Pioneer Missionary

This transcript has been automatically generated

Very terrifying. But thank you very much for inviting me and for this privilege of sharing with you this evening. Wonderful to look out on a crowded church like this. Some churches I go to have as many people in it as tonight we have empty seats. It’s very lovely.

I want to share with you tonight really a little bit of my own testimony of what God has meant to me and to our African brethren during the years that I had the privilege of working in Africa. And I’ve titled my thoughts, The Last of Faith. And if we could turn together to Genesis chapter 18.

I hope it’ll be by way also of a sort of valedictory word to James and Barbara Sherwood and Sue Mills as you’re going out. I think nothing more thrilling than to share in the meeting of somebody who’s just about to leave, and just to encourage you what a wonderful, wonderful God we’ve got. If I had any one particular word I’d like to give to the 3 of you, it’s just, my grace is sufficient. And whatever corner you get into, whatever moment of despair, whatever moment you just feel you can’t go a step further, my grace is sufficient. God’s wonderful promise all down the line, and he’ll never, never fail you.

And that’s what I want to share with you tonight, really, from my own testimony. Genesis 18, we have the storey here of how Abraham was sitting outside the tent and the 3 visitors came. He fed them a meal and then they were about to leave. And Abraham had somehow already noticed there was something different about one of the 3. They were all 3 a bit odd, but one particularly.

And then they speak to him, verse 9: They said unto him, where is Sarah thy wife? And he said, behold, in the tent. And he said, I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life, and lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son.

Sarah heard it in the tent door which was behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age, and he did cease to be with Sarah after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also? And the Lord said to Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child which am old? Is anything too hard for the Lord?

At the appointed time I will return unto thee according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son. Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not, for she was afraid. And he said, Nay, but thou didst laugh. Chapter 21.

And the Lord visited Sarah as he had said. And the Lord did unto Sarah as he had spoken, for Sarah conceived and bare Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him. And Abraham called the name of his son that was born unto him, whom Sarah bare to him, Isaac, which just means laughter. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac, being 8 days old, as God had commanded him. And Abraham was 100 years old when his son Isaac was born unto him.

And Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me. And she said, who would have said unto Abraham that Sarah should have given children suck, have borne him a son in his old age? And the child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast the same day that Isaac was weaned.

I’ve chosen to read one of the most sort of impossible storeys. I wanted deliberately to choose one of the most impossible things just to see how big God is. Really, if God can do that, there’s not much else he can’t do. And that’s how Sarah thought. Sarah’s been really— she’s made a boss shot this time.

She just doesn’t know the facts of life. And God said, all right, let’s see who wins. And you have at the beginning there, it was a laugh of incredulity. It’s a laugh saying, can’t be, no way. It’s a laugh of doubt.

And then God did what he promised. And again she laughed, but the laugh was changed to a laugh of faith. We had that little phrase in chapter 18 there, verse 14, is anything too hard for the Lord? You get the same phrase in Jeremiah 32, Jeremiah 32, verse 27.

Then came the word of the Lord unto Jeremiah, saying, Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for me?

And that really is our testimony through these years, the wonderful satisfying power of God. I really can write over the whole one word, satisfied. I’ve been a Christian now for, I was going to say over 30 years, it’s getting nearer 40. And I just thank God that he satisfies, he does supply every need on every level. He never, never lets you down.

When I was first converted, I was up at college, I’d been up, it was during my first year at college as a medical student, and I desperately unsatisfied with everything else that life had to offer. I date myself by saying that it was still World War II. I don’t do mathematics. I’m over 50. I’m not yet 60.

But there was this tremendous dissatisfying of everything. The world— the World War was so fantastically ridiculous. Men murdering men. And nobody seemed to care. And the desperate needs of the world and the hungry and all the other things that were going on, nobody seemed to care.

And I just felt, well, you know, there wasn’t much point in life. I think if I’d had more courage, I might very well have been a suicide. And that was the moment when God most graciously met with me. And through the friendship of Christian students, I came to know that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, died for me. And that was absolutely shocking.

