We usually think of missionaries as
teachers, and we consider investigators the students. But sometimes the
opposite is true. Missionaries learn from the people they teach. That:
was
certainly true when young Matthew Cowley, seventeen years old, was
called to
his first mission.
When Matthew
received his call, he thought of it as a dream come true. He had been
called to
Think of going
on a mission at age seventeen--to a completely foreign culture and
thousands of
miles from home. Now think of staying on that mission for five years.
That's
what Matthew Cowley did. He arrived in
The natives
of
The first few
weeks of Elder Cowley's mission were hard. The language was confusing,
and
Elder Cowley was beginning to realize how much he lacked both in his
ability to
preach and in his knowledge of the gospel. He knew he had to follow the
example
of the Maoris and use faith to meet his challenges. He later described
his
learning techniques this way:
How I remember as a mere boy--I was alone for
three months without a companion, not understanding the native
language--how I
would go into the grove every morning at six 'clock and study for
eleven hours
and fast and pray. Finally, within
eleven or twelve weeks and all by myself with no missionary to
encourage me, I
had the audacity to stand up before a group of natives and preach the
gospel in
their own tongue. I was using words I had never read or heard, and
there was a
burning in my bosom the like of which I have never felt before nor
since in my
life...The power of God was speaking through me as a youngster,
seventeen years
of age.
From that day
on, he spoke to the Maoris only in their own language. And his skill
with the
language became well known. One of the reasons he remained in
Elder Cowley
learned that translation required more than
knowledge. In a letter to his sister, he explained how he did the work:
The work [of
translating) was extremely interesting and was comparatively easy when
I had
the spirit of it. At intervals, however, I would lose the spirit, and
this
would cause me to spend hours over one short verse. Sometimes I could
not work
at all.
When I
found myself in this predicament I would lock myself in my room, fast
and pray,
until I felt the urge to continue...Now when I read these books, I
marvel that
I was the one that was supposed to have done the translating. The
language
surpasses my own individual knowledge of it. This was the great
experience of
my life, and it will always remind me that God can and will accomplish
his
purposes through the human mind.
But how had
such a young man acquired this kind of faith. Perhaps it seemed only
natural
among the Maori people. One day shortly after arriving in the mission
field, a
woman ran to him and told him her son had fallen from a tree and was
badly
hurt. Elder Cowley followed her home, but when he saw the boy, very
seriously
injured, he told her she should call a doctor. “We don’t need a
doctor,” the
mother told him. “You fix him up.”
Elder Cowley
had never administered to anyone in his life. He was frightened by the
mother's
expectations of him. But he knelt down and anointed the boy with
consecrated
oil, and then sealed the anointing himself and blessed the child. The
next day,
the boy was not only well; he was climbing trees again.
This was only
the first of many miracles Elder Cowley was to see brought about by the
faith
of the Maori people. He wrote of dozens
of similar experiences and in the account one can see how the boy
missionary
was growing:
I was taken across the
bay, and walked through [a] village, and in every home there were cases
of
typhoid fever. I walked fearlessly, with
my head erect, impelled by the priesthood of God which I held, and in
each of
these homes I left the blessings of heaven, and I laid my hands on the
sick. And then I had to go across the
bay again and get on my horse and ride all night to arrive at another
native
village where there was sickness.
When Matthew
Cowley returned to
I was asked to
administer to a baby in
Well, I was
scared. I never had that faith.
The thing came to me just suddenly like out of the blue. But I went on
and
blessed the baby with a name. It was the longest blessing, I think, I
have ever
given. I was using all the words I could think of and had ever thought
of. I
was trying to get enough inspiration—enough nerve, if you want to call
it
that—to bless that child with its vision. I finally did.
Eight months
later I saw the child, and the
child saw me.
Elder
Cowley, after all his great
experiences in
[From
the book We’ll Bring the World His Truth]
For
further reading, see Henry A. Smith, Matthew
Cowley: Man of Faith (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1986); and Matthew
Cowley,
“Among the Polynesians,” Improvement Era,
November 1948, pp. 699, 756-58