I Remain Super-Blessed

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 recorded this note six months before he died, though of course none of us knew that then. His text is Romans 8:6 — to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. He preaches it with the same clarity and warmth he brought to everything: don't let the carnal side of your situation have the last word. The economy is disturbing. The news is disturbing. But we are spiritually minded, and to be spiritually minded is life and peace.

He closes the way he always closed — the Lord will go ahead of you, His glory will be all around you, you will walk in the path that is right. And then: I remain your brother. I remain super-blessed. In Jesus' mighty name. Amen.

He said that at the end of every note, for four years. It was his signature, his sign-off, his way of leaving the room. I have come to think it was also his testimony — not a pleasantry, but a statement of fact about how he experienced his life. Despite everything, and there was a great deal of everything — super-blessed. Those were, as it turned out, among the last words he would send out to his people. We are glad they were those words.