It was the most wonderful day for me. It was simply, it was out of this world. That God knew me and loved me. Up till then, anybody who knew me didn’t love me, and those who loved me didn’t know me. But suddenly there’s this wonderful fact that God knew me and loved me.

This is tremendous. And the sheer joy in going back to college to complete my training, joining up with WEC, moving out to Africa. And then that was a— that was shattering. I arrived out there, you know, the ink was hardly dry on my medical diploma. I didn’t do any of the things you ought to do.

We were all in a hurry in those days. It was just after the war and there weren’t many doctors around. Needed, so they sort of sidestepped most of the rules. I didn’t do any house jobs, nothing. I, you know, in those days when you registered when you qualified, and so I went straight out to the field.

And I managed to persuade the mission it was a bad idea to send me to Bible school. I don’t know if they’ve regretted it ever since. But anyway, I arrived in Africa and overnight I became the senior chief consultant of everything from paediatrics to geriatrics. And I sometimes add the only thing that didn’t change was my salary. And it’s terrifying.

You know, we started from scratch. There was nothing. Others of you who have heard me talking this week know how I had to send home to my dear patient mother and ask her to send me out one of these teach-yourself books. Teach yourself how to build a house. And we learned how to make bricks and burn bricks and put bricks on bricks, and we had to build from scratch our little hospital.

It really was a beginning right from the bottom level. And there were moments you just wondered what it was all about. You just wondered whether God really could cope or couldn’t. You just wondered what was he aiming at. And then he’d do something lovely and you’d suddenly realise, yes, he was in charge.

I’d been out there for a few months and, um, I was loaned by the mission until such time as we got a hospital built, a little 3-roomed house with a tin roof on it. And it was very— most unsatisfying place, most unsatisfactory place you could imagine to do a medical clinic because it was so tiny. The very first day I arrived, arrived on Tuesday night, Wednesday morning I had 150 patients. That was the beginning. I had one little tiny room and each of those patients was a mother carrying a baby with a little toddler beside her.

So you can say there were 450 of them. And the noise, you have no idea. Put 450 into one tiny room, they’re all talking at once, crying at once, screaming at once. And the heat, the midday sun on the tin roof, and the smell. It really was something.

And I found that I had to do everything. There was nobody else. You could never go off duty because there was nobody else. So I worked all through the day and all through the night, 7 days, 7 nights a week. You got jolly tired.

And so I came out one day and I felt I couldn’t stand anymore. Heat, noise, smell, pressure of work, responsibility and everything else. And I thought if I just get away for 5 minutes, Well, if I go over home, get a cup of coffee and read Daily Light perhaps, have a moment of prayer and quiet my heart down, I could go back and face it again. I went over home. When I got over to my home, there outside the door was an African man and his wife and 2 little children.

Well, at that moment I didn’t want to see an African man and his wife and 2 little children. I didn’t want to see anybody. But you can’t be rude in Africa, so we were polite to each other. And after the courtesies, he just stood there, so I made the mistake and said, what do you want? And he said, I want work.

Great relief in my heart. I said, oh, I don’t employ people. See that house over there? The man lives over there, he employs people. You go over there.

No, he said, I want work from you. I looked at him and I said, well, what sort of work? Well, he said, I’m a cook. I’ve been cooking for missionaries for the last 18 years. Fortunately, he did not say he’d been cooking missionaries for the last 18 years.

I asked him why he’d left his last employer. He didn’t answer me. In complete silence, he rolled up the sleeve of his shirt. There at the top of his arm was the mark of leprosy. I said, oh no, Lord.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of leprosy, quite truthfully I wasn’t, but I hadn’t time for another clinic. I was already up to my eyes. I was already working all around the clock. And in those days, I couldn’t see leprosy patients in the general clinic. It just wouldn’t have been acceptable.

It would mean I’d have to have a separate building. A separate set of instruments, bandages, drugs. There had to be a separate spot on the timetable for seeing them. I just couldn’t do it. I felt God was unfair.

