the world didn’t. We sat in silence for a while. She reached into her bag and pulled out a small book. The cover was worn, like it had been touched by many hands.

“Read it,” she said. It was my name written at the top. In my own handwriting.

But I had never seen this book before. Inside, there were pages of prayers.

Desperate ones. Crumpled ones. Some were half-sentences. Some were just names — “Mama,” “me,” “help. ” 

“How did you get this?” My voice shook. 

“They were always heard,” she said, standing. “Every word. ” 

She walked out, leaving the book in my hands.

The next morning, Mama sat up and ate by herself. She smiled at me like she hadn’t been dying.

The nurse didn’t come that day or the next. I went round the street asking.

The woman with the akara stand had never seen her. The barber said he thought she was from our compound. Even Baba Felix, who sat by the gate every morning pretending to read his Bible, said, “Nurse? Which nurse?”

It didn’t make sense.

Two weeks passed. Mama grew stronger. Her laughter returned. I read the book every night, slowly, like it would vanish if I turned the pages too quickly.

And then I found the last page. Written in block letters, neat, firm.

You were never useless. Just sleeping. But even sleeping embers remember how to burn.

That was the day I stopped doubting. Not because I had answers, but because I saw the light and it had started inside me.

*** 

It started with Psalms.

I didn’t know where else to begin, so I opened to the one Mama always quoted:

“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High…” I read it aloud one morning before she woke up. My tongue stumbled over the “pestilence” and “buckler,” but I read it anyway, and again that night.

The nurse hadn’t returned. I checked the window every evening, hoping to see her white sweater approaching from the gate. She never came. But somehow, her presence lingered. When I opened the book she left, the room felt fuller.Like she had just walked past and left something behind. Like peace.

After three days, I stopped waiting for her. I began waking up early, earlier than Mama’s soft coughs. I would spread out my jotter and the old family Bible and underline verses I didn’t even understand, just because they made my chest feel warm.

I started praying longer too. Not because anyone forced me. It just became something I needed. Sometimes I said the same words for minutes: “God, don’t leave me.” Sometimes I sat in silence, waiting for something to rise inside me. And strangely, it did.

One night, while Mama slept, I prayed for two hours straight. I didn’t plan to.

But one scripture led to another, one prayer to another memory. And when I finally looked at the clock, the hands had done a full revolution.

The dreams started the following week. In the first dream, I was holding a matchstick. That was all. Just a tiny stick, unlit, trembling in my hand. The nurse appeared beside me, not saying a word.She bent slightly and blew gently, not on the match, but on my hand. The match caught fire.

In the second dream, I was sitting in church. Alone. Every chair empty, but someone was preaching. His voice filled the room, echoing like a drumbeat.

“The light has always been in you. You feared the smoke, so you buried the fire.” 

I woke up crying that night. Not from fear. From knowing. Something had shifted. I felt like someone had opened a window in my soul.

By the third week, I could quote scriptures without checking twice. I wasn’t perfect as I still fumbled sometimes but the Word had found a room in me. It no longer felt like foreign poetry. It felt like a letter I forgot I wrote to myself.

Even Mama noticed. One evening after prayer, she touched my shoulder gently. “You’ve changed,” she said. 

“I think He’s changing me,” I replied. 

She nodded slowly. “Whatever that woman brought… it wasn’t just medicine.” 

“No,” I said, smiling. “It wasn’t.” 

*** 

It happened one Sunday morning.

The church had just finished a youth meeting where half of us nodded like boiled yam. I sat in the third row, doodling crosses on the edge of my Bible with a blue biro. The youth pastor was talking about using our gifts for God, but my mind was somewhere else.

Then he said it. “Some of you think your gift is too ordinary. That God only uses preachers. But your hands can preach. Your eyes. Even your brush.” 

My biro stopped. I looked up. Brush?

I hadn’t painted in years. Not since secondary school, when I used to win inter-house competitions and borrow art supplies from Musa, the boy whose father was a tailor. The last painting I made was of Mama, kneeling beside a window, her hands raised in prayer. She cried when I gave it to her. I had packed up my brushes soon after. Life got heavy. Faith got confusing. But that day, something sparked.

I went home and pulled out the old cardboard box from under the bed. The brushes were stiff. Some had turned brown with dust.The paints were mostly dry. Still, I set up my table by the window, where light came in softly in the evenings, and started sketching.

At first, my hands trembled. I couldn’t draw a straight line. But then I prayed.

Not a fancy prayer. Just: “God, use these hands again. ” And something came alive.

By the third day, I had painted a flame. Not a literal one — more like a person holding fire in his chest, with eyes like a mirror. It was strange, raw, almost frightening. But it felt right. I showed Mama. She looked at it for a long time, then turned to me, her eyes misty.

“That’s what you’ve become,” she said.

Soon, I painted more. Scriptures I read at dawn became colours by evening.

