In 1997, I was rounding off at Lagos State University, restless, defiant, and convinced that rebellion was a personality.

I met a man who spoke to me about Christ. In keeping with my nonconforming spirit, I rebuffed him.

What followed was strange, and terrifying.

In the weeks after that conversation, especially as Sunday, February 16, 1997 drew near, I was seized by a sudden, irrational sense of danger. I felt unsafe. Hunted. As though someone was tracking me, determined to hack me to death. That was how real it felt.

On Sunday, February 16, 1997, in my room, I became a person of faith.

The next day, Monday, February 17, I went to school early to find the man I had rebuffed, because I knew he had prepared the ground for what had happened in me. I found him and said, plainly, in the midst of others: “That thing you spoke to me about weeks ago, I have done it.” He asked, “You are now a Christian?” I said, “Yes.”

“Alright,” he replied. “I will bring some things for you tomorrow.”

He returned with cassette tapes, messages by Pastors Taiwo and Bimbo Odukoya of The Fountain of Life Church. Then he said, “If you are free this evening, there is a place I want to take you.”

That evening, he took me to The Fountain of Life Church, Ilupeju, the church where I worshipped then and still worship today. And from that day, a journey began. A friendship began. A brotherhood began. A destiny began to take shape,

But faith did not erase my past overnight.

Because of my background, tumultuous, bruised, layered with childhood abuse (physical, emotional, sexual), I entered a battle many do not see and few understand: the battle of the mind. I was in church, but my mind was elsewhere. Images of my past life flooded me. Condemnation pursued me. Memories accused me. The noise inside was louder than the worship around me.

At some point, I decided I was done. I would stop going to church. I would return to my old life. The war in my head felt too heavy for my new confession.

So I went to him, not for drama, not for pity, but because integrity demanded it. If I was going to stop coming, I felt I should tell the man who brought me.

I told him my mind was under siege. I told him I was quitting.

He listened. Then he gave me an instruction that became an enduring mandate:

“If you say you want to go back, I can’t hold you down. But you need to know this: life is a battlefield, and it begins in your mind. You don’t give up. You learn to fight. Fight those things. You can win.”

That sentence became my template for living. I began to fight. I kept fighting. And I began to win. Today, the rest is history.

That victory did not come by wishing. It came by war. And I learned that I did not need resolutions; I needed a new diet, what I exposed my eyes to, what I allowed my ears to absorb, what I fed my mind. As the inputs changed, the mind began to change.

And then, as though heaven itself was weaving a line through my life, he pulled me further into purpose.

He took me into the Evangelism Department. Later, when the church needed Yoruba teachers for the Children’s Church because a Yoruba class was about to begin, he recommended me immediately. That was my entry into Children’s Church. From there, I moved into Teenagers’ Church. Quiet steps, but destiny steps, the foundation of a life spent reaching children.

There was a season I wavered, torn between child advocacy and another project I called lawpreneurship, focused on law and small business. One day he called me and said, in effect: do not take for granted what is easy for you. What is easy for you is not easy for others. “God is blessing this,” he insisted. “UNICEF is calling you. People are paying attention. Focus.”

Later, a woman I met at Fate Foundation corroborated that counsel with a line I have never forgotten: “If you are good enough for UNICEF, you are good enough for anybody.”

Then came a season of accusation, an allegation I did not deserve, a burden I did not create, a cross I did not know I was carrying until the day he heard. He called me and said, without preamble, without interrogation: “This is what you have been accused of. Go and defend yourself now.”

He never asked for my side first. He said, “I know you. I know who you are.”

And these are only fragments.

He has played major roles in my life, roles a book could barely contain: naming a product, opening my eyes to the reality of my field, nights of analysis upon analysis, conversations upon conversations, strategy upon strategy.

I remember the drug-and-cult-free club we built. I remember the night we decided to turn it into a structured programme, yet we had no curriculum. He stepped in and said, “Let’s build it.” We sat down and produced a four-week curriculum together.

I remember planning a vacation programme for children in two secondary schools. I remember finishing the curriculum late the night before it would be used, then realizing it had to be typed and photocopied. I moved through Lagos searching. I could not get it done. I returned home defeated. And he said, “No. We cannot use it like this. We must get it done.”

That urgency, his insistence on excellence sent me back into Lagos in the dead of night. I found somewhere at Ojuelegba. It was typed. It was photocopied. It was ready. And the next day, children benefitted from what would have failed if we had accepted mediocrity.

I can go on and on.

But let this be said plainly: there is no way my story can be written without him.

We fought many battles together, destiny-sensitive, life-threatening battles.

I recall the day I was sentenced to death by cult boys in LASU. We were together. School was not in session, and we had gone in to handle something. Those boys said my life would be snuffed out that day, that it was my dead body that would leave LASU.

We finished what we came to do. We refused to take a bus in front of the school. We walked, me, him, Taiwo Adedeji, and Tunde Oyeleke towards Iyana-Iba, took a bus, and left. The fact that I am writing this tells you how the story ended: I did not die. I was not killed.

We have stood in moments where death tried to negotiate. We have lived through them.

And so today, I am not writing a casual birthday message. I am writing a eulogy for the living. I am giving flowers while the recipient can still smell them.

Because what I do today, my work, my convictions, my direction bears his fingerprints. Even the wife I married, his prophecies, his counsel, his role are written into the architecture of my life.

So I celebrate the indefatigable, the enigmatic, and one of the most dogged, resourceful, and beautiful souls I have ever met on this side of heaven: Olakunle Soriyan

Happy Birthday, Sir.
Ìgbà ọdún, ọdún kan ni.