We Passed Through the Fire and Were Not Burned

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 his 31st of December 2018 voice note — the first of his year-end Ebenezer recordings that survives in this collection. He opens with thanks. Pure, sustained, specific thanks — for life, for household, for journeys taken and returned from, for needs met and prayers answered. We passed through the water. We were not swallowed. We passed through the fire. We were not burned. He says this every year, in almost every year-end note, because he means it every year and it is always true.

What I find most moving here is a sentence that sits quietly in the middle of it all: many are no more. We are not better than them, but we thank God who preserved our life. He never claimed to deserve what he had been given. He only received it with open hands, and gave it back as worship. God who brought us this far will take us further. He believed that too. He preached it until the year he died.