Don't Limit God — Rev. Edward Adeniji Koye-Ladele

He builds this one around the moment in Luke 5 when Jesus tells Simon Peter — who has fished all night and caught nothing — to launch out again into the deep. Peter's answer is honest and human: we have toiled all night and taken nothing. He was so saturated with the experience of failure that he could barely hear the instruction. My father named that tendency directly. Don't let your failures write the script for what God is able to do next. Launch out into the deep. Keep pursuing. You will not miss it. It is the kind of word he gave to people who came to him in the middle of a long dry season, and it has the texture of something he had needed to hear himself, once, before he learned to say it.

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 builds this one around the moment in Luke 5 when Jesus tells Simon Peter — who has fished all night and caught nothing — to launch out again into the deep. Peter's answer is honest and human: we have toiled all night and taken nothing. He was so saturated with the experience of failure that he could barely hear the instruction. My father named that tendency directly. Don't let your failures write the script for what God is able to do next. Launch out into the deep. Keep pursuing. You will not miss it. It is the kind of word he gave to people who came to him in the middle of a long dry season, and it has the texture of something he had needed to hear himself, once, before he learned to say it.