Hitherto Hath the Lord Helped Us

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 woke before 5:30am to record this one. 31st of December 2019. He opens by singing — to God be the glory, great things He has done — and then spends a few minutes just giving thanks. Not summarising the year. Not drawing lessons. Just thanking God for carrying them through it.

His anchor text is 1 Samuel 7:12: Samuel set a stone between Mishpah and Shem and called it Ebenezer — hitherto hath the Lord helped us. My father asks his listeners to shout the word seven times. Ebenezer. Ebenezer. Ebenezer. Each one a marker, a stone set in the ground to say: God was here. God helped. What He has done is history. What He will do is what we look up to Him for. He said this every year at the end of December, and he said it because he believed that the stone was real, and that the God who helped was still active, and that the two things together were enough to walk forward on.