Tonight you’ve entered into the
first part of the verse, “That I may know Him.” This is only the beginning, and
there’s a long journey ahead. My prayer for you is that you will go on through
the verse to know “the power of His resurrection” and also, God willing, one
day perhaps, “the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His
death.”
She felt an increased sense of calling toward missions, and
publicly declared during
a missionary gathering in North England, “I’ll go anywhere God wants me to,
whatever the cost.”
Afterwards, I went up into the
mountains and had it out with God. “O.K. God, today I mean it. Go ahead and
make me more like Jesus, whatever the cost. But please (knowing myself fairly
well), when I feel I can’t stand anymore and cry out, ‘Stop!’ will you ignore
my ‘stop’ and remember that today I said ‘Go ahead!’?”
After graduating from Cambridge with her doctorate in
medicine, Helen studied for six months at the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade
college at Crystal Palace. From there she went to Belgium to study French and
Holland to take a course on tropical medicine as she prepared for her
appointment as a medical missionary in the Congo.
In mid-March of 1953, at the age of 28, she arrived in
the northeastern region of the Congo (later named Zaire).
In the first two years, she founded a training school for
nurses, training women to serve as nurse-evangelists, who in turn would run
clinics and dispensaries in different regions.
In October 1955, she was asked to transfer seven miles away
to run an abandoned maternity and leprosy center in Nebobongo. Working with
local Africans, Helen helped to transform the center into a hospital with 100
beds, serving mothers, lepers, and children, along with a training school for
paramedics and 48 rural clinics. Outside of these facilities, there was no
other medical help for 150 miles in any direction.
Exhausted, Helen returned to England in 1958 for a furlough,
during which time she received further medical training.
The Congo became independent from Belgium in 1960, and civil
war broke out in 1964. All of the medical facilities they had established were
destroyed. Helen was among ten Protestant missionaries put under house arrest
by the rebel forces for several weeks, after which time they were moved and
imprisoned.
She describes the horror of what happened after she tried to
escape:
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.
Her captors, she wrote, “were brutal and drunken. They
cursed and swore, they struck and kicked, they used the butt-end of rifles and
rubber truncheons. We were roughly taken, thrown in prisons, humiliated,
threatened.”
On October 29, 1964, Helen Roseveare was brutally raped.
On that dreadful night, beaten and bruised, terrified and tormented, unutterably alone, I had felt at last God had failed me. Surely He could have stepped in earlier, surely things need not have gone that far. I had reached what seemed to be the ultimate depth of despairing nothingness.
In this darkness, however, she sensed the Lord saying to
her:
You asked Me, when you were first
converted, for the privilege of being a missionary. This is it. Don’t you want
it? . . . These are not your sufferings. They’re Mine. All I ask of you is the
loan of your body.
She eventually received an “overwhelming sense of privilege,
that Almighty God would stoop to ask of me, a mere nobody in a forest clearing
in the jungles of Africa, something He needed.”
She later pointed to God’s goodness despite this great evil:
Through the brutal heartbreaking
experience of rape, God met with me—with outstretched arms of love. It was an
unbelievable experience: He was so utterly there, so totally understanding, his
comfort was so complete—and suddenly I knew—I really knew that his love was
unutterably sufficient. He did love me! He did understand!
She also wrote:
[God] understood not only my desperate misery but also my awakened desires and mixed up horror of emotional trauma. I knew that Philippians 4:19, “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus,” was true on all levels, not just on a hyper-spiritual shelf where I had tried to relegate it. . . . He was actually offering me the inestimable privilege of sharing in some little way in the fellowship of His sufferings.
This theme of “privilege” became prominent in Helen’s
ministry. In her Urbana '76 address, she said:
One word became unbelievably clear,
and that word was privilege. He didn’t take away pain or cruelty or
humiliation. No! It was all there, but now it was altogether different. It was
with him, for him, in him. He was actually offering me the inestimable privileged
of sharing in some little way the edge of the fellowship of his suffering.
In the weeks of imprisonment that
followed and in the subsequent years of continued service, looking back, one
has tried to “count the cost,” but I find it all swallowed up in privilege. The
cost suddenly seems very small and transient in the greatness and permanence of
the privilege.
After returning to African in 1966, she soon left Nebobongo
to establish a new medical center in Nyankunde in northeastern Zaire, producing
a 250-bed hospital, maternity ward, training college for doctors, a center for
leprosy, and other endeavors.
There, too, she experienced several trials and relational
difficulties. She never claimed to see visions or hear the voice of the Lord,
but she did sense him rebuking her attitude. On one occasion, her conviction
from the Lord went as follows:
You no longer want Jesus only, but
Jesus plus . . . plus respect, popularity, public opinion, success and pride.
You wanted to go out with all the trumpets blaring, from a farewell-do that you
organized for yourself with photographs and tape-recordings to show and play at
home, just to reveal what you had achieved. You wanted to feel needed and
respected. You wanted the other missionaries to be worried about how they’ll
ever carry on after you’ve gone. You’d like letters when you go home to tell
how much they realize they owe to you, how much they miss you. All this and
more. Jesus plus. . . . No, you can’t have it. Either it must be “Jesus only”
or you’ll find you have no Jesus. You’ll substitute Helen Roseveare.
In 1973, Helen returned to the UK for health reasons,
settling in Northern Ireland. She traveled, wrote several books, and served as a missionary advocate.
