14. Corrie ten Boom and Celebrated Speakers and Missionaries
14
Corrie ten Boom and Celebrated Speakers and Missionaries
Imagine life without books. I could survive, and maybe even thrive, without movies, television, lectures, even newspapers, but not without books. My husband reads to me early every morning and again every night before we turn in. He’s a master of pronunciation and accents, and I’m the beneficiary. We have together refought the Revolutionary War, lived alongside Jayber Crow in Port William, Kentucky, joined the Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Club, spent millions of rubles and slogged through Russia with Catherine the Great, laughed ourselves sick with Ignatius Riley and his Confederacy of Dunces, and even joined Jezebel in plotting against Elijah.
Books have changed my life. The Bible, of course. I cannot comprehend what my life would be like if it were not for the profound influence that volume has had on me. But other books have also influenced me—one in particular that I read for course preparation in the late 1970s. I was asked if I would teach History of Missions. None of my doctoral course work in history had even touched on missionaries. The professor who was retiring commented that it was an important topic to teach, but it was too bad the subject matter was so boring.
For anyone teaching by the book, his words rang true. The texts were filled with facts and figures and dates. How could I ever teach this course? Then I picked up Through Gates of Splendor by Elisabeth Elliot, which tells the story of the deaths of five missionaries, including her husband Jim. The young men were killed after they entered the territory of a remote Ecuadorian tribe then known as the Aucas. I was left with more questions than answers, but no single volume has ever had a more profound impact on me.
My course became a biographical history of missions, which soon opened the door for my writing a book, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions, and decades more of teaching and further writing in the field of missions. What direction would my life have taken, I ask myself, if it were not for the powerful pen of Elisabeth Elliot? Whether writing of the Auca tragedy or of the struggles of single female missionaries, Elisabeth had a way with words and a knack for irony that easily struck envy in the mind of this budding writer. In that respect she was a role model for me—though certainly not in every facet of her writing and teaching.
She was what I would term a hard-liner on traditional roles for women. In 1988, when I was a visiting professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, she came to campus and one evening spoke to a large group of women, primarily seminary student wives. I learned only later when I listened to the tape how she had responded to a particular question: “Should a wife remain in a home where she is being physically abused by her husband?” In response, she pointed to 1 Peter 2 that speaks of slaves who were beaten. From there she moved to the next chapter, emphasizing that women in the same way ought to submit to their husbands. “I don’t think that requires,” she continued, “a woman necessarily to stay in a home where she is literally being physically beaten to death. But on the other hand, it might.”
I cringed when I heard those words. I personally had stayed too long in a marriage where I feared “being physically beaten to death.” With the wise counsel of Trinity’s president Ken Meyer, I got out in time. Does the Bible require a woman to stay in such a marriage? Not necessarily, Elisabeth said. “But on the other hand, it might.” With a room full of young married women, statistics would tell us that more than a few had been seriously abused. Some of them might have heard only those words: on the other hand, it might. But I’ve long ago realized that I can learn from people with whom I disagree. I view Elisabeth’s writing as an opportunity not only for inspiration but also for intellectual engagement. Here we interact with Corrie ten Boom, Henrietta Mears, Mother Teresa, and Helen Roseveare, as well as with Elisabeth.
Holocaust Survivor
One of the striking aspects of Corrie’s fascinating life is that it hardly seems to begin until she is fifty years old. Her story is primarily that of an old woman, the very opposite of that of the other most noted heroine of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the young girl Anne Frank. Corrie was in her midthirties when Anne was born.
We come to know them both through their writings. Corrie tells of her years of great sacrifice and of horrendous hardship in a concentration camp. Her miracle stories are balanced by her own temptation not to forgive her onetime ruthless prison guard. She is a modern-day saint—almost too good to be true. Not so, Anne Frank. She was a strong-willed Jewish girl who, amid Nazi terrors all around her, wrote of issues with her mother: “I need my mother to set a good example and be a person I can respect, but in most matters she’s an example of what not to do.” Again she wrote: “Although I’m only fourteen . . . I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child, I feel quite independent of anyone.”1
It is difficult to imagine Corrie writing such words as a teenager. She much later reflected on her close identity with Jews: “There, in Amsterdam in that narrow street in the ghetto they met many wonderful Jewish people. They were allowed to participate in their Sabbaths and in their feasts. They studied the Old Testament together.”2 But though in close proximity, they were worlds apart in many respects.
