So it won't be too late

It was a Sunday morning when missionary Matt Musser glimpsed his friend, Metinas, running toward him.

“An nemberak u ngok worak,” Metinas told Matt breathlessly. Across the valley in a distant village, he said, his grandfather was gravely ill. Metinas begged Matt to go with him to see if there was anything he could do for the old man.

“I grabbed my pack and we took off for the village across the valley,” says Matt. “We knew that Jakob had been to town a couple of months back trying to find out why he had been so sick. The doctors in town had no answers and he had been sent back to his home village to quietly pass from this life surrounded by his family and friends.”

Matt already knew there was nothing he could actually do for the dying man. “I knew that there were no meds that would help and with each step, although my head was telling my legs to move forward, my heart was telling them to run as fast as they could in the opposite direction,” Matt says sadly.

After hiking for two hours, Matt and Metinas finally reached Jakob.

“Things didn’t look good,” Matt says. “A crowd had gathered outside his hut. I set my bag down and slowly crawled up next to him through a small opening into the dark smoke-filled hut. He looked up at me, waiting for me to say something.”

But the right words were not there yet, Matt explains. The language barrier was still too great. After three years of diligently studying the Kora language, Matt felt able to communicate in the complex language only in a very limited way. He knew his language skills were not nearly enough to clearly communicate spiritual truth.   

“It would have been hard enough for me to know what to say to him in English, let alone in this excruciatingly difficult Kora language,” Matt explains.

So Matt sat quietly with Jakob, his hand on his shoulder. And a few simple words came to him.

“Nindio. Nait Nait. Nindio. Nindio.” “Oh, my heart. My Father, my Father. My heart. It’s so heavy. My heart …”

“I longed desperately for the words that would open up the door of Heaven to him. I longed desperately for words to share all his Creator had done for him … where he stood before a holy God and what that holy God had done to reconcile him,” Matt shares.

He thought of John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” Matt knew that Jesus was what Jakob needed so desperately.

“No one had ever come to tell Jakob that there was a Savior. … And now it was too late,” Matt grieves.

Matt could only sit there and pray that somehow, in some miraculous way that he knew nothing about, Jakob had heard the news of Christ, maybe somewhere in town when he was seeing the doctors. He prayed “that somehow the Good News of Christ had broken through the darkness and reached into his heart and life.”

Romans 10:14 hit Matt “like a ton of bricks”: How then, will they call on Him in Whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of Whom they have not heard?

Ten days later as he stood and gazed across the valley from the Mussers’ back porch, he saw the wisp of smoke beginning to rise.

“I knew it could only mean one thing,” Matt explains. “Jakob had died.”

“It tears my heart out to know that maybe in a year’s time, the Light of the gospel will enter this valley and had Jakob still been with us, he would have had a chance to hear,” Matt shares.

It’s hard for Matt and his wife, Emily, to be so intensely at work building relationships and growing to love people so much; it’s hard to be diligently at work learning a difficult language and then to feel the depths of loss at those who die before the gospel could be clearly shared.

“Yet, I know God is sovereign,” Matt affirms. “I’m confident that He is eternally gracious. … I believe God has said, Someone must go. Someone must tell them.”

“This is why Emily and I are here,” Matt writes. “People often tell us that it must be hard to sacrifice so much to be here. Well, life is hard here. We do miss our family. We do miss holidays with them.”

“But this,” Matt adds, “is the greatest privilege in the entire world. We wouldn’t trade it for anything!”

Countless others, like Jakob, are desperately in need of a clear presentation of the Good News about Jesus in their own heart language. Is God tapping you on the shoulder? Here are opportunities for you.