Our Eyes Are Upon You

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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This is the note he recorded on the 1st of April 2020, in the first weeks of the global lockdown. He begins not with a sermon but a prayer — Jehoshaphat's prayer from 2 Chronicles 20:12: O God, our eyes are upon you. We don't know what to do, neither do we have any might. He prays it as a pastor praying for the world: for the sick, for the frightened, for the governments, for those in fear. Heal us, O God. Heal our world of coronavirus. Our eyes are upon you.

Then he finds something in Joshua 1:9 — be not afraid — and notes that this phrase appears 366 times in the Bible. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Three hundred and sixty-six in a leap year. 2020, he says, is a leap year. God is assuring us in this leap year: be not afraid. He found that kind of thing — the small providential detail hidden inside a number, a date, a verse — and he always brought it out with genuine delight. He had been looking for signs of God's faithfulness for forty years by then. He found them everywhere.