Scotland of the 1840’s was as barren as the nursery rhyme cupboard of Old Mother Hubbard. The decade was known as the “Hungry Forties” as crops failed and migrant workers were driven to the overcrowded, desolate cities. In 1848, Mary Mitchell Slessor was born to an alcoholic shoemaker whose wife was a weaver as well as the eventual mother of seven children. When drink finally overcame Robert, the scant wages of his wife drove the family to Dundee, where young Mary grew up. At the age of seven, she was forced to work in the mill part-time. This meant schooling had to fit in with the work schedule. Home was a tiny, one-room flat with no water, lighting, or sanitation facilities.
It was a tough world for this redheaded, street-wise young woman. She finally dropped out of school to work in the mill, but the girl who knew how to use her knuckles with the local rowdies had a tender heart. When a missionary from the Calabar in Nigeria spoke in their local church, Mary’s heart was inflamed. Everything, though, was against her becoming a missionary—everything and everybody but God. Nonetheless, God was able to use all of these circumstances in a mighty way to her advantage.
Many years later, Mary Slessor, who became known as Mary, Queen of the Calabar, wrote in her diary, “God plus one are always a majority—let me know Thou art with me.” Mary Slessor—the fighting Scot from the slums of Dundee—went to an Africa that was still reeling from the horrors of the slave trade. It was diseased by such pagan customs as killing all twins because the natives were convinced that one had been fathered by the devil. Since they were uncertain as to which twin was so fathered, they immediately killed both.
The Africa to which Mary went was competing for the white man’s money, weapons, and booze. The impact of Mary Slessor, who sacrificed pleasure, health, and almost her very life, is so beautifully described in a book written by James Buchan entitled, The Expendable Mary Slessor, which I highly recommend.
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11
Buchan describes Mary’s accomplishments: “She never opposed the African ways except where they degraded the Africans themselves. She had learned from St. Paul ‑ ‘Paul, laddie,’ she called him—that her Lord loved these people enough to give His life for them, but loving them never meant acquiescing to the base aspects of pagan culture. She threatened and begged to save lives; she adopted dozens of African babies that were left to die in the bush. She fought for the right of African women to be free from death at the whim of a man. For nearly forty years—until her death in 1915—she lived as an African, often in a village hut. When she died, thousands of Africans wept for the Eka Kpukpro Owo ‑ “Mother of all the peoples.”
Buchan confirms a story I heard long ago. After many years in Africa, Mary returned to her native Scotland, a stooping, gray-haired woman so wrinkled that her friends failed to recognize her. Recuperating at a friend’s home, her hosts, the McCrindles, often heard her talking in her room. They thought the isolation and privation had actually affected her sanity, but upon listening to her conversation, they soon discovered that she was chatting with her heavenly Father—a habit Mary cultivated by keeping in constant touch with Him.
If it is true that “when the going gets tough, the tough gets going,” then certainly that was true of the Scot whom I consider to be among the great Christian leaders of the last century—Mary Slessor, Queen of the Calabar.
Resource reading: Jeremiah 29:4-14
Featured image of Mary Slessor and her “family” by an unknown author – http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll123/id/64415, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30916331