God knew I was overworked anyway. What— listen, if you start arguing with God about leprosy patients, you’re wasting time. They’re his favourites.

So I tried a different tack. I said to the Lord, Lord, even if I did treat him for his leprosy, I couldn’t have him in my house handling my food, cooking my meals. Whatever would my dear mother say if she knew a leprosy patient was doing that? I’m not sure, but I think the Lord said, your mother doesn’t need to know.

So Ansel came into my home. He became my cook for many, many years to come. And together we set about building a little small outhouse outside the hospital for the leprosy clinic. We sent off to the local city, some 350 miles away, for the drugs and bandages that we would need. And the day came that the box arrived, and together we unpacked it.

It was exciting actually, because any of you who are medical, it was 1954, and that was the year when for the first time we had the DDS drugs for the leprosy patients that were in tablets. And having up till then everybody had to use the very, very painful Shamuga injections, it was a wonderful year to have these tablets. And Anzo pulled out the great big bottle of tablets and the bandages, and he’s looking at everything. I, being somebody with my feet on the ground, pulled out the bill. And the bill said that it would come to 4,320 Belgian Congo francs.

That’s about £60.30. Well, I didn’t have 30p, never mind £60. And I wasn’t very pleased about the affair anyway. I felt God had pushed me into it. I didn’t want to be treating leprosy patients.

So I said to God, okay, you can pay the bill. And I pushed it inside my Bible. Now I will say that we did pray about it every day. Anzo and I prayed through that month every day that God would send the money needed to pay that bill. We came to the last day of the month, and the rule in the work was that all bills were to be paid by the last day of the month.

No debts were to be incurred. The last day of the month came and I had no money. I had no fund I could borrow from. I had no money. There wasn’t anything.

And I really was quite angry with God in my heart. I felt that He was mean with him. You know, £60 in those days in Africa was about the price of one cow. And the Bible says cattle on a thousand hills belong to the Lord. I thought he could have given me one.

But he’d put me into debt because he’d made me do it. And I was sure he’d made me do it. And he’d landed me in debt and I couldn’t understand that. That didn’t fit. I went off to work that Saturday morning with a grievance in my heart against God.

When I came back for lunch at midday, my houseboy said, come quickly, Doctor, there’s a brown envelope on your plate. We both knew where the brown envelopes came from. And he said, another missionary sent it across with apologies. It had been in his postbag yesterday, and he hadn’t noticed that your name was on it. Came from the office.

We opened it together. I shook out the money. Anzo took the money and started counting it out into piles. I pulled out the slip of paper. The bottom of the slip of paper It said that there was 4,800 Belgian Congo francs.

I did the maths on that. 480 for the tithe. That left exactly 4,320 Belgian Congo francs. Right to the cent, it was there. I suppose if I hadn’t grumbled, God might have sent me some extra for pocket money.

Do you know, isn’t He marvellous? It was the exact money. And those gifts, there were 3 gifts inside that money. One gift came from a couple in North America whom I’ve never met. One gift was from a couple in Northern Ireland who became my close prayer partners.

And one gift was from a Sunday school class in London. The gift from America may have taken up to 5 months to get there. In those days, it had to go through all sorts of bank exchanges before it reached us. And every bank exchange, they take a bit off. Yet they came that day together to make the exact sum that was needed.

And then I noticed that against 2 of the gifts it was actually written on the slip of paper, this is for your leprosy work. And when they sent their gifts, I didn’t have a leprosy work. I had no intention of having a leprosy work. Isn’t he marvellous? It is his laugh of faith.

You see, he just, he does something so beautiful that he takes away the doubts and the problems and the heartaches and the frustrations. They were all there all the time. Everybody has them. You can’t live life without them. Suddenly he comes in, he does something beautiful, and you just feel this sort of rise up inside you of tremendous joy.

He’s in charge. We were out there about 12 years. We had the joy of establishing a work and getting the thing going. And then all of a sudden, something happened. And on a Saturday afternoon in August of 1964, a lorry drove into the village where I was working.

