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Story behind
the song Today O!
- Wale Adenuga
TODAY O
Wale
Adenuga
¿ 1997
Fountain of Praise/ASCAP
CCLI Song No. 3530861
No matter
what I face
I will
praise You Lord
When
troubles come my way
I will
praise You Lord
Today O I
lift up my voice in praise
For I know
that you are always there for me
Almighty
God, You're my all in all
No matter
what I face, when troubles come my way
I will
praise You Lord
Alleluia
O, Alleluia ee
Alleluia
o o o, Alleluia ee
Honestly,
one of the greatest surprises in my life has been the way
the song Today O has become popular. I don’t even
remember the first time I taught it in church. Somebody
reminded me how recently. She had been in our church and had
to relocate to another part of Lagos at some point in time.
She told me “I remember you teaching us the song Today O
in church one Sunday. You wrote the words on a blackboard”
Looking back, that’s possible I still don’t recall doing
that. But it’s possibly true.
However,
one thing I can’t forget is what inspired me to write the
song. Tuesday, November 17, 1987 is one day I and members of
my immediate family won’t forget on a hurry. I was in my
third year in the university of Ife as a civil engineering
student. I had a chemical engineering course at 7am in the
morning. I headed home after my class which lasted for two
hours. On getting home, I saw the house I left earlier on
fire.
We lost
everything. I come from a fairly large family. My parents
gave birth to six of us – five boys and one girl. The only
thing each of us had left after that incident was what we
were wearing and the two cars each of my parents drove to
work in. At this time in our lives, there was no one in the
family who was a Christian. We scarcely went to church. Of
course, because our trust in God was not absolute, we
subscribed to being fetish. This incidence further drove us
all as a family into greater darkness.
A year
later, I surrendered my life to Christ. I didn’t do so at a
crusade or in church. I just knew I had come to the end of
myself and I just had to surrender to my Maker. So one day
in May 1988, I knelt down in my room and asked the Lord to
take His place in my life. Afterwards, one by one everyone
started to become a Christian in my family. Today, we don’t
believe in fetish tokens anymore, we all call upon the name
of the Lord.
Years later
as I was going back home to visit my parents, I started to
reflect on what had happened to us as a family, I was
inspired to write the song Today O. I didn’t set out
to write a great song. I just set out to express my heart to
my Redeemer. Another motive for writing this song was to
help people walk in faith whilst in trouble. Trouble and
challenges are one of life’s greatest common denominators.
You can’t pray them away. You can’t anoint them away. Jesus
said we will experience them but that we should be of good
cheer because He has overcome the world. And because He has
overcome, we will do too.
And so
these days I am amused when I hear people change the words
of the song. Instead of singing When troubles come my way,
they sing When success comes my way. How do I feel
about that? And what do I think? Frankly I don’t feel or
think anyhow. I will not do a revised standard version of
the song because I am convinced as to the scriptural
soundness of it. One of the songwriters I really respect,
Brenton Brown wrote and I quote “As songwriters, our
challenge is to write corporate songs that help us express
the truth of who God is and the truth of our lives as we
really live them in a worshipful way to God” That is the
spirit with which I was inspired to write Today O and other
songs the Spirit of God has birth through me.
Visit Wale Adenuga's blogsite
waleadenuga.blogspot.com
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