Caleb - The Calling I Did Not Pray For

I prayed for Aika. I given was no Aika.

Instead, the Lord nudged me towards other people, the same way He did my father. Through serving the community directly.

I’ve met people who needed the Lord at that one precise moment, just like Aika once did. I met strong souls. Gentle ones. Broken ones who still laughed. I learned their names. I held their hands.

But none of them had her musical brilliance. None of them carried that particular softness for animals and the elderly. None of them had her beauty. And none of them held my heart the way she did.

Called to her, but not meant for her. I kept trying to remind myself.

After leaving the delegation I had once belonged to and sorting my own life, vocationally and spiritually, I asked God only for one thing. Not to return her to me. Just to let our paths cross once more. A glimpse of her smiling face from a distance. I would have taken anything at all.

Nothing came. Not even a whisper.

Back in Izu, for a whole year, God kept putting me wherever Aika was. Now, it’s like we never even knew each other.

I had let myself drift where the Lord wanted me. Before I knew it, it has been one year since I last saw her nor heard from her.

I’ve moved on with my life. I’m fine.

Or so I say.

Well, yeah. Sure. I have moved on. Definitely. It’s not like, as the youths say “we are officially a thing”. As if a label could ever replace something that grew slowly and quietly over a year of shared prayers and unsaid truths.

But I let them talk. Christian or not, teens will be teens.

I learned about Aika the way everyone else did. Through headlines and gossip forums that never asked my permission to hurt me.

At first, the articles were cautious. They wrapped her name in careful language after the reveal. Words like resilient, brave, survivor floated through every piece written by people eager to borrow her gravity.

Photo and videos of her idol life, and the short Lord forgive me for saying this: mother of pearl, son of a nutcracker, fiddle faddle part of her life when she suffered inhumane treatment were all exposed online. Pieces of her life that should never have been dragged back into the light. Fragments of a past she had outgrown, offered up again for consumption.

I couldn’t bear looking at some of them without spiralling into absolute wrath. It explained so much about who she had been when I met her. Her aversion to cameras, to being touched and in dragging my name in the mud.

Like anything online, gradually, the media tone softened and humanized her.

Videos of her laughing during interviews made the headlines. Her demeanour finally relaxed in a way I didn’t remember seeing before.

She was no longer being defended. She was being celebrated. And then there was him beside her.

A former trainee and backup dancer. Someone who had stepped forward to testify, risking his own idol debut to back Aika and several other girls when the world finally became ready to listen. The media loved that part. A handsome ally. A shared enemy. A clean narrative arc.

They stood too close in photos. They smiled at each other with familiarity. Netizens did what they always do. They connected dots that weren’t theirs to draw.

It also came out that Aika had been the anonymous songwriter no one could ever trace. The one behind melodies that had carried so many voices in the radio and mainstream media. And now she was composing openly. Writing for this new man. Creating music together.

Isn’t that the secret thing we used to do? Now, her voice and words have more freedom than it ever did with me.

Speculation became assumption. Assumption hardened into certainty.

Aika is finally happy. Without me.

I told myself not to care. I told myself I had no right to.

Still, I read every article. Every comment thread. Every headline that implied a happiness I couldn’t give to her.

When the news came that she was pregnant, I sat on the floor of my small apartment and let the grief arrive properly.

It hurt in every way a thing could hurt.

I’ve read in an article about men actually dying from heartache. Yeah, that was how awful my heart, and everything for a matter of fact, felt.

I wrote her letters and poems, and even more lyrics, but the music just doesn't come out. She had been it. She was my music, my rhythm, my muse.

Without her, the notes refused to line up. For weeks, maybe months, the pain did not ebb. It simply lived there, constant, dull, and unrelenting.

I thought of her last message more times than I could count..

‘I’m finding my footing. I hope you are too.’

I read it until the words stopped meaning what they said and started meaning what they didn’t.

That this was the end. That she was moving forward without me. That loving her meant staying out of her way.

I never replied.

I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Every version of the response I had felt selfish. An attempt to anchor her to a past she had already outgrown. She was just back in the spotlight where she originally belonged. And I was back to the obscurity and away from the prying eyes I prayed so hard for.

God brought us in each other’s path to correct each other’s momentum, was what I kept telling myself.

It wasn’t meant to be Caleb. Live with it. Most days, I did. Some days, I still cried.

On rare occasions, old videos of me surfaced online. A few clips and screenshots. A before-and-after comparison that briefly amused strangers. Apparently, all it took to preserve my sanity was joining a group of quietly devoted Protestants and embracing a noticeably balding haircut. The internet mourned my hair more than my disappearance. I broke a surprising number of hearts. Even my former parish stopped trying to get me back after that.

Peace came with anonymity.