Very noisy, shouting, and suddenly a man came into my sitting room shouting. He was using a language I didn’t know. Fortunately, one of my African helpers came in behind him and interpreted, and he, amongst other things, said to me that they had brought on the lorry a wounded civilian who had been shot in the chest.

Somehow that phrase did something to me, the fact that he said a civilian. You only use that word in wartime. This was the first indication we had that we were at war. We knew nothing. We’d heard no rumours.

We knew nothing at all. And suddenly here was somebody telling me I was at war. I had no idea how big this was going to be. I was miles, hundreds of miles from anywhere. The sudden awful feeling of being cut off, and we were at war.

I didn’t know whether this was going to be World War III or a local tribal war. War. And you were alone, and you had nobody to turn to for help. And then he said that this man had been shot in the chest. I am not a surgeon.

I do surgery because there was nobody else to do it, but I had no training. And the thought of war wounds, I wouldn’t know what to do or how to cope. And a terrible sort of panic took hold inside of me. I went across to the hospital, and this man was lying on a raffia mat on the veranda. I knelt beside him and examined him, and it was true, he had been shot in the chest.

But it was a very minimal wound. The bullet struck him on his collarbone. Travelled along his collarbone and came out over his shoulder. And there were 2 little holes, quite neat, quite neat. One that, you know, not even any blood.

All I did was I washed it through, I put a Band-Aid on both ends of it, and I gave him a cup of coffee. And he got better. And he thought I was wonderful, and I knew God was. But that was the beginning for us of 5 months of unbelievable Cruelty, wickedness, barbaric savagery. During those 5 months, 27 missionaries were murdered.

Over 200 Roman Catholic priests and nuns were killed. We’ll never know, but perhaps as many as a quarter of a million, 250,000 innocent African civilians were butchered to death. Had to witness a lot of it. There were things that one’s grateful to God one’s forgotten. They were very savage days, very cruel days.

And yet throughout it all, I can only testify that this wonderful truth kept coming through: my grace is sufficient for you. I remember the night that I was actually first taken captive. So happens I was the first white woman to be attacked in our area. Somehow up to then they kept saying, we shall not touch the white women, and we kidded ourselves and tried to believe it. So when it came, you kind of weren’t ready for it.

And it was a terrible night. I was flung on the ground, I was cruelly beaten, I was kicked, I lost my back teeth through the boot of a rebel soldier. It was a very savage and cruel night. You know, under those conditions, you don’t pray, you don’t even think. You’re hanging on to life.

In fact, there was a moment when I really prayed to die. It would have been easier to die than to live. It was just desperate, it was frantic. I think if I’d prayed any prayer that night, I would have prayed, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? I felt he’d gone, I felt he wasn’t there, I felt he could have stopped it, it didn’t have to go that far.

And then suddenly, into the middle of the situation, there was God. I can’t explain it, I can’t say anything more than that. There was God. He was big. He was far, far bigger than the rebels.

They suddenly looked petty. God was big, he was vital, he was real. It was as though he stretched his arms out to me. He said, you asked me for the privilege of being a missionary. This is it.

Don’t you want it?

As I was driven down the corridor of my home, it was just as though he spoke with such clarity. He said, these are not your sufferings. They’re not beating you. These are my sufferings. All I ask of you is the loan of your body.

And suddenly, into the midst of all the darkness and wickedness, one word shone out. There was suddenly the overwhelming realisation that God, the Almighty, had stooped to ask of me something that he was letting me give to him. And suddenly I was— I don’t know how to express it. I was overwhelmed by the realisation of the privilege, privilege he was offering me of joining with him, sharing with him in some little way. In the edge of the fellowship of his sufferings.

He didn’t take away the suffering or the cruelty or the brutality, but suddenly altogether different. It was suddenly beautiful. It was with Jesus and in him. It was marvellous, the privilege of just sharing with Jesus. And right there in the very middle of it, he said, my grace is sufficient.

