The call to medical missionary service demands a wholehearted consecration, and a willingness to go anywhere at any time the Great Physician may call. Here in the homeland we can see dozens of individuals all about us who need our help, and to whom we can minister and perhaps be a great blessing: but in most foreign fields where our missionaries go and spend their lives, there are hundreds and thousands who are in desperate need of help, and especially help to learn the gospel of health, as well as the gospel • of a crucified, risen, and soon-coming Saviour.
These may be brown, Or yellow, or black. Their hearts are heavy with the load of sin, and they have been kept in darkness by poverty, ignorance, and superstition; but they long for something better, just as many people here in the homeland do. They feel very grateful to the messenger who comes to them and brings the light of the message. I can think of many things that are more pleasant and easier to do than to go to some of these people, but I can think of nothing more satisfying than to see individual lives transformed by the light of the truth, and their health improved by the help of a medical missionary.
I have experienced the greatest joy and pleasure in working with young people who come to our schools of nursing to be trained as medical missionary nurses. These young people often come from an isolated place in their native land, and perhaps know little of the truth, but as they come to us and learn of the gospel of health and learn more perfectly of the message as a whole, their lives are transformed. As we work and study with them, it is a real inspiration to see them change and blossom out, as it were, into real missionary nurses.
As these nurses are graduated and go out into the field, perhaps into a little village in some dark place in their native land, there to hold up the light of truth and be the means of bringing many souls into the fold, it is certainly an inspiration and very satisfying to see the results of the work that we have been able to do for them. As I go out to see some of the work of these nurses who are in the field and actively engaged in missionary and nursing work, it makes me feel that I am well repaid for any heartaches or loneliness I may have felt when I left my homeland and loved ones, and went out to the far corners of the earth to work for those who need help.
I for one want to renew my consecration to medical missionary service, and I hope and pray that I will have the physical strength and courage to go anywhere that the Master calls in service. I hope that each of us will remember our missionaries who are daily laboring out in the hard places of the earth, and will do our utmost to uphold their hands by our prayers.
