God’s message will find its way to its intended destination, one way or another
Alexander MacKay was a Scottish missionary pioneer to Uganda. How did he learn of God’s call to become a missionary?
His story starts with the story of another missionary, David Livingstone, the Englishman who traveled into the heart of Africa as an evangelist in the mid 1800s. After a number of years, a British newspaper sent reporter Henry Stanley to find Livingstone. When Stanley came upon Livingstone, he uttered those famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley was so moved by his time with Livingstone that he himself later became a missionary, and he went to the heart of Africa, to Uganda.
In April of 1875, Henry Stanley wrote a letter appealing for workers to come and evangelize the region with him. He gave the letter to a French colonel who then left by caravan for the coast. But the Frenchman was suddenly attacked by a savage tribe. He was killed and his body was left unburied on the sand where it was discovered by some English soldiers who happened to be passing that way. The soldiers buried the French Colonel, but before doing so they pulled off his boots. In one of them was Stanley’s letter, stained with the dead man’s blood.
They sent the letter to an English General in Egypt who sent it to a newspaper in London. Six months later, in December of that year, Alexander MacKay read Stanley’s letter in the London newspaper. Through that letter, God spoke to MacKay and called him to be a missionary to Uganda.