After You Have Patiently Waited — Rev. Edward Adeniji Koye-Ladele

He had a way of making patience sound like something active — not passive resignation, but a kind of muscled, deliberate trust. His text is Hebrews 6:15: after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise. He points out, gently but clearly, that we live in a fast world — fast food, fast flights, fast lanes — and that this impatience has crept into the way we relate to God. Good things don't come fast. You don't get your degree overnight. Rome was not built in a day. But God is not withholding. He is faithful. The promise is already written. And those who wait will obtain it, just as Abraham did.

Between 2018 and 2022, my dad sent hundreds of short voice notes - prayers, declarations, and pastoral reflections - to WhatsApp groups of friends, family, and church members spread across Nigeria, the UK, the US, and beyond. He recorded most of them early in the morning, usually before 9am, from the house in Ibadan. Many of them were part of his series, Strength for the Journey.

Because he wanted them to be preserved, he typically recorded them as a voice note to me and then forwarded it on to the different WhatsApp groups he wanted to share them with. I have stored 92 of these voice notes, listened to them, transcribed them carefully, and selected twelve to share here. I will add more of them in the years to come.

These twelve span four years, different seasons of his life, and different modes of his pastoral voice: testimony, prayer, teaching, encouragement, and pure blessing. Some are two minutes long. Some stretch to ten. All of them honestly, unapologetically, bluntly, my dad. In most of them, he's sitting alone in his room. He's not constrained by, or speaking to, a specific audience. I often close my eyes and imagine him sitting there in his room upstairs in Olodo, embracing this new tool as a way to keep doing his life's work.

We hope they are a gift to everyone who knew him, and to everyone who is only now meeting him for the first time. - Mogbekeloluwa & the Koye-Ladele family.

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He had a way of making patience sound like something active — not passive resignation, but a kind of muscled, deliberate trust. His text is Hebrews 6:15: after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise. He points out, gently but clearly, that we live in a fast world — fast food, fast flights, fast lanes — and that this impatience has crept into the way we relate to God. Good things don't come fast. You don't get your degree overnight. Rome was not built in a day. But God is not withholding. He is faithful. The promise is already written. And those who wait will obtain it, just as Abraham did.