From The Life and Letters of Tom Jackson, which take you on a journey to Africa beginning in 1941 and ending in the killing of Tom and his wife in June 1990.

The News and Observer “The Old Reliable” – Raleigh, NC – The Rev Thomas K. Jackson and his wife, June, surely knew the risks of living in Liberia, a West African country torn by a guerrilla war between rebels and the government. But missionaries do not flee from fear or bow to politics. Their mission – the one Mr. Jackson carried on for 50 years before he and his wife were killed – is to spread the gospel.

Tom Jackson: “One day I walked through the woods of Africa for many miles: perhaps 20 miles the first day and perhaps 15 miles the second day. God put it on my mind to go to a certain village to preach the gospel. But when I got there, there was nobody in the village of 75 huts, looked all around, didn’t even find a dog, nothing. I sat down in a little porch in one of those little mud houses and drank from my water bottle. As I sat and drank, I looked across the village and saw at the other side, a man coming straight to where I was. He reached out with his hand as Africans do, shook my hand and snapped my finger as they do in their handshake, and, then he said, “I know now what God meant last night when He told me to come to this village and that there would be somebody today to show me the way.” And so I sat in the heat of the African noon day and opened my Bible and told that young man of the grace of God. That men are sinners and Jesus is the sinners’ Savior and he died for sinners and rose from the dead and lives at the right hand of God ever to take up for us if we trust and believe in Him to forgive us our sins. The man bowed his head and trusted Jesus for His salvation, picked up his stick, his walking stick, and headed off down the road.

And I thought, Oh Lord, how amazing You are. Look what you’ve done in my life. As a young man you put me on a ship in England to go to Canada. Then the grace of God waiting for me there in a neighbor farmer who gave the gospel to me by which I was saved. Then you said all right go to Bible school, all right go to Africa. God sent me to the shores of Africa and then up into the interior and then learning the language and then somehow in the Sovereign workings of God, there’s a man over there in the village whom I had never seen nor had he ever seen me, but I had an appointment with that man and we met. One who had the water of salvation met the thirsty soul and he went on his way by the grace of God.”

As Tom Jackson would say, “Let the true church roll on.”

Compiled by Miriam Gautier, a member of Springs Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Dunnellon, Fla.