There’s no good saying it wasn’t yesterday. There’s no good saying it wouldn’t be tomorrow. The thing was, right there in the situation, I could say with most of the rest of you, I couldn’t possibly go through it, nor could Anne. But when the moment comes, there’s Jesus. And he was overwhelmingly sufficient.

You didn’t need anybody else or anything else. There was Jesus, and he was sufficient. My grace is sufficient. Tremendous. Lovely.

We were taken away to house arrest, then to prison, one thing and another. About 15 weeks after the beginning of the rebellion, there came the day then when we’d— all the whites in the area had been rounded up. And again, it’s one of those days, it was a terrible day. Mostly petty stuff, petty cruelties. It wasn’t really brutalities that particular day, but it went on and on and on.

And you all know, I have a frightfully vivid imagination. I was always imagining what they were going to do next, which was always far worse than what they were doing now. And, you know, I wasn’t trusting God to be sufficient with this minute. I was always bothering about whether he could be sufficient for the next minute. And at about 10 o’clock in the evening, there were 7 of us in our group, 5 women and 2 men, All missionaries, all whites.

And we’d been rounded up into a small house. We were taken into the inner room. We were laying out on the cement floor and soldiers standing over us with fixed bayonets. And it was pretty cruel. Then into the room came the leader of that gang of rebels.

And he called me out by name alone. And those were moments you dreaded. While you were all together, you had mob courage. But when one was separated out, you knew it was for evil. He took me out into the central room and after a bit he took me outside the house onto the veranda steps.

I remember it was a very dark night, but out in the courtyard there was a huge bonfire. And dancing around this bonfire was a great crowd of about 70 African youths. These were the jeunesse, the young people who had joined with the rebel forces. They were all of them under the influence of drink and drugs and witchcraft. They weren’t representative of our Africans.

These were just a handful who had become bitter. There they were, and they were singing lewd songs. They kept screaming out filthy things, and then they would shout out, throw the 5 white women to us, we know what to do with them. And with that as a background, the leader of the rebels drew close to me, and he went to put an arm around me and as though to make love to me. And every instinct in me as a woman was to force him from me, that he shouldn’t touch me.

Quite truthfully, I hadn’t the courage to push him from me. I was afraid if I pushed him, he would strike me. And I’d been so beaten that day, I just felt I couldn’t take another blow. And then he said this to me, if you will agree to become my wife, I promise you the other 4 women will not be touched.

The other 4 women. One of them was my field leader’s wife. In her mid-60s. The other 3 were single girls younger than I was.

It’s impossible. You couldn’t choose either way. They were both so totally evil. I guess I said nothing, I don’t remember. He took my silence for agreement.

He took me back into the room where he’d been working. He gave me a stool beside his table. After a bit, he sent for a soldier. He told the soldier to take the other 6 missionaries across the courtyard into another house. Used to see if they had everything they needed for the night, used to come out, lock the door, stand on the veranda and see that nobody touched them.

And I had to sit there and watch my fellow missionaries leave me alone. And the minutes dragged like hours, probably only about 10 minutes seemed like a lifetime, and suddenly there’s a commotion out in the courtyard. A truck drove in, shouting, there was noise, there were people, there were guns let off. The leader of the rebels went out to see what was going on. After a bit, he came back into the room where I was with a lieutenant of the rebel army, all dressed in the uniform of the army, talking rapidly in their language, which by that time I’d learned a good deal of it.

He was saying how that day at Isiro, our nearest township about 100 miles to the north, planes had come. Now from the planes, soldiers had come down like, he said, like white birds. We learned later they were the Belgian parachutists. There’d been hard fighting in the streets, but at the end, the 200 white people held captive in Isiro had been freed, and they’d all been flown out to safety. My heart filled up with praise to God, and I thanked him that yet 200 more had been rescued out of this wicked evil.

And then he went on, he said, after the planes had left, the colonel of the rebel army called in all the sergeant majors and he told us all that we were to go out into the forest to wherever white people were held captive.

