You Can’t Quit

She is hurrying. Who wouldn’t? Her daughter’s struggle is awful.

Her daughter’s struggle with what? School? Medical issues?

Demonic torment.

“Have mercy on me, Lord,” the mother cries. “Oh, Son of David!” (What a name for a Canaanite woman to give a Jewish man.)

“My daughter … the demon is hurting her so badly.”

Jesus does not answer her.

That story is for us, dear reader. In it Jesus and his disciples are far from home. They are abroad, up north by Tyre and Sidon—modern Syria.

In February Pastor Howie Mohlke and I left our Zambian homes. We too went to a country north of us.

I was in Sondu, Kenya for two weeks. Three pastors in the Lutheran Churches in Mission for Christ (LCMC) and I learned and practiced adult education.

*Sondu is located in Southwestern Kenya*

Pastor Mohlke flew up for the second week. Near Sondu in Chabera he led a workshop for LCMC lay preachers—over 50 of them.

At the end of our time with our brothers, one of them, LCMC Bishop Richard Ogosi Amayo, led us all in a service of holy communion.

In that closing service Howie preached from Matthew 15:21–28, the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman with the demonized daughter.

Does demonic torment seem as distant to you as East Africa? Something far away, something mostly just in Jesus’ day?

Millions of Americans figure that Satan is not just far away, he is fake. Your African brothers and sisters in Christ know better. Many have fears you may not.

Demonic Pentecostal preaching is spreading in Sub-Saharan Africa. Witch doctors advertise even in upscale urban neighborhoods.

Why would Christians be tempted to run, not to Jesus, like the Canaanite woman? Why try charms or traditional healers?

What a liar, our old evil foe. He means deadly woe. God seems distant. Other help seems closer.

God seems slow. Other options seem faster.

The Swahili proverb I learned from my Kenyan brothers in our course on dialogue education was Haraka, haraka, haina baraka. (“Ha-RA-ka, ha-RA-ka, high-EE-na ba-RA-ka.”)

That is, “haste, haste, there is no blessing.”

The Bible says similarly: “Enthusiasm without knowledge is no good; haste makes mistakes” (Proverbs 19:2 NLT).

It’s not just true in education. All those sayings remind me of another African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

That sums up a key aspect of what Howie Mohlke and I were doing in Sondu and Chabera, Kenya. Our LCMC partners asked your One Africa Team for help. “Let’s work together,” they said, “in training for practical action in Christ.”

The result may mean this time, classes for veteran pastors on a master’s degree level. Those brothers teach future pastors in online evening classes.

Or the request may lead to a workshop for men learning for the first time how to study a short section of the Bible and preach specific good news about Jesus from it.

No matter what, we go together.

Jesus’ disciples didn’t want to go together with the Canaanite woman, did they? “Send her away,” they tell Jesus. “She keeps bothering us.”

How that must sting. Can you imagine how afraid and ashamed she must already feel, with all the battering her daughter is getting from the demon?

(Did the mother feel responsible somehow? And where is the father? What about any other relative or friend? Why does she come to Jesus all alone?)

You can’t know fully the demon’s agenda in abusing her daughter.

Nor can you know the depth of why Jesus at first answers her pleas with nothing. He tells her he is only sent to the lost sheep of Israel.

But that’s not the whole story. Jesus wants so much to help her and her daughter.

Today too prayers for help to Jesus can seem so futile. Nothing is happening, we conclude. After we pray, all we hear is heaven’s door being slammed. Bolts click. Lock after lock closes, almost audibly.

But do you know how it went with the Canaanite woman? A door opens.

How? The woman doesn’t quit. She kneels before Jesus.

Jesus tells her, “It isn’t right. You don’t take the children’s bread and throw it to dogs.”

Nevertheless, she doesn’t quit.

“Yes, Lord,” she admits. “Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”

“Woman,” Jesus beams, “your faith is great. Let it be done for you as you want.”

Just as when God said, “Let there be light,” as soon as he says it … You can’t imagine her joy. Her daughter is whole again.

Ever notice that the only times Jesus in the Gospels heals someone from a distance—the centurion’s servant in Matthew 8, the Canaanite woman’s daughter here, and possibly the royal official’s son in John 4—it involves a foreigner?

So two biggies, friend. I’m on my knees before you, almost like the Canaanite woman before Jesus. Please.

1. The man who writes down the story that Howie Mohlke was preaching in Kenya—Matthew? He is Jewish, right? So are all the apostles.