Following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather, Corrie was a watchmaker, the first licensed woman watchmaker in the Netherlands. But she is known today for her family’s hiding Jews and her own Nazi concentration-camp horrors. Her family, including her parents, three siblings, and three aunts, all lived together in cramped quarters above the shop in Haarlem.
The Ten Boom family’s involvement in the Dutch underground began in 1942, when they helped neighbors who were forced to leave their homes. Through their Reformed Church and business connections, they networked with trusted friends to provide temporary housing. Despite their crowded space, they hid as many as seven people at a time behind false walls and other secret spaces. But less than two years later, the Gestapo was on their steps. Those hidden managed to escape. But Corrie, her sister Betsie, and their father were arrested. The old man died in custody a short time later.
Corrie and Betsie were taken to the infamous Ravensbrück concentration camp, where tens of thousands would die. It was a hellhole where women fought for every blanket and particle of food and clothing. The sisters found themselves caged in with what seemed to be wild animals beaten down by Nazi guards. But together they vowed to make the best of their dire circumstances. They began reading Scripture and praying, inviting others to join. After a time their influence on barracks 28 began to make a difference.
Corrie later told how she had smuggled a small bottle of much-prized medicine into the barracks. When Betsie became ill, she gave her some each day. But others found out and were soon begging for the miracle medicine for themselves. Tempted to hoard, she reluctantly shared it with others at Betsie’s urging:
It was hard to say no to eyes that burned with fever, hands that shook with chill. I tried to save it for the very weakest—but even these soon numbered fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five. . . . And still, every time I tilted the little bottle, a drop appeared at the tip of the glass stopper. It just couldn’t be! I held it up to the light, trying to see how much was left, but the dark brown glass was too thick to see through.3
The sisters were convinced that God had miraculously increased the liquid in the tiny bottle even as he would see them through this awful ordeal. They tried to remain optimistic, sharing with each other about their dreams of freedom. Betsie wanted to set up a home for refugees, but like so many others, she did not survive the starvation diet and the filthy, disease-ridden, overcrowded conditions of the concentration camp. She died before Christmas in 1944. Corrie was released less than two weeks later.
After the war, word of the sisters’ suffering quickly spread. Corrie was invited to speak at nearby churches, then in larger venues, and finally around the world, traveling to more than sixty countries, from Israel and India to America and Vietnam. During a visit to Germany in 1947, Corrie later told how a man came up to greet her after her talk. She immediately recognized him as one of her cruel guards: “And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course—how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women? But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. I was face-to-face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.” He introduced himself as a guard at Ravensbrück, not knowing she recognized him. He explained that since those days he had become a Christian, and he wanted her forgiveness.
And I stood there—I whose sins had again and again to be forgiven—and could not forgive. Betsie had died in that place—could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking? It could not have been many seconds that he stood there—hand held out—but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.4
HENRIETTA MEARS
Teacher Extraordinaire
In her New York Times review of the film Fargo (1996), Janet Maslin writes:
The Coens [brothers Joel and Ethan] are at their clever best with this snowbound film noir, a crazily mundane crime story set in their native Midwest . . . merrily evoking the singsong drabness of Midwestern life. . . . The violence is so quick it appears cartoonish. . . . Yet the film makers’ absurdist humor and beautifully honed storytelling give it a winning acerbity, a quirky appreciation of the sheer futility captured on screen.5
Henrietta was born in 1890 in Fargo, North Dakota, and grew up in Minnesota, the actual setting of most of the film. I suspect that if she had been born a generation later, she would have made a point to see the film and would have relished its absurdist humor. She was dead serious about Bible teaching, but her quick wit and self-deprecating sense of humor and satire were only a clever quip away.
