Single-Mindedness: Helen Roseveare

Helen Roseveare (1925-2016) was one of the great missionary spokespersons of the 20th century. Roseveare served as a medical missionary in Zaire, surviving a violent civil war there, where she was brutally raped in 1964. In her moment of utter darkness, she prayed to God, and she sensed the Lord telling her, “You asked Me, when you were first converted, for the privilege of being a missionary. This is it. Don’t you want it? . . . These are not your sufferings. They’re Mine. All I ask of you is the loan of your body.”

I had the privilege of hearing Helen Roseveare speak at the Urbana ’87 missionary conference. Her single-minded devotion to the Lord sustained her in extended periods of loneliness, in her near 20-years ministering in Zaire.

She never married.

Justin Taylor, at the Gospel Coalition, posted a remembrance of her life. She died today.