Whose Report Will You Believe?

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 one from Virginia, in the United States, during a six-week outreach trip. He opens with a song — whose report will you believe? We will believe the report of the Lord. His report says I am healed. His report says I am blessed. Then he asks the question directly: what report are you carrying? Because many people, he says, are walking around under the weight of a report that was never theirs. A medical diagnosis. A sentence pronounced by someone who called themselves an expert. A verdict from circumstances that looked permanent.

He tells two stories — one about a woman misdiagnosed with HIV, another about Archbishop Benson Idahosa, who was flung onto a rubbish heap as a dead infant and revived by his mother's prayer. And then he tells his own story again, briefly, the version that never changes: you will not die but live and declare the goodness of the Lord. He heard it on a radio, thirty-five years before this recording. He was still declaring it.