She was schooled in the fundamentalism of the early twentieth century, but she cleverly mocked her own deadly serious explication of the Bible and that of others. Her most often-repeated spoof was her retelling of the familiar nursery rhyme “Old Mother Hubbard.” Her varied audiences typically consisted of serious-minded university students who felt honored to sit under her teaching. But on occasion, to bring some lighthearted fun into the room, she would play the part in a whimsical costume with an odd assortment of accessories, gripping a phone book that substituted for the Bible.
After reading the rhyme to the end, she invited her listeners to go back to the beginning to draw out the fuller meaning of the text. She dug into each word and phrase seeking a deeper understanding of the old woman and the poor dog and even how the woman went to her cupboard. The wenting and the cupboard were begging for in-depth exegesis, and the text as a whole was a sad commentary on life itself. Her skit was an obvious spoof on certain preachers. Henrietta’s zany humor was a real hit, and the students howled with laughter.
Having grown up in Minneapolis from the time she was eight, Henrietta enrolled at the University of Minnesota and after graduating taught in a public high school for more than a dozen years. Her first year of teaching was in a nearby small town, where she taught chemistry and served as principal. The following year she transferred to another nearby school, again as principal and chemistry teacher. Here she organized and coached a football team. In her spare time she taught Sunday school and Bible classes. After leaving that school, she returned to Minneapolis, where she taught chemistry at Central High School for the next decade.
Her return to Minneapolis set the stage for the next decades in two significant ways. She teamed up with her sister Margaret in their living arrangement and evangelistic outreach that would continue for more than thirty years, and she also committed herself to teaching Sunday school as a second vocation. She took on a small class of uninterested girls that over the years grew into the hundreds, and many of the young women entered ministry themselves.
Word of her Sunday school success soon spread to other states and around the country. Then a call came from the large and prestigious Hollywood Presbyterian Church. She accepted, and for the next thirty-five years she served as the director of Christian education. Revitalizing the Sunday school was her primary assignment, but she would expand that role into teaching young adults, publishing, and establishing a retreat center.
That she built a Sunday school of a few hundred kicking and screaming children of church members to some six thousand eager students is the stuff of legend in itself. Finding suitable educational materials, however, posed a problem that would somersault into Gospel Light Publications and become a worldwide ministry. Initially, Henrietta wrote the materials herself, but as the company grew others joined her, and the company would later expand into book publishing and other areas. Her Forest Home Retreat Center, purchased in 1938, would also exert a wide influence.
Beyond her grand success in Sunday school, publishing, and conference sponsorship, Henrietta’s most lasting legacy was perhaps felt among individuals she influenced on a personal level, particularly young men. Among her protégés were Bill Bright (founder of Campus Crusade for Christ), Dawson Troutman (founder of the Navigators), Richard Halverson (chaplain of the US Senate), and Billy Graham, who said her impact on him was greater than that of any other woman with the exception of his wife.
She observed these young men enter ministry, marry, and raise families, while she remained single. She later told of a young man who had shown particular interest in her when she was young, but his lack of a strong Christian commitment was unacceptable to her. That she and her sister Margaret had developed a tight partnership did not bode well for marriage, nor did her strong personality and career success. Her humor easily diffused threats to the male ego, but as a wife she might have been intimidating. Her own rationale for not marrying was as simple as it was comical—that she had never found anyone who could match the qualities of the apostle Paul.
Henrietta loved living in style in a beautiful home, wearing high fashion, pricey jewelry, big hats, and bobbed hair as did the flappers of the 1920s. She recognized the fun she could have with fashion and her own quirky personality, and she laughed the loudest when her boys dressed in drag and mimicked her. She would have never been mistaken for an earlier version of Mother Teresa.
MOTHER TERESA
Twentieth-Century Doubting Saint
“Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason—the place of God in my soul is blank—There is no God in me—when the pain of longing is so great—I just long & long for God. . . . The torture and pain I can’t explain.”6 These words were written by Mother Teresa in the early 1960s, more than three decades after she began her mission work in India, and more than thirty-five years before she died.