My current church was particular about avoiding worldliness. No celebrity pastors. No curated online personas. No idols, digital or otherwise.

I bristled at the rigidity, until it eventually hit me. I had once been a symbol.

Not just a servant. A symbol. A face that drew people in. Numbers. Donations. Relevance.

I hadn’t minded it back then. I told myself it was for God’s glory. But standing where I stand now, listening to sermons that cared more about souls than optics, I finally understood what my parents had been trying to teach me all along.

“Faith should enlarge you. Not brand you” became my new motto.

I stayed off the socials and I worked. I helped my father. Outreach programs. Shelter coordination. Support groups. Paperwork that never ended. Lives that fell apart quietly and had to be pieced back together with patience instead of spectacle.

I preached to small rooms. I prayed with trembling hands. I learned to exist without applause. I learned to let joy come quietly, without witnesses.

Some nights, when the world was very still, I think of her.

What if…. The most dangerous combination of all words.

Eventually, I was allowed to choose where I would serve. I chose the smallest branch. Another tiny paradise like how Izu was, for me and Aika.

We held masses in a repurposed community hall that had once hosted bingo nights and disaster drills. You have to rent it in advance. Even the folding chairs. The only microphone we had squealed if you breathed wrong. No stained glass. No pulpit carved with authority.

And yet, I felt more at home there than I ever had anywhere else.

Children ran through the aisles during prayer. They tripped. They whispered. They laughed. No one shushed them with fear. Reverence was not enforced. It was lived. Presence mattered more than posture and looks.

One evening during Bible study, a youth leader stood and sang a song. It took me a second to recognize it. Then my chest collapsed inward. It was Aika’s.

She had written it last year, before we parted ways. A melody about waiting without resentment. About believing God was close even when answers were not. I hadn’t known she was releasing Christian music now. I hadn’t known anything.

The children followed her lead. Their voices tumbled over each other, wildly off-key and entirely sincere. They sang with the kind of confidence only children have, where correctness means nothing compared to joy.

Tears came before I could reach for my handkerchief. The same one she had kissed me through.

I crouched down and pretended to laugh as I covered my face. The parents chuckled at the chaos of sound. To anyone watching, it looked like joy overwhelming me.

It was. And it wasn’t. It was joy for her new found happiness and continued path with the Lord, even without me. And grief, for the exact same reason.

To ensure I couldn’t escape, the children formed a circle around me and started skipping and singing more of Aika’s song.

She would have loved this….

At night, when the building emptied, I lingered in the darkness to have a one on one with the Lord.

I had done what You asked. I had served. I had obeyed. I had found a place that felt like home. Still, no Aika. This is bullying.

Meeting Aika again was the only thing I had asked persistently for so long and it doesn’t seem to be heard.

‘Please,’ I whispered into the quiet. ‘Just once more. I don’t need her to stay. I just need to know she’s real in this world and not only in my memory.’

Lord, tonight, give me a sign. A Bible verse, a song on the radio, through my dreams, anything. If there is nothing taking me to Aika, then I am done asking. I will move on.

I hated myself for asking. It felt selfish. I knew better. I had been taught that prayer was not bargaining.

I was mourning and hoping to get one final cry out when another wailing resounded louder than mine. A boy came screaming for help. His name was Kanta. He was the only child in the village not attached to any church, which meant the children talked about him endlessly. They wanted to bring him in the way children want to rescue things instinctively.

He couldn’t have been more than eight. He looked sad and was dangerously thin, but still had that fire in his eyes. He was alert and stood in the way children become when they’ve learned too early that adults are unpredictable.

Lord, is this really how You would treat me? I thought You loved me? I asked for help, I asked for Aika. I am not in the emotional capacity for deal with other people needing help when I am dying here as well.

I thought all of those as I followed Kanta without question. Even though I was complaining internally, my body still moved.

I wasn’t sure if it was me or the Lord who moved my legs to run but I was thankful I did go. Kanta’s mother was beaten half to death by his father.

I intervened without hesitation. I called the police. Stayed until the man was arrested and the ambulance doors closed. Kanta clung to me the entire time.

He thanked me like I had saved the world. But the world hadn’t been saved. The man had already sold Kanta’s little sister.

All gone. No record. No trail. That was the beginning of my new calling. I asked for Aika in a prayer and the Lord answered with this. More people to rescue. I didn’t complain. I just marched on.

Months turned into years. Paperwork. Dead ends. Leads that dissolved the moment we reached for them. I learned quickly that people who traffic children rely on one thing above all else. Time.

Time makes people stop looking. I didn’t stop. Neither did Kanta.

He became my shadow. My questioner. My reminder that faith without inconvenience is not faith at all. He laughed easily. He healed unevenly. He asked questions that made adults uncomfortable, which I learned were usually the right ones.

