Rachel's Viewfinder

Her gnarly, wrinkled finger drawing on the table in front of her, Helen told us a story from her missionary days in Nigeria. Helen was in her 90s, using a walker, and obviously frail. At first, I thought we were in for a difficult interview. Bad memory, bad hearing, and all that. Boy, was I wrong!

I was unexpectedly in Florida. David, our SIM USA summer intern, sat beside me taking notes as Helen spoke. His is spending the summer recording and writing out stories from SIM’s retired missionaries. A hiccup in the original plan sent me and my husband to Sebring, FL for a week to smooth things out. It’s not that I minded being in Florida. But there were other projects on my production list, and this business trip was taking time away from those projects.

Being 90-plus years old, there were plenty of times when Helen rambled on. She mentioned going out to the field during WWII. Her ship had to zigzag across the Atlantic to avoid the U-boats, and when they got to Nigeria, they could not make port due to a minefield. But then her narrative shifted to a rolling list of “and then…and then…” Admittedly, I didn’t know how much of Helen’s interview we were going to use.

At one point, Helen stopped, and I asked her if she had any favorite memories of people she met or served. That’s when her eyes lit up. She picked up her shaking hand and put her finger on the table.

“There was this tribe of people who raised cattle,” she began, drawing a circle on the table. “And they’d move from place to place. For a short time they grazed their cattle near the town I lived in.”

Helen went on to talk about an old man from the tribe. Too old and weak to be out grazing cattle with the younger men, he was built a shelter. He stayed there while his people went to market, or roamed the land around town. Helen heard about him living alone in his hut. The Lord impressed on her to begin visiting him. Reluctantly, Helen did so.

Every week, Helen made rounds to visit a number of people. To her list, she added visiting the old man. When she saw him, she told him the story of Jesus. The next week, she went back and asked, “Now do you remember the name of the man I told you about last week?”

The old man turned to her and said, “I am an old man and I don’t remember very well. What was his name again?” Helen again told him the story of Jesus. This back and forth of “Who is the man?” and “Please, tell me again,” continued for a few weeks. For the longest time, Helen thought she wasn’t making any progress.

Dragging her finger on the table, Helen drew out the route she used to walk when she went visiting. “There was this one week,” she said, continuing, “when I was walking past the old man’s hut after visiting a few other people. Every week I had gone to visit and he couldn’t remember the story. But as I walked past him, I could hear him saying, ‘Yesu! Yesu!’”

Helen stopped, tears coming to her eyes. “That was the last time I saw him,” she told me. “His tribe moved on the next day. But he finally remembered. And I believe when I heard him saying, ‘Yesu,’ he was praising his Savior.”

I sat there, tears coming to my eyes. Here I was in an unexpected place, doing a project that wasn’t in my original plan. But Helen’s story reminded me that I can’t know all the reasons why God asks me to do something “now,” or changes the plan. If Helen hadn’t been obedient when the Lord asked her to visit the old man, he never would have sung out the words, “Yesu! Yesu!”