Only her confessors and closest friends had any idea that she struggled so with doubts. “Where is my faith?” she asked on another occasion. “Even deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be a God—please forgive me.” Still again, she wrote that “the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”7
There was nothing in her childhood or early adult years that would have signaled the crises of faith Mother Teresa would later endure. She was born Agnes Bojaxhiu in1910, the youngest of three children. Life was easygoing in the Albanian village of her childhood until she was nine, the year her father died. Though left impoverished, her mother was buoyed by her devout faith and opportunities to serve in the community. Agnes drew on her mother’s faith and was inspired by stories of missionary sisters who had gone to India, many living in poverty in thatched huts with danger on all sides.
It was no surprise then when Agnes, at age nineteen, informed her mother that she wished to be a missionary. Her mother gave her blessing, and her daughter sailed for India a short time later. At twenty-one, she took her vows to become a Loreto sister and was assigned to teach in a girls’ school. Several years later she was appointed headmistress.
She might have carried on with that work until her death, but for what she was convinced was the voice of God while traveling to her annual retreat:
This is how it happened, I was traveling to Darjeeling by train, when I heard the voice of God. . . . I was sure it was God’s voice. I was certain that He was calling me. The message was clear I must leave the convent to help the poor by living among them. This was a command, something to be done, something definite. I knew where I had to be. But I did not know how to get there.8
That she heard this call was as natural as it was supernatural. That she would spend her life in a cloistered convent educating girls from India’s prosperous families was not what she had envisioned for her missionary vocation. But to follow her call into the streets was regarded as ludicrous by some of her superiors who thought she was too frail for such strenuous work. She was persistent, however, and only two years later was authorized to form a new religious order, the Missionaries of Charity. Three of her students volunteered to join her. From the beginning, she determined that this would be a convent without walls: “Our Sisters must go out on the street. They must take the tram like our people, or walk to where they are going. That is why we must not start institutions and stay inside. We must not stay behind walls and have our people come to us.”9
In the decades that followed, the Missionaries of Charity grew at a steady pace. When she left India for the first time in 1960, there were more than one hundred sisters in the order. Now the world was getting to know her as she traveled through Europe and America. People were taken with her, dressed in her blue and white Indian sari, a worn gray sweater over her shoulders and sandals on her bare feet. Who was this tiny woman who was defined by her ministry to the poorest of the poor? Everywhere she went reporters followed, people volunteered, and money flowed into her coffers.
Soon there were thousands of Missionaries of Charity stationed around the world and not in underdeveloped countries only. New York City and San Francisco became centers of outreach. As the spotlight turned on her various ministries, critics raised issues. It was true that she was in many respects a poor administrator. Yet she alone remained in control. She was a dictator, some charged. Others challenged her rigid stance against birth control and family planning in India and in other countries where babies and young children were dying of starvation.
In December 1979, a year before her seventieth birthday, Mother Teresa accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, which brought even greater focus on her selfless missionary service. When asked how she identified herself, she responded: “By blood and origin, I am all Albanian. My citizenship is Indian. I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the whole world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to Jesus.”10 She remained active in ministry until her death in 1997, at age eighty-seven.
Missionary and Writer
In No Graven Image, Margaret Sparhawk is a fictional character who sacrifices the pleasures and delights of an American middle-class life to serve as a missionary among the Quichuas in Ecuador. Without medical training, she seeks to offer basic treatments to the sick and injured. She has become acquainted with Rosa and her children, and when Pedro injures his leg, she offers to give him a shot of penicillin. However, he dies, probably from a reaction to the antibiotic. Had she left him alone, he no doubt would have survived.
O ineffable, sardonic God who toys with our sacrifices and smashes to earth the humble, hopeful altars we have built for a place to put Your name! Do you mock me? Why did You let him die? Why did You let me kill him? O God! I came to bring him life—Your life—and I destroyed him in Your name.11
If readers are hoping to find resolution at the end of the book, they are disappointed. Margaret does not pack up and return home—at least not yet—but her once secure calling is shaken, as is her faith. The book was so controversial that some Christian booksellers refused to display it on their bookshelves. But it certainly was not the only controversial book written by the hand of Elisabeth Elliot.
