She was a featured speaker at Urbana several times in her retirement years, a mission conference for collegiates attracting upwards of eighteen thousand students. What attracted college students to this diminutive, white-haired lady from Northern Ireland? Surely, her refreshing candor had something to do with it. There was no sugar-coating success or hiding failure in her remarks to students.
Helen Roseveare (1925-2016) went to the Congo (now Zaire) in 1953 as a medical missionary doctor. She built a hundred-bed hospital from scratch and founded an orphanage for children of leprosy patients. She was, by all accounts, capable and strong-willed, threatening her male colleagues. Tensions with a newly appointed male boss who tried to curtail her leadership initiatives didn’t help matters. She went home to Ireland on furlough depleted and convinced she needed to find a doctor-husband to work with her and side with her in power struggles. She even identified a young doctor who seemed to fit the bill, but the relationship never materialized.
She returned to the Congo as a single woman, now in charge and finding ministry falling into place. A civil war erupted in 1964, and rebels took control of the hospital she was leading. She was held as a prisoner for five months and brutally raped. She felt utterly alone as though God had abandoned her. At her lowest moment, she read Paul’s letter to the Philippians and the words jumped off the page, “My God will supply all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4.19). “God met me there,” she wrote. “He was utterly there. He comforted me so completely. My pain was swallowed up in privilege.”
Christ’s sufficiency to meet every need became Helen’s signature message for the remainder of her ministry. She returned to Ireland in 1973 to care for her ailing mother and devoted herself to train a new generation of mission leaders. She spoke at Urbana at eighty-seven on the theme “Stir Me.” Stir me to go, give and pray is the focus of today’s prayer: