"I am going to escort you"

"Miss Mabel Shaw, one of the first two missionaries sent out to Rhodesia by the London Missionary Society 1915, wrote:

'They told me a lion had been about ... at last I rose to go, and was just about to mount my bicycle when out of one little hut came the old leper headman.  He held a spear between the stumps that once were hands, and he went hobbling along the path in front of me.  I called to him and he stopped and looked around.'

'Where are you going?'

'I am going to escort you to Mbereshi village.  You can't go alone with lions about.'
He would not have it.  It was not fitting for me to go alone.  I looked at him, a feeble old man, handless, feet half eaten, his whole body covered with marks of disease, and his face most pitiful.  I said to him, half-banteringly, and with a smile, 'Now what could you do if a lion came?'

He drew himself up, and with a quiet dignity said, 'Have I not got a life to give?'  I was silent, seeing a cross.  I followed him to the village, thanked him, and came home having met with God face-to-face."

(from God's Candelight, 1943, as quoted from the Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter, July/August 2002)

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Christa Wells song, How Emptiness Sing.  Inspired by a post written by our own Ann Voskamp.