Faint Yet Pursuing

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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July 2020. The world had been in lockdown for months. He opens this note by recounting a conversation he'd just had with a church member who said that COVID-19 had messed up the year. He didn't argue with the grief in that. He just gently disagreed with its conclusion.

His text is Judges 8:4 — Gideon came to Jordan and passed over, he and three hundred men that were with him, faint yet pursuing. He pairs it with David at Ziklag: everything stolen, wives and children gone, his men weeping until they had no more strength to weep. And yet David inquired of the Lord. And the Lord said: pursue. Without fail, you will recover all. Glory still lies ahead of you. Don't be weary. Put on new courage. He was preaching this to people who were exhausted. He was also, I think, preaching it to himself.