Why is prayer so hard? I’ve been a believer for more than 3 decades and my ministry now is, in part, a ministry of prayer. Yet still, despite my many attempts at disciplining myself to pray daily and the many books I’ve read on prayer, I struggle. This dumb flesh, right?

I always find inspiration towards prayer through reading missionary biographies. They serve as a flashlight into the dark corners of my heart, revealing the sinful areas I’d much rather ignore.

For most missionary biographers, the theme of prayer runs constantly through the pages, like a second protagonist in a long story of struggle and pain. Few missionary biographies, however, are as explicitly about prayer as this one, so I found Goforth’s journal-style recollections doubly encouraging.

In this book, Rosalind Goforth simplifies prayer and our access to it. She writes that: “Prayer has been hedged about with too many man-made rules.” (13) It’s talking to God. It conversing with Him and making our requests known to Him. It’s simple…and maybe that’s the reason we don’t do it nearly enough!

She also emphasizes the power of God in this book, a power that’s limited neither BY nor TO the largest requests. She writes:

“It is true that ‘there is nothing too great for God’s power’; and it just as true that ‘there is nothing too small for his love!’ If we believe God’s Word we must believe, as Dan Crawford has tersely and beautifully expressed it, that ‘the God of the infinite is the God of the infinitesimal.'” (14-15)

In fact, throughout my reading of this book, the word of the old hymn “Does Jesus Care?” kept ringing in my mind:

Oh yes, He cares, I know He cares,
His heart is touched with my grief;
When the days are weary,
The long nights dreary,
I know my Savior cares.

Another aspect of this book that I just loved was the historical glimpse into missions in China 100 years ago. She shares, for example, the testimony of another missionary she met along the way. For his first 15 years in China, Rev. Hunter Corbett suffered from dysentery and the doctors finally told him he had to leave the country. But he testified:

“I knew God had called me to China, and I also knew that God did not change. So what could I do? I dared not go back on my call; so I determined that if I could not live in China I could die there; and from that time the disease lost its grip on me.” (31-32)

He ended up staying there something like 55 years.

Throughout Chapter 5, she also describes her family‘s escape from the Boxers during the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century. It’s a harrowing chapter worth readding to get a glimpse of how those who survived martyrdom (unlike others like John and Betty Stam) still suffered greatly as they escaped their murderous pursuers! She even expounds on her own guilt of having run and survived while so many others were caught executed. 

“After all is said, we must believe God was glorified and God’s purposes were fulfilled in the death of some as in the saved lives of others. The blood of the martyrs is still the seed of the church.” (48)

Later, she also humbly testifies about her own distrust and fear to follow God into the heart of China, because she feared for the lives of the children who yet lived. Up to this point, it seems they had already lost four children in infancy, and when her husband felt a call to move, she refused! When God took her fifth baby through fever while still in the city, she broke down and relented of her distrust and fear. They moved to the interior and she never lost another child. In hindsight, she writes that “The safest place for you and your children is in the path of duty.” (70, 83) While I don’t believe God killed her children simply to teach her a lesson, I do believe that God used the death of her fifth child to highlight her distrust; and He later protected her family because He’s a gracious Master!

She even expounds on this grace and goodness in her children’s lives this way:

“As I recall those years of touring life with our children, words fail me to tell of all the Lord’s goodness to them and to me. Though there were many hard, hard places, these were but opportunities for special grace and help. Many times, when discouraged almost to the point of never going out again with the children, there would come evidence that the Lord was using our family life, lived among the people, to win them to Christ. Then I would take new courage and go again. It is so true that: We may trust Him fully / All for us to do; / Those who trust Him wholly / Find Him wholly true.” (83)

Overall, I found this collection of answered prayers in the lives of one missionary family an incredible encouragement and an invitation to begin (or continue) recording the answers that God has given my family to our prayers. It may just be a woman’s prayer journal from 100 years ago, but it’s timeless record of God’s faithfulness even in the smallest of things.

©2022 E.T.