And that from now on every white person, man, woman and child, didn’t matter their nationality, didn’t matter their religion, every white person was to be murdered immediately, mercilessly. And I was sitting there alone. It was as though he suddenly saw me. He picked up the storm lantern off the table. He came across and he looked at me closely.

He said, aren’t you the Protestant doctor from Nebobongo? I didn’t answer. I couldn’t have answered. He said again, using my African name, aren’t you Mama Luka? And the leader said, yes, she is.

He swung around on that leader. What’s she doing here alone? Don’t you touch her. She’s good. When I was wounded at the beginning of this war, they took me to her hospital.

She healed me. And he undid his shirt.

And there were the 2 bullet wounds.

Isn’t God fantastic? Isn’t he lovely? You see, I couldn’t have made a decision. I couldn’t say yes or no to the choice he gave me. I didn’t have to.

God already prepared it all. 15 weeks before, God sent that man to me with that silly little wound. All it needed was Band-Aids and a cup of coffee. Lord, did I get the credit for healing him. God had prepared for this night.

He got it all in his hands. It was all arranged. Out of all the sergeant majors who might have come, he was the one who came to where I was at that moment of that night. 20 minutes later, I probably wouldn’t have been there. God had it perfectly timed.

I didn’t recognise him, but he knew me. One minute before, he demanded my death. He turned around, he took me by the hand, took me across the courtyard. He had me put in with the other missionaries. I tell you, we had a praise meeting that night.

You’ve never heard the like of it. Wonderful Jesus. Yes, you see, we can laugh. There’s the laugh of faith. You know, I didn’t ask God to deliver me.

I don’t even believe I thought God could deliver me. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t have any faith about it. Almighty God was already working on my behalf. I belong to him.

All authority from heaven was given to Jesus, and he’s given it to us. It’s ours. And he’d been commanded on my behalf. All around the world people were praying for us and letting loose God’s power on our behalf. And God worked it.

God worked it. It’s wonderful. We were eventually rescued and brought home. We had a year at home to get over the shock and the sufferings. And then the way wonderfully opened up for us to go back.

And we went back in ’66. Um, there was nothing very dramatic about going back. People think, oh, isn’t it marvellous of you to go back? It wasn’t like that. I’d lived out there, all my medical life I’d served out there.

They were my people. As soon as the door opened up to go back, I went back. When I got there, it didn’t seem like that. When we got back, it was one of the most shattering experiences. There was nothing left.

You just cannot conceive what that means till you meet it. We have no conception here what nothing is. And it was— I just couldn’t believe it. All the buildings had been destroyed. All the equipment had been destroyed.

There was nothing. At first, when we arrived back on Easter Sunday, and they were in the building that had been the church, there were parts of the walls standing, most of the rest was gone, and they were having a service.

Do you know they had nothing? They had no clothes. They were just wearing bark cloth and grass skirts again. Everything had been taken. They had no Bible, they had no hymnbook, everything had been destroyed.

They were singing hymns by heart. They had nothing. They were so thin it was unbelievable, they were like walking skeletons. And the way we do it in our part of Africa, there were women on one side, men on the other side of the church. And as I looked down, and I tell you, I saw things that I just cringed.

I couldn’t take it. A man had his eyes gouged out for being the houseboy to one of us whites. I could go on with even worse. It was terrible. I felt everything inside me was going sick.

I thought, I can’t stand it, I must go home. And then all of a sudden I realised the joy. It’s unbelievable. Their faces were full of joy. The singing was fantastic.

They just lifted up the roof. There wasn’t a roof there to lift. There was tremendous, tremendous joy, joy, joy. One of them gave his testimony that day that we got back. Came up front and he said, we want to thank you missionaries for bringing us the one thing they couldn’t take from us.

Yeah, they destroyed all the buildings, they destroyed all the equipment, they’ve taken our clothes, they’ve taken our books, they’ve even taken our children. They had. The rebels had taken all the teenage boys away, made them into soldiers. Those kiddies never came back. There’s a whole gap in our generation out there.