In many respects fictional Margaret is Elisabeth herself. Like Margaret, she had gone to South America as a single woman and struggled with loneliness and was not taken as seriously as were the missionary men. In These Strange Ashes, she tells how she was one of four single missionaries stationed together, each hoping to escape their plight through marriage—preferably to a single male missionary. In the meantime, they struggled desperately with boredom in the jungle. Elisabeth recounted her “dimestore” dreams—the longing to just wander the aisles and make a little purchase of nothing more than scotch tape or a nail file. She distracted herself with every imaginable household task just to avoid the hard work of language learning. Days dragged into weeks and months.
Then she was faced with two very serious setbacks. The first was the death of a tribal woman whom the four women had tried to save in childbirth: “It was a life and death matter, and if God had spared Maruja’s life, the whole Quinones tribe might have been delivered from spiritual death. In my heart I could not escape the thought that it was God who had failed.” Sometime later when Macario, her faithful and indispensable language informant, was murdered, she questioned her calling: “Had I come here, leaving so much behind, on a fool’s errand? . . . How was I to reconcile His permitting such a thing with my own understanding of the missionary task?”12
If these incidents pulled the very rug of divinity out from under Elisabeth, the worst was yet to come. Her escape from her life among the Colorado Indians came with her marriage to Jim Elliot. They had known each other at Wheaton College when he envisioned himself as an unmarried missionary giving his entire life to evangelizing those who had never heard the gospel. Now they would work as a team. They might have carried on with their work in the jungle of Ecuador for decades, like most missionaries unknown to the outside world, but for Operation Auca.
Operation Auca, a rash ploy to enter the lands of very territorial native warriors who had killed outsiders before, ended with the tragic death of Jim Elliot and four other young missionaries. In my biographical history of missions and in other writings I have been critical of their approach, arguing that it should not be seen as a model for mission outreach to native peoples. It was a hastily conceived strategy so risky that two of the men flew out each night because the natives were known to attack in the predawn hours. Because of the obvious danger the venture was top secret, details of which were transmitted by coded messages. No one outside the small group was informed, not the most seasoned missionaries in the area, not even their mission superiors.
Fearing the outsiders, the native warriors speared all five of the men to death on January 8, 1956, only a few months after their entry into the territory had been secretly devised. Within days, however, it became the most publicized missionary news story of the twentieth century. In 1957 Elisabeth told the story in her book, Through Gates of Splendor. But Operation Auca would not be the end of the story. Rachel Saint, sister of Nate Saint, one of the five killed and the pilot of the operation, was a Wycliffe missionary nearby who had been learning the tribal language with Dayuma, a woman who had left the Auca territory. In September 1958, Dayuma visited her people and then invited Rachel and Elisabeth, with her young daughter, Valerie, to come and live in the tribe, which they did.
The story of Operation Auca and its aftermath is complicated and controversial. Elisabeth realized that herself. “For those who saw it as a great Christian martyr story,” she later reflected, “the outcome was beautifully predictable. All puzzles would be solved. God would vindicate Himself. Aucas would be converted and we could all ‘feel good’ about our faith.” However, that is not the way it happened. “The truth is that not by any means did all subsequent events work out as hoped. There were negative effects of the missionaries’ entrance into Auca territory. There were arguments and misunderstandings and a few really terrible things, along with the answers to prayer.”13
Elisabeth, who suffered from Alzheimer’s in her later years, was an outspoken and controversial writer. In the process she managed to offend—and inspire—evangelicals and others on almost any issue her quick mind and cunning pen tackled. She refused to be ignored.
HELEN ROSEVEARE
Missionary Medical Doctor
The story is chilling. The setting, a mission compound in a Congo jungle. The year 1964, long after sundown on October 29. Americans would celebrate their scariest holiday two days later, but what happened that pitch-black night was far worse than any imagined Halloween horrors. Helen was an unmarried missionary medical doctor who had turned her back on a bright future in England to bring health care to some of the world’s most needy people.