Three years passed like that. Still no sister. Still no Aika. I only hear of her solo albums on the radio. All I allowed myself were letters. Dozens of them.

Some folded into my Bible at first, alongside her old notes. Eventually, there were too many. They spilled into a spare drawer, like a raffle box of unpicked feelings and love confessions. All untouched for years.

Until Kanta found them.

He read exactly one, then called me “an old, dramatic, heartbroken loser”.

In the following days, he did what teens do best. He pried, er, investigated. Kanta did not give up on Aika the way I did. He noticed things I pretended not to. Lyrics, for one.

She had just released a new album. Critics called it “tender”, “Unembarrassed”, “Devotional” I told myself not to listen too closely.

Kanta did not tell himself that.

One afternoon, he dropped onto the floor of my living room with my laptop already open and feet on my coffee table like he owned the place.

‘Explain this,’ he said.

I glanced at the screen and felt something in my chest close reflexively. Lyrics scrolled past. Lines about waiting. About standing still while someone else learned how to walk again. About loving without taking. About believing God sometimes asks you to step aside, not because you are wrong, but because timing is holy.

I shut the laptop.

‘Kanta.’

‘No! You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to pretend you don’t hear it.’ He insisted.

‘It’s poetry. She writes for everyone.’ I explained.

He stared at me like I’d insulted his intelligence.

‘She writes like she knows exactly who she’s talking to. And you are acting like an eighty-year-old man mourning his first love.’ He spat.

I snorted despite myself. ‘I’m not even thirty.’

I reached out and lightly flicked his forehead. ‘Mind your tone.’

‘Mind your heart,’ he snapped.

Kids nowadays….

He stood and paced. I let him.

‘She reads fan mail. Agency-filtered, but she reads it. I checked.’

I froze. Kanta, stop…

‘I found contacts. Fan groups. Industry intermediaries. Her agency mailbox. She doesn’t ignore letters.’ He spoke relentlessly.

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘She’s not married.’

‘Kanta.’

‘She was never even pregnant!’

‘Kanta!’

‘The guy everyone linked her to is gay.’

The room went very still. I sat down slowly.

Ah… So that’s why Aika was incredibly comfortably close with him in the photos… She didn’t like any close skin to skin with males anyways… Other than with me…

‘It’s been too long… She has a life now. A full one. Commercials. Programs. Films. Her music is everywhere. She doesn’t need—‘

‘She doesn’t need you? Is that what you think this is about?’ Kanta interrupted furiously.

I didn’t answer. He kicked the leg of the table.

‘You don’t get to decide that for her! She still clearly writes about you. You don’t get to choose absence and call it love.’ He screamed.

When did you become such a poet yourself? Is this the effect of being around me?

‘Kanta why are you doing this?’

‘I wanted to do something for you in return for saving my mother and me! I have been trying to do that for years. Can’t you see?’ He started to ugly cry.

‘Thank you. I have moved on now, Kanta.’ I think? I hope? I’m trying to?

‘There was no need to disrupt Aika’s peace. It had been four years since we walked away from each other.’ I managed to say without choking on the words.

He sniffled as if it was his own love story.

‘I didn’t give up on her right away. I prayed and prayed for Aika. Until the Lord gave me you. You know the story.’

We stared at each other, both too stubborn to retreat. Finally, he grabbed his jacket.

‘Fine,’ he finally said and stormed off with all the printed research findings he got about Aika.

‘Stay holy. Stay lonely.’

I stifled a giggle. So poetic…

He didn’t come by for days. I told myself he needed space. Teenagers retreat when they’re angry. He’d cool off.

On the fourth day, I was called in by his mother.

‘He had another moment.. Another ‘’I am sure I found her’’ moment. I am afraid it is another dead end.’ She started.

Poor Kanta is never giving up on his sister…

She surprised me by smiling.

‘Still… because of you… because of this search… many children went home. Not mine, but it feels like a win. Somehow.’ she continued as tears welled on her eyes.

We cried together.

*****

I found Kanta sitting behind the community hall, hunched over his phone. He didn’t apologize. Neither did I. He simply held the phone out.

‘A place. Closed. Off-record.’ He started.

I looked at the photos and messages exchanged.

‘No one’s heard of it,’ he continued. ‘Except politicians. Donors. People who don’t want records.’

I wanted to say no. I wanted to protect Kanta from disappointment again. But by some power vested in me, instead, I took the phone and made the call.

I have resigned to Lord’s plan fully now. My calling is to help others find their way.

I won’t give up in finding Kanta’s sister, and in helping other children along the way.

Aika, I am sorry for longing for you. I was called to you, but not meant for you.