In preparation for two weeks of short term mission work in Kenya that my wife and I have planned for our Church, I am reading Faster Beats the Drum by Gladys Stauffacher.  Its a granddaughter's account of her grandparents--two ground-breaking missionaries to Kenya, Uganda and Congo, during the first years of the Africa Inland Mission. 

John and Florence Stauffacher married knowing that God had called them to offer the Gospel to the souls living in East Africa at the turn of the 20th century.  Their whole lives were spent in the wilds of Africa, facing leopards, tribal uprisings, the turns of imperial tumult, war, famine...all of it.  Their first son, Raymond, spent three out of the first four years of his life in tent structures for home.  Only one year was in a solid structure house, and that was a rock and mud home his father built.

John and Florence would pray for people they only knew by the name of their tribes...Maasai, Rendille, Samburu and Kikuyu.

John wrote for a missions journal: "Our Mission here at Laikipia is on the very frontier...Two tribes to the northeast are fairly begging for missionaries to come to their country.  Last Sunday a man visited us, coming ten days journey, a chief more powerful than the big Maasai chief, with a people more wealthy because of their many camels.  He begged us to come to his people.  His tribe, called the Rendille, is almost unknown as yet.  Between them and us are the Samburu, also Maasai-speaking and equally anxious for Christian teachers.  Could we reach these two tribes we would touch all to the northeast as far as the desert.  To sit down and converse with these people as friends and send them away again into the darkness from which they came is heartbreaking.  Oh, brethren, hear Him again as He says, Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest that He send forth laborers into the harvest field."

Through constant malarial fevers, storms and tribal wars they worked steadily forward.  Sacrificing the comforts of home, comforts others might have thought they owed their children; comforts others might have thought they owed their parents.  They lived far off in Kenya, always longing for the next group to meet, the next woman, man, or child who might hear the old, old story, find power in the deeper magic of the Gospel, and devote themselves to Jesus Christ. 

Every soul matters eternally.  Every soul alive today matters to the Lord more than the nations.  A soul, an individual soul, lives forever.  Nations pass like tides. 

Have we lost the mission?  Have we lost the fervor?  There is a soul far away who has never heard of Jesus.  There is a soul down the street who has never heard the name of Jesus spoken with any reverence or meaning.  The biographies of our past saints encourage us, but the mission is ours today.