The Congo was in the midst of a violent civil war, and for some months the compound had been occupied by Simba rebels. Helen had been strongly counseled to evacuate the country, but she insisted that the people needed her medical services now more than ever. She heard gunfire, but that had become the norm. She was sleeping in her small bungalow, doors and windows bolted shut. Then without warning, her door was kicked down. In barely a nanosecond, terror shot through her like high-voltage electric current. She had to run, to get out, to escape, to flee to the tangled jungle.
They found me, dragged me to my feet, struck me over head and shoulders, flung me on the ground, kicked me, dragged me to my feet only to strike me again—the sickening, searing pain of a broken tooth, a mouth full of sticky blood, my glasses gone. Beyond sense, numb with horror and unknown fear, driven, dragged, pushed back to my own house—yelled at, insulted, cursed. . . . My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?14
After that awful incident she was taken to a convent where other women, including nuns, had been imprisoned by the rebels. There the horror of that night of rape was repeated over and over again. Amid the terror, she was able to minister to other women and on one occasion to push a rebel soldier away from a trembling teenage girl who had just been brought in and to volunteer to go out into the night herself to suffer unspeakable brutality.
During a time when the “taboo subject” of rape was rarely written about and surely not spoken of in polite company, Helen was unusually honest about the trauma she endured. “At that time we were not taught in missionary training school how to face up mentally to where rape fits into the picture,” she later recalled. “The strange thing is, of course, that the actual sexual experience of rape does stir you. You suddenly find yourself sexually awakened. And it was terrible because right in the suffering, in all the awfulness of prison life, beatups and everything, this other thing came too.”15
Born in 1925 in Cornwall, England, Helen enjoyed privilege as the daughter of a highly acclaimed mathematician who had been knighted for his outstanding service during World War I. After graduating from an exclusive girls’ boarding school, she went on to Cambridge for a degree in medicine. Few missionaries had come to the Congo with such stellar credentials, but she quickly realized that education and background counted for little. Blatant gender bias was the norm. She was assigned a region, however, where she was her own boss and was able to set up a medical center with the help of Africans. She fought back when she was ordered to relocate to an old leprosy complex, but to no avail. So again she set up a training school and an outpatient clinic.
Helen was driven. Her accomplishments were legendary. She moved with a long stride and at a furious pace, preferring to work without other missionaries interfering. But, as such, she was a threat to the male mission executives. So several years after she arrived in the Congo, a young male doctor who had just arrived on the field was assigned to take over her work and serve as her supervisor. It was an outrage. All her arduous labor of building a successful endeavor was now in the hands of a novice. She was distraught. He even took over her Bible class for the nursing students. Then he fired her van driver, who knew all the rutted, winding two-track trails. She knew she had been beaten, emotionally as well as professionally. She requested home leave and returned to England.
Back home, however, she realized that her heart was still in Africa. But she was convinced that as a single woman she could never accomplish what needed to be done. She would find a husband, preferably a surgeon. And so it was; she snagged the perfect man. But when the innocent doctor realized she was grooming him for the Congo, he got cold feet.
She had purchased new clothes, permed her hair, and even resigned from the mission in an effort to win him. The breakup was a very trying time, as she later confessed: “Well, in the end I jolly near mucked up the whole furlough. I couldn’t find a husband in the mission, so I got out of the mission. God let me go a long way, and I made an awful mess. Then God graciously pulled me back and the mission graciously accepted me back.”16
When she returned to the Congo in 1960, the independence movement was becoming more violent. She nevertheless continued her work and took over the now-abandoned medical center she had built years earlier. The young doctor who had taken her place had fled the country with his family. In the following years she carried on with the work, particularly the work of training young men as nurses, many of whom were then licensed by the government. Then the work stopped suddenly in late October 1964, when she was taken into captivity after having been assaulted and raped. Two months later American and Belgian troops rescued her and others. Only then did she learn that many missionaries and countless Congolese had been brutally killed.
