“When the angels had departed from them into heaven, the shepherds began saying to one another, ‘Let’s go straight to Bethlehem then, and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.’ And they came in a hurry and found their way to Mary and Joseph, and the baby as He lay in the manger. When they had seen Him, they made known the statement which had been told them about this Child.”
— Luke 2: 15-17
While I was in seminary, wife Mary Ella and I taught a Sunday school class for middle schoolage children. One week, I read a story about a missionary in the Congo who drove into the city to pick up the payroll.
There and back, he didn’t encounter any problems, but later a man came to the altar at the mission station to give his life to Jesus.
Then he walked over to the missionary to confess that he and a companion had followed him into the city and planned to rob him on the way home with the payroll.
But past midnight, when they approached his camp, there were a dozen warriors standing in a circle around his camp.
They were dressed in white robes, each one with a giant spear in one hand and a giant shield in the other hand.
The missionary had no idea what he was talking about as he was traveling alone — or so he thought.
A boy in the class raised his hand and said his dad was the missionary in charge of that mission station. Then he offered to tell us the rest of the story.
That missionary came home to America and was traveling to all the churches supporting him to ask them to continue their supporting.
He often told the story of the angels, and at one church a man came up to him at the end of the service and asked him not to leave until he could get something from his car. It was a journal and they compared dates.
The man found a comment about a Bible study at their church on the same night as the story.
One of the folks in the study came in late and said that God had told him their missionary’s life was in danger. They stopped the study and spent the rest of their time praying for his safety — and then he told him there were a dozen people in the Bible study.
Suddenly, our students were teaching the teachers!
Charles “Buddy” Whatley is a retired United Methodist pastor serving Dawson Street Methodist Church in Thomasville, Ga. With wife, Mary Ella, they are missionaries to the Navajo Reservation.
