Each new kindness shown her was an incentive to harder service. She
threw herself again into work with an extraordinary keenness.
Dissatisfied with what she was doing at Ikpe, she moved in all
directions in her "box on wheels," prospecting for new spheres of
usefulness, fording rivers, crossing swamps, climbing hills, pushing
through bush, traversing roads that were unsafe and where by the law
people had to go in couples, and often putting up at villages six or
ten miles distant. She saw crowds of people, and hundreds of women and
children in every street, but no light; not even a desire for it,
though here and there she found a disciple or two. She met with more
opposition from the chiefs than she had done in all her experience.
They would not hear of "God fashions," and would not permit teachers to
enter their districts or churches to be built; they forbade all
meetings for worship. She braced herself, body and mind, for the fight.
She spent days in palaver, but they would not give in. She insisted
that at least the right of the disciples to meet and worship in their
own homes must be recognised. When the chiefs saw her face, set with
iron resolution, they were afraid, wavered, and agreed. They then
became quite friendly. "We don't object to schools," they admitted. "We
want our children to learn to read and write, but we want no
interference with our fashions. If houses of God are built, we shall
all die, and we are dying fast enough."
"I shall never give you teachers without the Gospel," she declared. "If
you don't take the one, you won't have the other. But I'm going to
bring both. I shall put up a shed on the roadside, and hold services
there whenever I get a chance."
"All right, Ma," they said with something like admiration. "Come
yourself, but don't send boys."
And then she remembered. "How can this poor tabernacle do it, even with
six lads to push and pull and carry the cart through the streams? But I
have opened the way, and that is something."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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