God’s extraordinary work

I just finished Mark Batterson’s book, All In.

Batterson told the extraordinary story of how 100 years ago the Philadelphia Church in Stockholm sent two missionary couples to the Congo. David and Svea Flood and Joel and Bertha Erickson were committed to serving God and the local people.

Their efforts appeared unsuccessful that first year. The couples saw no one respond to their message of Jesus’ love. Svea became pregnant and contracted malaria. She gave birth to a baby girl, Aina, on April 23, 1923, and died just 17 days later.

David was so overcome with grief that he gave Aina to Joel and Bertha Erickson and returned to Sweden, where he spent decades trying to drown his sorrow with alcohol.

Aina’s new parents died three years later when villagers poisoned them, and she was given to Arthur and Anna Berg, another missionary couple. They renamed their adopted daughter Aggie. The family eventually left the Congo to minister in South Dakota.

After high school, Aggie attended North Central Bible College, where she met and eventually married Dewey Hurst.

The two ministered in several churches before Dewey became the president of their alma mater. On their 25th anniversary at the college, they were given a trip to Sweden.

Aggie had always longed to find her biological father. They found him near death on their final day in Stockholm. David’s bitterness melted as he and Aggie embraced. That day he reconnected with both his daughter and God.

Five years later the couple attended a conference in London.

One featured speaker, Ruhigita Adagora, superintendent of the Pentecostal Church in Zaire, caught Aggie’s attention.

He was from the region where her parents had ministered. She sought him out and asked if he knew anyone from the village where she had been born.

He had in fact grown up in her village and brought her family eggs each morning. Aggie’s mother had told him about Jesus.

He said, “Shortly after I accepted Christ, Svea died and her husband left. She had a baby named Aina. I’ve always wondered what happened to her.”

The two embraced like long lost siblings when Aggie revealed she was that baby.

Ruhigita told her, “Just a few months ago, I placed flowers on your mother’s grave. On behalf of the hundreds of churches and hundreds of thousands of believers in Zaire, thank you for letting your mother die so that so many of us could live.”

God rarely works quickly.

Psalm 90:4 says that to God, “…a thousand years are as a passing day…” (NLT)

As Aina’s family illustrates, God is always doing more than we imagine, but he works at his pace, not at ours.

It is easy to be discouraged by our current challenges, but God typically takes bad things and accomplishes good things through them in his own time.

Serve God each day. You never know how God may use your faithfulness in truly extraordinary ways.

Tim Richards grew up in Fairdealing and previously served as associate pastor of Pilgrim’s Rest Church there. He currently serves as a pastor on the staff of Concord Church in South County St. Louis.