But he said, one thing they couldn’t take from us. You’d brought us Jesus, and he was inside, and they couldn’t get him out. Lovely. And the joy that spread across them. And so we started with our Africans to begin all over again.

And it wasn’t easy. Eventually, 5 of us medics from 5 different missionary societies got together and we at long last— isn’t it marvellous, it takes all the trouble of a rebellion to get us to see sense. So 5 of us got together and said, shall we forget what missions we belong to and get on and do a job together? Marvellous. And so we decided, the 5 missions, to get together and build one hospital, have one medical centre and do one medical service.

Service and have a training college for everybody in the area, not bother with our little labels. And Dr. Becker was in charge, a lovely godly man. And when we got there, the government gave us 40 acres on a mountainside, 40 times the size of a football field if you don’t know what an acre is. And Dr. Becker divided it up into 5 sections, and he gave us a section each. And he started off with me because I was the lady doctor, and that seemed the polite thing to do.

So he gave me the first section, and I always maintained mine was the hilliest that they always say theirs was. And he gave me this 8 acres up on the mountainside with brambles and briars. And he said to me, we want you to build a training college for African medicals. I— nobody asked me any questions. He already turned, started talking to the next one what he was to do.

I tell you, I remember going higher up the mountain. I put 4 red flags in the 4 corners of my section. I went up the mountain. I spent a week or 6 days up there in prayer. Just looking down on those flags and what was in between them.

And it was just brambles and briars and elephant grass. I said, God, can you show me? I want a vision. I need to see a college there instead. And he gave the vision.

So we started.

Eventually we got going on the first big building. And it was about the biggest building I’d ever built. It really was. It was pretty huge. It wasn’t quite as large as this church.

Church, it wasn’t far off it. It was a large building. And we burned, we made our bricks and we burned our bricks and we carried our bricks and put our foundations in. And then we got the brick walls up to, roughly speaking, it wasn’t as high as this by any manner of means, about a quarter of the height of this. We got the walls as high as we were going to go, to the height we were going to put on the roof.

And then I got cold feet. I thought, I’ve never built a building this size in my life. I don’t honestly think I know how to put the roof on. And I had a sort of feeling we’d better get somebody else to come and help put the roof on. So I said to my head man, I think we better pray that the Lord will send us— we didn’t know what to call him, so we called him a roofer.

And he said, we’ll ask God to send us a roofer. So we started praying for a roofer. Well, we got all the roofing material ready, you know, these trusses, triangle things. We got them made, got them ready, they’re all measured, they’re all down there on the ground. We’ve got all the roofing material down there, we’d cut all the corners, everything was ready, all the holes were bored, put screws through, everything was ready.

No roofer, no roofer. Well, we didn’t know what to do, so we plastered the walls. You know, you do that last roof job anyway. We plastered the walls, no roofer. We put in the doors and windows, no roofer.

We did the electricity and the waterworks, no roofer. We even cleared up the brick rubble and planted flowers, and still no roofer. So there came the day when my headman said to me one night, he said, listen, I can’t invent another job. Shall I send the workmen home and we’ll send for them when this roofer comes? I looked at him.

He and I have worked together for many, many years.

I said, no, we’ll put it on. He shrugged his shoulders. Okay, your affair. So I went up to bed that night. I said, God, why have you not sent a roofer?

What are you trying to say to me? He’d done such wonderful things for us during the rebellion. I’d seen him do such marvellous things all my life in Africa. I’d seen him healing people, providing for needs, big things, big things. And here was just a little thing all the way out of all the roof, there must be dozens.

And you see, I couldn’t understand him. Well, I went to bed that night. At about half past 1 in the morning, I was woken. I heard a car coming up the hill. Now I am the next to last house on the hill, one house up beyond me of another doctor, a lady doctor who’s in charge charge of the maternity work.