Psalm 23 became a boy walking through a dark forest with golden oil dripping from his hair. John 1:5 became a candle on an ocean, refusing to drown.

Word spread. People started asking to see the “boy who paints God.” The youth pastor asked me to help design new posters. The children’s teacher brought her class to our house one Saturday to “watch you paint.” 

I didn’t feel famous. I felt awake. It wasn’t about showing off. It was worship.

The way some people danced with flags. The way others wrote songs. My brush had become my tongue.

And the more I painted, the more I saw. Visions would come while I mixed colours. Not full ones. Just flashes — a girl weeping in a garden, a crown glowing on an old woman’s head, a mountain of broken clocks with a voice whispering, “It’s not too late." I painted them all, quietly and honestly. Like prayers with pigment.

Sometimes I still looked out the window, half-hoping the nurse would return. I wanted to show her the paintings and thank her and probably say, “Look. The match caught fire."

*** 

His name was Sunday.

He had joined our church about a month after Mama got better. One of those boys who sat at the back with folded arms and a hard look. I noticed him because he always left early, before the benediction.

One Sunday, I saw him staring at one of the paintings I had done for the youth wall. It was the one of a boy under heavy rain, with fire still burning in his chest. The title wasStill Burning.

He didn’t know I had walked in.His eyes weren’t just looking.They were searching.

“You like it?” I asked. He jumped a little. “I was just… it’s strange,” he said. I smiled. “What’s strange?”

“The fire. It’s still there, even with all that rain.” 

I nodded. “That’s the point. ” He nodded slowly. 

“I used to feel like that.” 

We sat on the edge of the platform, just the two of us and the scent of dust and anointing oil. He told me how he used to sing in choir and how his father used to call him “God’s echo.”Then came the crisis, a series of untimely deaths in his family and many unanswered prayers. The light dimmed.

“I just don’t see the point anymore,” he said. “God seems far and quiet." 

I didn’t give a sermon. I just handed him the painting.“Keep it,” I said.“It helped me remember. Maybe it’ll help you too. ” The next week, he came to youth fellowship with his sketchpad. By the month’s end, he was designing scripture bookmarks for the church library. He smiled more. Asked questions during Bible study. The light was catching on.

About three months later was the second anniversary of Mama’s healing. I had just returned from submitting an art piece titled "Touched by Fire" when I found the old photo. A black-and-white image of a nurse beside Mama’s hospital bed. Her face. That same white sweater. That calm light in her eyes.

I took the photo back to my room and stared at it under the yellow bulb. The edges were curling from age, but her face was sharp and calm, almost eternal.

I turned it over. Faint pencil lines, almost invisible. One word: Firekeeper.

I blinked. When I rubbed my eyes and looked again. It was gone.

I placed the photo inside the book she left and reached for my phone. I had taken a picture of Mummy and I at the hospital during that first diagnosis, just before she was discharged. I scrolled through the gallery to find it.

There she was again.

The nurse, wearing the same white sweater. Same calm smile. This time, standing behind us, just slightly out of focus, like smoke behind glass. I hadn’t seen her there before. I zoomed in. Her eyes were glowing faintly with soft, steady light.

I opened two more photos. One from when I was a boy, holding Mummy’s hand at the clinic. Another from the church vigil last year. In the shadows and behind the crowds. Was this only my imagination?

I returned to the hospital the next day.

The reception area had been repainted, but the smell was the same antiseptic and quiet grief. I asked to speak with the matron, told her I was trying to track down a former nurse for a personal thank-you.

She brought out the old duty records. No one by that name. No one matching her description.

“Are you sure it was this hospital?” the matron asked, peering at me over her glasses. I nodded.

That night, I dreamed again.

I was standing in a field of candles. Some flickered, some burned bright.

Others were nearly out. The nurse walked among them, touching each flame with her finger. Every one she touched leapt up again.

When she reached me, she smiled. “You see now?” I wanted to speak, but she put a finger to her lips. “You are not alone,” she said. “And this world is full of sleeping fires.”

Then she was gone.

My Review

Sometimes a story whispers its way into your soul so quietly that you don't realize you're being changed until it's already happened. This is what happened to me while I read this story.

The paranormal elements here are a chef's kiss. No flashy or over-the-top supernatural moments. Just this divine presence that feels so tangible, you can almost taste it. 

The emotional truth of this story snuck up and sucker-punched me. The way the beginning captures grief, doubt, and that bone-deep weariness we all know too well? Absolutely devastating. But then comes this line that made me stop everything and just feel:

> "You were never useless. Just sleeping. But even sleeping embers remember how to burn."

Literal chills. 

I loved the character growth. I loved the interpretation of the theme. When I saw the main character's gift was art, I was sold. I loved the mystery behind who the 'nurse' was. The spiritual truths in this story were so profound, making this story ingrained in my head.

Aggregate score: 89.5%

Congratulations on making the 1st position in this contest, Emmanuel. Cheers to more amazing stories from you. 

The Author