CHAPTER 1
BLANK CHECKS
Extreme Prayer Accesses the "Whatever You Ask" Promises
At the start of our missionary career in West Africa, my wife and I moved into a dusty, tin-roofed shack in a small village, bringing only some basic supplies and two bicycles with us. We had visited the village with a more experienced colleague a few times before this to get to know the people; now we would live with the villagers as we began learning their language and culture.
Rather than house us in a grass-roofed hut, one of the church leaders sacrificially emptied his little square home for us. This house was like no dwelling we'd ever seen. I could reach up and touch the tin roof without stretching. The mice had burrowed through the floor and would pop up at night to eat anything not hanging from the ceiling. One night I heard a cataclysmic struggle in one corner. When I got up to investigate, I discovered a colossal spider wrestling a majestic roach. Rebecca and I cheered for the spider.
Outside, the drooping branches of a mango tree brushed up against the screenless window, providing convenient access into our home for green mamba snakes. Without a ceiling, our rafters were home to a host of bats roosting between the wood and the tin. Like some kind of bat cave, our little home had so many bat droppings on the floor that we could have supplied enough guano for the gunpowder used in the American Civil War.
In spite of our initial squeamish reaction, that house holds a special place in our hearts. The generous church leader who had allowed us to temporarily move into his home tried to help us adjust to the "openness" of our dwelling by explaining, "It's not only people who live in a house." His sacrificial loan enabled us to make our home among the people with whom we would work to translate the Bible into the Yalunka language.
When we first arrived in West Africa, we pulled our water out of a hand-dug well with a bucket. We cooked outside on a kerosene burner. I remember taking bucket showers out under the stars in a grass enclosure, thinking, This is probably not what the Centers for Disease Control means when they caution Americans to avoid night-biting mosquitoes. As I showered, I could look up to a night sky so stunningly bright that at first I mistook the Milky Way galaxy for a huge, wispy cloud stretching the width of the sky. One night about three months into our stay, I had an epiphany that I was gazing into a vast fog of distant stars. A long, awestruck "oooh" flowed unbidden from my chest as I gaped at the same stars that had been God's visual aid for Abraham. I love Africa.
Living like the local people helped us get to know our neighbors. Just down the hill from us was a clearing where vendors set up a market every Saturday. Early our first morning, I heard trucks roaring to a halt outside. I tentatively opened the door to discover that our front steps were part of the market. Since our house was so close to the clearing, vendors were in the habit of stacking piles of rice just outside our doorway. Hundreds of people were milling around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the foreigners.
Another morning, the chilling wails of a mother in distress woke us. We found someone who could explain the woman's situation: her three-year-old son was dying. I felt so sad for this mother that I asked, "Could we see the child?"
I could tell by the villagers' faces that they had never considered that we might be able to help them. I wasn't a doctor. I had a good book on tropical medicine, but that was the extent of my medical training. Even I didn't know what I was thinking when I offered to help the dying boy.
They answered, "The child is out in the bush being treated by a traditional healer, but we will go out and get him."
It took a while for them to bring him back to the village, and I took advantage of the time to ponder my next move.
When Rebecca and I were finally brought to the boy, he was lying on the earthen floor of a grass-roofed hut belonging to one of his relatives in the village. His breathing was labored, and his pupils, wide like inky wells, did not respond at all to my flashlight. The words "pupils fixed and dilated," which I'd heard countless times on TV hospital dramas, echoed in my memory. Hopelessness crept into me as I realized that his mother was right; her son might not live long.
In hushed tones, Rebecca and I talked with the local pastor about what medical procedure might save the boy. "It can't be meningitis because we don't have any medicine for that," I mused, applying dubious diagnostics. "It could be cerebral malaria, but I don't know how to get an unconscious child to take the malaria tablets."
At some point I suggested, "We should pray for the kid. After all, we are missionaries."
At the simple mention of prayer, I saw the boy blink, and his eyes began to wander around the room focusing here and there.
I thought to myself, We had better hurry up and pray, because I think God is healing him! By the time we had finished praying, the boy's breathing was normal, and we were able to give him a dose of malaria medicine. Later that night, the family laughed festively over their little boy, whom they had given up for dead just hours before. We tried to give him the second dose of medicine that night, but he fought us like a rabid bobcat. His strength in combat proved to everyone present that he was fully recovered. Today he's nearly a grown man, and he still attends the village church.
In that dark hut a permanent little light blinked on inside my soul: God is real, and he wants me to rely on him first, not as a last resort. That's when I began to learn not to pray about my strategies, but to make prayer the strategy.
I thought of that night twelve years later. My family was still living in that village, but by this time we had built a baked-brick home with solar power and a well with an electric pump that supplied running water. I was handed the receiver of our satellite telephone and heard the voice of the chairman of the board asking me to become the president of our mission, Pioneer Bible Translators.
When the euphoria of accepting this new challenge wore off, it occurred to me: I'm in trouble. I need a really clever strategy. Our ministry had a distinguished record in Bible translation; however, its growth had plateaued over the previous decade. As the new president of the mission, I couldn't show up without some kind of brilliant plan for success. People...
