Chidinma Ibemere, in her book ‘Abba’s Favourite’, explores 15 Essays on the Rhythms of Life, which gathers reflections on faith, identity, and the quiet strength that comes from living with conviction.

The essays move fluidly between the spiritual and the personal, chronicling moments of doubt, discovery, loss, and gratitude. What emerges is not merely a collection of devotionals but an honest self-portrait, one that examines how belief, culture, and womanhood coexist in a modern African context.

The book’s tone is conversational rather than prescriptive. Ibemere doesn’t attempt to persuade her readers to share her faith; instead, she shares her lived experience and invites them to sit with her questions.

Whether she writes about forgiveness, purpose, or friendship, her essays unfold with a clarity that is rooted in lived truth. This restraint and emotional transparency make her work accessible even to readers outside the Christian faith.

Each essay feels like a continuation of a quiet dialogue between the author and herself. The process of reconciliation between who she was, who she is, and who she hopes to become.

In The Void Caused by Grief, she writes tenderly about absence and endurance, while When Bex Came Back traces the intricate ways that friendship shapes healing. In November 16th, 2016 she describes a turning point when gratitude evolved into calling, as Ibemere recounts the birth of her foundation and her growing advocacy for education.

One of the collection’s quiet strengths lies in how it reframes divinity. Ibemere’s portrayal of God is intimate rather than institutional, Abba as Father, companion, and presence.
For those accustomed to distant notions of faith, this framing is radical in its simplicity. She writes with a steady conviction that belief can coexist with vulnerability, and that doubt is not a failure of faith but an extension of it.

“The silence of those before us emboldened you. You mistook endurance for surrender. But our silence is strategy, the prelude to breaking the pride of your borrowed power.”

These lines, drawn from the essay “To Oppressors,” mark a turning point in the collection, a widening of the lens from personal faith to collective experience.

Here, Ibemere’s voice expands into a commentary on history, nationality, and the immigrant condition. The poem reads as both lament and resistance, a literary act of reclamation that connects her faith to her social and cultural identity.

Read in this light, Abba’s Favourite becomes not only a meditation on personal belief but also a reflection on the broader African experience: the politics of silence, endurance, and reclamation.

The quote’s quiet fury, “our silence is strategy” captures a tension familiar to many in postcolonial or diasporic spaces: the burden of dignity under pressure, and the strength required to exist without erasure. Ibemere’s ability to carry that weight into her faith narrative gives her essays a layered, transnational resonance.

Beyond religion, this book becomes a study in becoming, in navigating the spaces between identity and belonging, belief and doubt, home and elsewhere.

Ibemere writes not from certainty but from curiosity, and her humility allows readers to engage with her ideas freely. She gives readers autonomy: the space to believe, to question, or simply to witness.

Her prose is gentle but deliberate, offering beauty in understatement. Abba’s Favourite feels grounded in the tradition of spiritual memoirs, yet it reads with the lyricism of creative nonfiction.

The essays are not grand revelations but careful notations of ordinary grace, the kind found in forgiveness, friendship, or the rediscovery of purpose after pain.

In the final essay, Dear Young Person, Iberemere’s tone shifts toward mentorship, as she She addresses her readers directly, encouraging self-worth and faith amid uncertainty.

It is a fitting close to a work that began as self-reflection but matured into community-building, a gesture of generosity from a writer who has found peace and wishes the same for others.

Chidinma Ibemere’s greatest strength lies in her honesty. Even as she approaches complex subjects, faith, grief, social injustice, and belonging without pretense or rigidity.

Consequently, the essays never demand agreement; they simply offer perspective. This honesty grants the reader autonomy and respect the sense that one is free to interpret and feel.