One Day’s Walk
By Kimberly Thigpen
The village sits at the top of a mountain, remote from the world, a day’s walk—up—from a town. As missionary W. D., who has served with Source of Light for 40 years, puts it, “For people like me it will take more time as we are not used to walking up so fast.”
Separate from other people and resources, the village suffers. W. D. and his fellow missionaries traveled to the village and found, “The whole village was suffering with skin diseases. The Lord placed a burden in my heart to help them, and I took one doctor and one nurse with medicines. We started helping them by applying medicine to their skins with our own hands and started knowing them and identifying ourselves with them. Slowly this relationship developed through the years.”
Years. Not days, not months. Bringing light into this village was not a quick process, like turning on an electric switch. More like the slow, imperceptibly-increasing light of a sunrise, the missionaries returned again and again, committed to loving like Christ, offering not only truth, but themselves.
Remember when Jesus encountered a leper in the Scriptures? Everyone else backed away, fearful of catching the deadly disease. Fearful of contamination. Fearful of their own mortality. Jesus healed the leper, but reading the account in Matthew 8 brings to light an action even more extraordinary. Jesus touched the leper. Touched him before He healed him.
While he was still a leper, Jesus listened to him, talked to him, reached out and touched him. That person had not been touched since the diagnosis that condemned him to a life of rejection and solitude. The law of Moses declared him unclean. His future held nothing but death.
Then Jesus came. With Him came an impossible acceptance, a fearconquering hope, a healing beyond just the physical. Jesus offered the impossible. And it was so. Healing and hope came for the leper. Light shined forth to everyone who saw it, and spread to those who heard of it.
Like Jesus, these missionaries traveled far to a land darkened by sin and hopeless. Like Jesus, they approached. With their hands, they treated the diseased. They placed themselves alongside the lost.
Like the leper, the people were changed. If one were to hike the trail to this village now, they would find a place of great light. As the missionary says, “the whole village came to the saving grace of the Lord and the village now is a Christian village.”
The leader of the tribe, S. N., believed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and was saved. W. D. baptized him. The tribe’s leader is now also its pastor, overseeing the church the missionaries planted and built. The tribe has no written language, but S. N. translates basic SLM lessons and teaches them to the youth and the children, raising up the village’s next generation in faith.
The light spreads. This tribe is not keeping the hope and light of salvation to themselves. They are spreading the good news to neighboring tribes and continuing the pattern they were shown.
Missionaries brought Jesus to them. They are taking Jesus to others.
May we follow their example, and do our part that more people can hear, and be transformed.
But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. Proverbs 4:18
