Finding the Lost

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By Jennifer Woodruff Tait

Recently, I happened to be going through back issues of Christian History Magazine when the title of one caught my eye: “The Paradox of David Livingstone: failed missionary, lost explorer, and one of the monumental figures of the 1800s.” (You can read it here).

Livingstone is probably best known in the popular imagination for getting lost, and for being found (near a lake in modern-day Tanzania) by British journalist Henry Morton Stanley, who possibly didn’t say “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” upon meeting the wandering explorer. After Stanley found him and went home, Livingstone actually got lost again.

Livingstone had originally set out to become a missionary, but he failed at that, at least by the usual standards of such things. As Mark Galli wrote of Livingstone in that issue, “He converted only one African his entire life, and that convert reverted to paganism. He established no hospitals, nor did he translate the Bible into a foreign tongue. Some missionary.” Yet he impacted many through his discoveries and his campaign to end slavery. His example even converted Stanley, who had set out to find him solely for the glory and the adventure (https://www.christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/accidental-missionary/)

I found all of this oddly comforting. We all have ideas about what the Christian life, and our Christian callings, should look like. We set out on grand adventures with well-thought-out plans and pre-conceived notions of what Christian vocation looks like. Sometimes our plans are used mightily. Sometimes our missions look like textbook examples. But sometimes they come crashing to the ground. We are lost.

In those moments, it is good to know that we have someone searching for us who specializes in helping, saving, and comforting the lost--and in transforming banged-up plans into surprising new places of grace. If there is any lesson Christian history teaches most frequently, perhaps it is that one.