“Please, let our petition be acceptable to you, and pray for us to the Lord your God, …that the Lord your God may show us the way in which we should walk and the thing we should do” (Jer 42:2-3).
Rowland Bingham, involved in the early days of the Sudan Interior Mission, soon discovered why the interior of Nigeria was known as “the white man’s grave.” At age 20, he had begun the journey with two other young men, Walter Gowans and Thomas Kent, but within a year Gowans, age 23, and Kent, age 25, had died of malaria. Five months later, after himself recovering from malaria, Bingham returned to Canada and visited Mrs. Gowans to give the mother her son’s few personal effects.
Bingham writes: “We stood there with hands clasped in silence for a while. Then she said these words that I will never forget: ‘Well, Mr. Bingham, I would rather have had Walter go out to the Sudan, and die there all alone, than have him home today disobeying the Lord.’”