One man is sharing his story about the miracles he’s encountered while serving in the mission field with the hope of inspiring others to get involved with missionary work.
During an episode of the podcast, Soul of the Wild with Josh Doyle, Danny MacKay talked about a mission trip he took during September in Botswana, Africa.
“We got to go into an area in western Botswana, right on the border Namibia to work amongst the Basarwa people who are kind of like indigenous people. They’ve been marginalized. They’ve had a lot of their land taken from them. Very remote, very difficult to get to and a crazy amount of them have never heard the Gospel before. There’s not a lot of ministries that don’t go to them.”
He continued, “We were just going to show up in these communities and just go love them, share with them, sit down with them, and let them know that we care about them.”
He talked about a number of unexpected things that happened at the beginning of the trip but God remained in control of the situation.
“Right out of the gate, our translator’s car broke down so they didn’t show up for the first day we were supposed to go out and make contact with the Basarwa. So we’re driving two hours down these crazy roads,” MacKay said. “We finally got to the first community called Kabul. We went to the chief of the whole village, not speaking his language at all.”
MacKay explained that their Boswanian host named Innocent started speaking to the chief, despite no previous experience with the language.
“So they get into this conversation for a half an hour and I like pull him aside and I’m like ‘Innocent, I thought you told us you don’t speak the language. And he’s like, ‘I don’t … I literally don’t. I don’t know how I understood it. It was just through the Holy Spirit, I understood his language and was able to speak it.’ We literally watched this supernatural thing. I’ve heard stories about it from other missionaries but I’ve never seen it.
“If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have believed it. But I mean, of course, God can do that and you read about it in the book of Acts. You read about those tongues that came down and all the sudden people are speaking in languages they didn’t know and people are hearing the Gospel in their own language.”
MacKay added, “We got to share with this chief. He gave us his full blessing to just go throughout the community and get to know people. If you just show up, God will do stuff … we weren’t expecting that. We didn’t even pray about that. We thought, well let’s just go anyway.”
Doyle humorously pointed out that when plans fall apart, it leaves so much room for God to show up and demonstrate His intentions.
“God has a completely different plan,” Doyle said. “It’s not a mission trip until the wheels fall off.”
MacKay noted that he is excited about the adventurous side of serving in mission work too.
“This is what I live and breathe and will die for is to serve Christ by making Him known amongst people that haven’t heard. Generally, on our planet, a lot of people that are unreached, that have never heard the Gospel, they’re in these really hard to get to, remote places.
“I get a thrill out of the adventure of what it takes to sometimes get to these places, whether it’s hours of boats, hiking, staying in tents, and being outdoors,” MacKay said. “That feeling of knowing like if we don’t do this, no one else will. I love the adventure part as much as I love the mission part because they’re both how I want to live my life.”
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