But Jesus keeps hinting to his fellow Jews that his church will be multinational. Worldwide. Gentiles will fill it.

Matthew, we think, writes mainly to Jewish believers. They struggle so with God’s paradigm shift.

Demonic terrors, crazy situations, cross-cultural barriers. Such will not be the exception. They are all part of God’s plan.

2. Delays too. I mean, Jesus prayed the most desperate prayer, didn’t he? And it didn’t look like God was answering at all, did it?

Jesus died all alone in place of us all. Jews. Gentiles. Kenyans. Americans. Everybody.

So don’t quit praying. For Everybody.

Pray for missionaries far away. Pray for gospel victories close to home.

Whatever Jesus says happens. What does he tell the desperate woman? “Let it be done for you as you want.” Boom. Whatever Jesus says happens.

Then why pray for others? Why pray much for others? Maybe with people who look different from us, people with lives that seem in shambles, it feels easiest to shoo them away. We are like the Twelve.

We are like the woman too. God may seem slow. Prayer to God seems slow. Other options seem faster.

What if in Christ you don’t quit? What if right now you pray for someone who is lost? (Your daughter? A friend’s child?)

You can’t quit! What if you keep praying for the Spirit of God to lead many more people to trust in the Son of God for the glory of God?

You can’t quit! What if you pray every day, even when so much bad stuff doesn’t go away, or God seems to impose yet another delay? “Have mercy, Lord.”

What if Jesus really is David’s direct descendant, a man just like us, and King over everything? “Oh, Son of David.”

Darkest powers, you can’t be too close to their web. Jesus is stronger.

You can’t have done anything too bad. It’s already paid for.

You can’t have failed to do enough good. He was perfect in your place.

You can’t be too distant. The Canaanite woman’s daughter proves it.

You. Can’t. Quit. Keep praying. Pray to Jesus for that other person. Today.

Missionary Dan Witte and his wife Debbie live in Lusaka, Zambia.

Please pray for those working in fields that are ripe for harvest. Share their story, engage with future news, and receive updates. Learn more about our mission fields in Africa and how the Holy Spirit is working faith in people’s hearts at https://wels.net/serving-others/missions/africa

My Cup Overflows

I was flying for a second day from Lusaka, Zambia to Douala, Cameroon. Africa is so big that such trips mean an overnight stay. Two flights.

On African routes I fly I rarely hear an American accent. But next to me on the plane from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia was an American. She was born in New York City. Now she teaches at a school of design in Milan, Italy.

I did not get her name. Still, my cup overflowed (Psalm 23:5).

We found out we were both going to Cameroon’s biggest city for two-week learning events. She would help students at a major school of design, LABA (Libre Académie des Beaux-arts/Free Academy of Fine Arts).

At a more modest site in Douala, I was to meet with eight Cameroonian and Nigerian pastors. They teach at our sister seminaries in West Africa. They too would focus on design—learning design for future pastors.

The woman was inquisitive. Highly educated. Her undergraduate degree was from an Ivy League university.

I wanted to share a bit about myself. I wondered if the conversation might turn toward God and eternity. So I showed her Hebrew on my smartphone: Psalm 23.

I spoke the last verse to her in Hebrew, pointing at each word of 23:6. “Surely goodness and faithful love will chase me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD day after day after day.”

“You read Hebrew?” she said. “I’m Jewish.” She got excited. “Can I ask you a question about my bat-mitzvah verse?”

That turned out to be B’reyshiyt (Genesis) 33:4. On Jacob’s way home, after all he had done to his older brother Esau decades earlier, Jacob feared meeting Esau. “But Esau ran to meet him, hugged him, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. Then they wept.”

In New York City, when the woman next to me had been young, that was the verse she had been chosen to read to her synagogue. She had given a brief speech on it too.

She was still interested in it. She quizzed me about the extraordinary dots in the ancient text over the Hebrew word for “and kissed him.” She remembered asking her rabbi about those.

I asked her if she knew that Jesus had expanded that verse into a story about two brothers.

Another story? Yes.

There were two brothers, I told her. Estranged. One had been far from home for a long time. But the Father was waiting for him. When he saw him at a distance, he ran out to him, threw himself on his son’s shoulders, and kissed him.

Did she know that story? “No,” she said. “I’ve never heard it. Tell me more.”

The son in the story had tried to repeat the three-part speech he had prepared. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired men.”

Do you know that story? The one about the Pharisees who disliked Jesus eating with notorious sinners? The one Jesus told about the prodigal son, the waiting Father, and the elder son? The one in which the Father interrupts the younger one before he can offer his bargain?

