Guest Column: Are the heart-breaks of life random unlucky events?

In 1908, pioneer missionary Victor Plymire and his wife were sent by a mission society in Pennsylvania to bring the Gospel to Tibet. A young married couple, Victor and Grace abandoned themselves to God to be used as He willed. God accepted their surrender and implemented this stage of His plan for their lives.

After a long arduous journey through China, they ended up in a remote area of Tibet, alone. Leaving Grace in a small village for days and weeks at a time, Victor walked up and down the steep mountains and valleys through summer heat and winter blizzards, spreading the good news of Christ’s gift of salvation from the wrath to come for those sinners who would repent. Food was scarce, many days he lived on yak butter tea.

Victor labored for 16 years before even one soul came to Christ. In his 19th year of missionary labors in Tibet, his wife Grace and his only child, six-year-old John, died of small pox. Both perished in the same cold winter week.

The local village cemetery refused Victor permission to bury his family, so he purchased a small plot of ground, about an acre, on a Tibetan hillside overlooking a valley outside of town. It was the middle of winter in that bitter cold part of the world. He was all alone and only had enough strength to dig one grave in the frozen ground for the two precious bodies. Was this to be his reward for 19 years of faithful service?

Heavy with grief, Victor returned to Pennsylvania, married again, and returned to Tibet to live and work until the communist take-over, at which time he was expelled.

Victor died in 1963, never succeeding in planting a permanent church in Tibet and never knowing God’s purpose in the deaths of his wife and son, having given his life to win to the Lord a handful of precious believers.

Did he ever feel like a failure? I don’t know. I imagine he must have had many discouraging years wondering why God had brought him to such a hard field. In God’s economy, his whole life had been poured out in exchange for so little, so few.

Thirty-six years after Victor Plymire’s death, and 65 years after he had knelt beside the frozen grave of Grace and John, a small group of Christians in the area of Tibet where Victor had lived were asking the local Communist officials for permission to gather for Christian services. Permission was denied unless they could prove the existence of their religious group before the Communist revolution.

Tracking down Victor Plymire’s English nephew in search of some documentation, they received back by return mail the deed to the cemetery plot of Grace and John. The land had been deeded, not to Victor, but to the few believers he had gathered around him at that time. The land was deeded in the name of the little church group, such as it was, in 1927.

The local officials accepted the 65-year-old document as proof for the previous existence of a Christian group and gave them permission for a church, a group who could legally meet and not be arrested. They were allowed to build a church on that land and today it is a thriving, growing lighthouse for God in the middle of great darkness and spiritual oppression. Many have come to know the Prince of Peace there.

Art and I are still crying over a death in our family this past June. It hit pretty hard and we wish God had healed him. God has his reasons and we know he is in control of all things. We choose to believe the Bible when it says, “No purpose of God’s can be thwarted.” What is the purpose of my suffering? I may never know. But I trust Him.