So I drew the curtains back, peeped out to see whether the car was going to stop at my house or not. But it didn’t. It went on to the next house. So I was relieved. I saw the lights come up in the next house.

I heard them talking. After a bit I saw Ruth coming out, getting into the car, going down the hill. So I put a quick prayer up for Ruth that God would help her and I rolled over and went to sleep again. So the next morning at 20 past 6, I was going down the hill to have prayers with the workmen. And I was arguing with God.

I said, God, Do you really want me to put that roof on?

And there was a sort of awful shrinking inside me. I couldn’t quite see the point of this. And while I was talking to God like this and going down the hill, a man passed me going up the hill. Now I didn’t really look at him. I saw he was— looked a bit tired and a bit dusty.

I said good morning to him politely, you know, and he said hi to me. I thought he was American. And He went on up the hill and I went on down the hill, and my headman from the bottom came rushing out from the village. He came running up to me. He said, Doctor, do you know who that is just gone up the hill?

I said, no, I’ve no idea who it is. He’s a roofer. So my headman and I, we went up the hill after him and called out to him. Now I felt a bit of a fool. He’s turned around, looked at me.

I’d already said good morning once. I said, I’m terribly sorry. I said, I don’t even know what your name is, but I hear you’re a roofer. He looked at me. Told me what his name was, okay, it’s Lee, Roscoe Lee, and he said, I don’t quite understand the rest of your question.

Well, I said, you see that great big building down there? It’s finished but for the roof. Everything’s ready, workmen are ready, anything. All I need is someone to put the roof on. Why, this poor Roscoe Lee had never been accosted by a mad white woman in the jungles before.

So he simply said, will you give me 5 minutes? Sure. So he went up the hill and I went down the hill, and I had prayers with my workmen, and he came down the hill wearing dungarees, and they started on the job. And in 9 and a half days, finished. Roof was on.

Now, the storey that lay behind it was that at 1:30 in the morning, Roscoe Lee had driven in, having come 250 miles over the dreadful roads of our part of Africa, with his wife, who was urgently ill. And Dr. Ruth had gone down and operated on her during the night. And she needed 10 days in the hospital before she was strong enough to go back home, by which time the roof was on.

All he wanted was patience. He— the day before I had a job to do. This is the first day I didn’t have a job to do and he sent the roofers. See, he’s never before time, he’s never after time. He is always there.

He may try us out, he may test us to see how far we’ll trust him, but he does not fail. I wanted to put that one in really because it was a little thing. It’s, you know, just a little bit of humour in a sense, but he’s just as concerned with that as with the big things. When you’re caught up in a rebellion, it doesn’t matter to God whether things are big or little. He cares.

This is our wonderful God, and he says to us, behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for me? And you see, in the same chapter Jeremiah said to God in verse 17 of Jeremiah 32, Ah, Lord God, behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee. And that’s what we go out on. It doesn’t matter whether you’re going across the sea to another country, whether you’re going to your next-door neighbour at college.

No matter where he sends us, he’s sending us out in that wonderful knowledge and power. He is sufficient. We can be satisfied in Him. There is nothing too hard for Him. You know, this wonderful Lord Jesus, He’s the same yesterday, today, and forever.

He’s the same in Palestine, in Africa, and here in London. He doesn’t change. I want in closing just to ask 2 questions.

First of all, may I ask you, does He satisfy you? If there’s anyone here who’s not yet sure that they know and love the Lord Jesus, and you’re not sure yet whether he satisfies you, satisfies you, I just want to put to you, you know, that he wants to. He longs to. He longs to satisfy every single one of you. And if you’re not sure yet, do talk to somebody before you leave tonight.

My second question may be a little more demanding.

Do I satisfy Him?

I should do. He wants it. He only satisfies us in order that we give Him all, we trust Him with all, we really believe it, we step out into the faith that He does these wonderful things for us, that we can laugh the laugh of faith. We can move out with Jesus and know that he will never let us down. Oh, that it isn’t only that he satisfies me, but may it also be that I and you satisfy him.

Amen.