On returning home, Helen was too mentally and physically broken to even imagine going back to the Congo—that is, until letters began arriving from her students begging her to help them put their war-torn nation back together. How could she? But just over a year later she was back directing cargo planes as they ferried everything from food to building materials into remote landing strips. Within a year she was back at her base and rebuilding her school and clinic. But life would never be the same. New students with a spirit of independence and nationalism were unwilling to defer to the demands of an authoritarian white woman teacher.
Yet she stayed on for seven more years. The ending, however, was perhaps in some ways almost as painful as the brutality she endured at the hands of rebel soldiers.
When I knew I was coming home from the field and a young medical couple were taking my place at the college and an African colleague was taking over the directorship of the hospital, I organized a big day. It was to be a welcome to the two new doctors, a handover to my colleague, graduation day for the students in the college, and my farewell. A big choir had been practicing for five months. I got lots of cassettes to record everything and films to snap everything. Then at the last moment the whole thing fell to bits. The student body went on strike. I ended up having to resign the college where I’d been the director twenty years.17
Why did she decide to waste her life in Africa in the first place? She was a brilliant physician who could have practiced in London or anywhere else in the British Isles. Now she was back home depressed and disgraced. She might have blamed others, but instead she blamed herself. Perhaps she was too strong willed and dictatorial. She might have been more forgiving of her students who were finding their way amid the new spirit of freedom. Her openness and honesty opened the door for invitations to share her story, and in the decades that followed she traveled the world speaking at conferences and colleges, swaying audiences with her humility and humor—and her unmistakable British accent.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
Anyone who has ever endured the anguish of being fired—or given a terminal appointment or let go or laid off—knows that at the time the news is devastating. But for Dr. Helen Roseveare and many of us, we come to realize that it is possible to journey beyond such potholes and discover there is smooth pavement ahead. Helen was very familiar with impassable two-track roads through the Congo forests and the pitiless perils lurking in the midnight jungle. But the most difficult-to-navigate depression in the road appeared suddenly and where she least expected it—so suddenly that she might have been altogether derailed in her life journey. Instead, she pulled herself out of the mud, trudged home, took a new direction, and revved her engine, cheered on by compassionate crowds.
Elisabeth and Mother Teresa might also be categorized as celebrity missionaries. Like Helen they were both unusually honest in relating personal issues they encountered as missionaries who were supposed to serve as saintly role models. Elisabeth was plagued with idleness while questioning her calling. Mother Teresa struggled with doubts so dark as to obscure the very reality of God. Despite expectations to the contrary, Elisabeth reflected on Operation Auca and its aftermath not in pious platitudes but with hard-nosed integrity.
Corrie ten Boom in some ways became the ultimate celebrity saint for evangelicals, though the first five decades of her life are dim. But during her years of public ministry, there were no scandals or setbacks or serious censure. She reported many miracles, not the least of which was her willingness to forgive. Henrietta Mears was a force to be reckoned with who may have had little awareness of the power of her personality. She covered her dominating disposition as well as her faults and foibles with her quick wit and humor.
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
How do you relate to Helen Roseveare in her loss of her position as director and teacher of the school she founded? Have you ever been fired from a job? Is it easier to tell people openly that you were terminated or to accept an opportunity to resign and tell people that is what you did?
What can we learn from Helen’s account of being raped? Are there both pros and cons in making public what is often a very private violent crime?
Do you think that most people today make a real sacrifice to serve in Christian ministry? Do you personally know of anyone making a sacrifice comparable to that of Mother Teresa, Elisabeth, or Helen when they serve in cross-cultural missions?
Are you surprised to know that such a revered spiritual giant as Mother Teresa struggled with faith-threatening doubts? Do you think it is important for people to reveal the deepest doubts about God? Do you know people who have anguished over doubts about God’s very existence?
Should Christians expect God to honor their sacrificial ministry by protecting them or those they depend on from violence, sickness, and death as Elisabeth seemed to expect? When someone says God saved her when she missed her connection on the plane that crashed after takeoff, how should we respond? Is such a statement implying that while God purposely saved her, he purposely did not save all those who died?
Do you like to think of those in Christian ministry as saintly individuals? Is that how you perceive Corrie ten Boom and the others?