Below is an except from Rev Imolehin’s testimony about his wife
‘In 1977, I had the worst crisis of my life up to that time when my life had no direction. One man met me on the street in Ilorin and asked me, “Where are you coming from?” I said, “From down there.” He asked, “Where are you going?” I said, “Up there.” I was going nowhere. Then he asked if I could be his houseboy, and I accepted because it was the best thing for me at that time. I was a houseboy for two years, from 1977 to 1979.
Unfortunately for me, I had met my wife before then, and we had agreed to marry. She continued her education while I dropped out of school. I was helping the wife of my master to fry puff-puff and sell them. My wife would come from UI on holidays and meet me where I was frying puff-puff.
I felt very sorry for her and even advised her to go and look for someone else to marry because I was hopeless. But she refused. And now, our marriage has lasted 43 years.
Only last year, she called me and said, “I want to tell you something that I would like you to hear.” Then she said that some of my friends in Ilorin—those same friends who are still there—used to call her aside and tell her, “That person you say you want to marry, go and look for a human being.”
My marriage had gone over 40 years before she felt that she could call me to tell me. She said the reason she hadn’t told me all along was that she didn’t want to spoil the relationship between me and those friends.
Today, in Ilorin, there is no such friend that I cannot employ and pay any salary that he can name—name your price.
For what happened over 43 years, that I now became “a person,” everywhere I have gone, I have honored her. I have been everywhere in this world, preaching crusades in different continents, and I make sure I take her along and fly her in business class.
When I wanted to start preaching, I used my call as part of my proposal to her. When I was proposing marriage to her, I told her, “I am going to be an evangelist. Think about it and make up your mind whether you think you can marry an evangelist.” So I had put it as part of the proposal from day one. And I have been an evangelist for 50 years.
When I was going to start that work as an evangelist for real, I had no Bible. Not that I didn’t have one at all, but the one I had had fallen into pieces. I had to gather the pages by hand because they would fall off due to overuse—some of them were even torn in half. That was my Bible. I would call out a passage, and when I got to that chapter, the leaf might be missing or cut in two.
One day, she looked at me and said, “You say you want to be an evangelist, but you don’t have a Bible.” I said, “It’s not my fault.” So she gave me her own. It was her Bible that I used to start my ministry.
And whenever I go to the mission field, I take her along. I have three sons—I take my three sons along. I don’t want to lose them to the other brand of Christianity they see on television.
They are young people, just coming out of school. They are on the internet, they know all the skills and trends. I don’t want to lose them. Christianity is not just the version of it you see in America or Europe.
When I do crusades in Tanzania, people trek 100 miles to come and hear the word of God—that is also Christianity.
The last time we were leaving Sephonga, I took their mother and myself, and all the money I had, I put into buying tickets for my three boys and their mother. I said, “Follow me.”