The woman and I had one of the best conversations I have ever shared with a stranger on an airplane.

Did she become a follower of Christ that day? Not that I know of. I have been praying for her. I still think Psalm 23:5 applies: “My cup overflows.”

That leads to the next photo.

In Douala, on the last day of our first week together, the West African seminary teachers played this game. Each took turns pouring as little water as possible into the glass dish. Whoever broke the surface tension and made the cup overflow would lose.

I wish you could have heard the laughs and jokes during that game. It wasn’t just that the dish overflowed when it ended. Our hearts did too.

Video of singing during devotions

We had sung, prayed, and heard God’s word together. We had talked about so many plans that week—plans to help other men in Cameroon and Nigeria shepherd God’s flock. Men had practiced teaching the Bible in front of their peers. New teachers had asked questions.

“My cup overflows,” David sang. We felt the same.

May I share one more way my cup overflowed during my last week in Douala?

It was hot there. We drank so much bottled water.

But on Thursday of the second week, we drank life itself. It was so unique.

Note this sign from the mission house where we stayed. In French: “Whoever has the Son has life. Whoever does not have the Son does not have life.”

Four of us saw that in a new way. Others had left. We had stayed a second week. That Thursday the four of us took part in the worldwide theological educators’ meeting of the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference.

Our cups overflowed. On a screen before us we saw the results of the Spirit’s gift of life around the world.

Pastor Orem and Pastor Johnson from All Saints Lutheran Church in Nigeria loved it. Other theological educators around the globe introduced themselves.

As in the photo above, Pastor Orem beamed. He told me, “My spirit has gone to faraway places and is so blessed.”

Missionary Dan Witte (far right) and his wife Debbie live in Lusaka, Zambia.

Immersion Matters

Immersion matters! Now wait, before you go crying “Heresy!” on me, understand what I mean. I’m not talking about baptism here. I’m talking about language immersion—in this case, French language immersion.

For 3 weeks in January, I left my home in Zambia to live in and study French in Lyon, France. I lived in the 21^st-century equivalent of a monk’s cell in a big apartment building. I rode the trams and the subway to and from my language school each day. In Zambia, it was summer, and (as always) it was blazing hot. Since I’m a Canadian, it was a pleasure to experience Northern Hemisphere winter again (although I didn’t have a coat to take along with me from Africa).

Food Immersion

Cheese is my favorite food, and France is pretty much the Valhalla of cheese. I would love to tell you about the many varieties of cheese I consumed along with slices of Lyonnaise rosette sausages or Corsican coppa ham on baguette. But this article is supposed to be about language immersion. Besides being a great place to be immersed in cheese, Lyon is also a great place to be immersed in the French language. The second-largest city in France, Lyon lies at the confluence of the Saône and Rhone rivers, and it has a standard metropolitan French accent.

So, why was a standard accent important for me? My job as a missionary takes me to many French-speaking countries of Africa: Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Benin, for example. I also work with French-speaking Lutherans from countries that I’m currently not able to visit, such as Togo and Burkina Faso. Having lived in Ottawa, Canada, for 9 years, I can tell you that the African French accents are much closer to a standard metropolitan (i.e., European) French accent than anything I ever heard in Canada. So, I went to France to study and practice French for 3 weeks because it has the variety of French that all the African forms are based on.

immersion — *Five Guys (“Cinq Mecs”?) in Lyon. What a blessing*

Linguistic Leap Forward

In Lyon, I did not only study all morning and afternoon in a French school. I also went out and used my French around town. Going to board game clubs and shops. Eating at a traditional mom-and-pop style restaurant called a “bouchon”. Helping several French people locate different books they were looking for in the big, huge FNAC bookstore. Joking about the strange, spaceship-like public toilets with folks waiting for their family members to come out. Shopping for a coat in the mall at the Superdry store. I’m figuring out how to get my cell phone working at the Orange shop.

Immersion was a great experience. I’d never been to France before, so it was amazing to hear French all the time and to get used to listening to and speaking nothing but French. My ear has picked up the pace since my immersion, and so has my ability to express my own “very deep” thoughts—JK!—in French. I think it will be a big benefit if I can go back for another round of immersion sometime next year. But my best French immersion is coming up in March—with a trip to visit Lutherans from Benin and Burkina Faso—and in April—with a trip to teach a workshop on Luther’s small catechism in the Congo. For then, I will truly have great content to communicate in French: the true message about Jesus Christ! I can’t wait to take along the cool new bible I picked up in France.