Retired PCEA minister Reverend Timothy Njoya recently celebrated his 82nd birthday but he still remembers how he met his wife Leah and how they ended up tying the knot.
Speaking to Standard Entertainment, Njoya said he never really prayed for a wife but one lady saw him and fell in love with him.
“What could I do?” he asks.
The two met at Langata Women’s Prison in 1966. At the time, Leah was doing research while Njoya was at the correctional facility to preach. It is during the engagement at the prison that the two fell in love.
Njoya, already deeply in love then, coincidentally met Leah again at the Limuru conference center where she was staying.
“When we were entering the bus, I paid for her. She too had fallen in love and we didn’t know each other,” he narrated.
Njoya later received a letter from Leah thanking him for paying her bus fare, but he never responded because he felt shy.
Finally, he wrote back, many months later. “I am a shy man that is why I didn’t reply to your letter, but thank you so much for the letter.”
One thing led to another and in one particular conference where he was called to preach, Njoya sat next to Leah and he says, “I felt what I felt for the first time, I wanted to run away. Afterward, our correspondence began.”
Long story short, they got married two years later in 1968, and were blessed with five children,
Reverend Njoya, who insists he is Christ-like, says amid laughter that he is lovable, “I was once handsome enough for my wife to accept to marry me, even now I am handsome for her.”
“I have never gone to maternity but I have five children. Only my wife knows how she got them, I only went there to see the baby when it was delivered,” he adds that he couldn’t bear to see his wife in labor pain at any one time.
“I am courageous when it comes to facing all kinds of pain including bullets and teargas, but not facing my wife’s pain.”
Njoya recalls an instance when he was abroad and drove off into the bush because he was scared and didn’t know what he was going to do with his wife in labor.
“The doctor told me to go back home because my wife was not ready to deliver, I was scared because I was not at home where I could call other women to help, I panicked.”
“I don’t know how we raised all the children; sometimes I had no job but my wife had a good job. She had enough to sustain us all together with the children,” he said.
“My wife raised me and my children,” he adds.
Related Topics
