I Never Made a Sacrifice

I Never Made a Sacrifice.  The norm is to grandstand; the rule is to bet on oneself. Therefore, any deviation from the norm or exception to the rule draws attention, positive or negative. Compared to some of today’s celebrities who are entirely contained in the Internet, it is hard to imagine the international celebrity heaped upon the Scottish medical doctor turned missionary, David Livingstone (1813-1873). Livingstone was the first European to crisscross the African Interior, opening the continent to commerce and Christian evangelism while exposing the dark industry of the slave trade. Livingstone grew up in a tenement adjacent to a cotton mill and fought hard to enter medical school at Glasgow only to set it all aside immediately after graduation to answer the call to missions in Africa.

Legend grew up around Livingstone and his expeditions, especially when he trekked the mountains all over Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Malawi, etc., searching for the source of the Nile River. "The Nile sources," he told a friend, "are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power [with] which I hope to remedy an immense evil" (Tim Jeal, Livingstone: Revised and Expanded [2013], p. 289). After his wife, Mary, died in Mozambique of malaria (1862), no one had seen him in years. When Henry Morton Stanley finally found Livingstone in 1869, sick and recuperating in Ujiji, a Tanzanian village, he said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Livingstone replied, “Yes, I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.”

Of his physical heart Livingstone had famously said, “If I die, bury my heart in Africa.” His friends did exactly that when Livingstone died of malaria in Zambia (1873) while the rest of Livingstone’s body was buried in Westminster Abbey, London. But one brief interchange by Livingstone to a group of Cambridge students (1857) during a furlough captured his spiritual heart. When asked about his sacrifice, he resisted using the term.

“For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. . . . Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice” (R. Winter and S. Hawthorne, Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, [1981], p. 259).