Whilst I’m a big believer in teams, and the capacity to achieve great things when people work together, there is no denying the impact an individual can have.
In recent months I’ve been reading a number of biographies of such people. Take David Livingstone, Scottish missionary and explorer in Africa. He was a pioneer, an evangelist, who dedicated his life to the peoples and tribes he encountered and who is still revered by them today. He travelled places where others feared to tread, and placed his life in God’s hands.
Or Cameron Townsend, who I had never heard of before, but who initiated what we know today as Wycliffe Bible Translators. As a result of a ministry, then a movement of people (post WW1), the Bible has been and is being translated into hundreds of languages. Indeed, in many cases, these are languages that have never before been written down.
Or take the remarkable story of Bruce Olson who decades ago entered the Colombian jungles where he has since lived and worked among the native tribe known as the Motilones. His story is told in Brutchko, available from St Luke’s bookshop. He enabled the tribe to discover Jesus who walked the jungle trails with them.
Then recently I’ve been moved by the life’s work of Ken and Jocelyn Elliott, currently kidnapped from their hospital base in Burkino Faso. They built this hospital from the ground up, and have provided medical and surgical care in one of the poorest communities of Africa for over forty years. They don’t ask for donations but simply live on what is provided to them.
All these stories are inspiring. They demonstrate the power of one. What one person can do. In truth there were many others who helped or assisted them along the way, and none could do such things without the power and presence of God to sustain them.
All made huge sacrifices for the sake of God’s mission and work in the world. It is a reminder of the heroes of faith in Hebrews chapter 11. Of them it is said, “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth” (verse 13).
In a sense this remains true. We still labour and strive in faith, knowing that the fullest rewards of God’s kingdom are yet to come.
As we begin this year, and the many activities and endeavours that will go with it, may we be inspired by those who have labored before us, and who have revealed the possibilities of what even one person can do. For God so loved the world.