Jesus was greatly supported by wonderful women in his earthly ministry, and I want to honour the passion of women today who give their all for Christ, pouring over his feet the fragrant perfume of their love and faithfulness. Among them is Lily Gaynor.
Hailing from Liverpool, Lily shared a life of joy and excitement among poor tribespeople in Africa. At constant risk of tropical disease, and plagued by rats and mosquitoes, she could have got married and enjoyed relative comfort in England.
But after inviting Jesus into her heart and training as a nurse and midwife, she heard the distinct call of God to work in Guinea-Bissau, a Portuguese colony in West Africa, though now independent following a lengthy civil war.
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And so, she set up her clinic under a mango tree amid the daunting challenge of tuberculosis, malaria and typhoid cases, along with severely malnourished children.
At the same time as treating hundreds of patients each day, she translated the New Testament into the Papel language – after first getting it down in written form.
The primitive villages where she lived and worked were unsanitary, with disease at times rampant, but “God’s Needle”1 – the wonders of penicillin – enabled many to recover and opened hearts to the Gospel which had brought them such kindness.
Of necessity, she even ventured into dentistry and veterinary work, joking that she and her colleague would have perhaps done better to fly home and marry a dentist and vet. But witchcraft and voodoo proved a much bigger, though not impossible, challenge, with one witchdoctor powerfully converted.
After 35 years of unstinting hard work, supported by faithful colleagues, many congregations of believers were built up. This was perfectly illustrated when, aged 89 and long retired, she was invited to a meeting of Guinea-Bissau Christians in London, and re-united with Bilopat (later re-named Antonio) who was miraculously healed of tetanus as a young boy.
Antonio explained that it was a celebration to thank God for sending the Gospel to Guinea-Bissau and to honour the missionaries who brought it. Aged seven, he was so sick that he wasn’t expected to live, and yet – apparently on his ‘deathbed’ – he insisted that he wanted to “enter Christ” and become a believer. Everything was done medically to help him, to no avail it seemed. But God raised him up and he became a fervent Christian leader.
When Lily told the story of his healing to the assembled Christians, as she records: “Antonio leapt onto the platform. We hugged and cried together and a great response of praise to God roared through the congregation.”
As for the Bible translation, it was of course a mammoth task and had to be checked and re-checked, but one embarrassing faux pas nearly got missed. On reading the typescript covering the passage where the Apostle Paul insists that a deacon should have only one wife (1 Timothy 3:12), she noticed that ‘only’ had been omitted, so she wrote ‘soo’ (Papel for only) in the margin in red ink for correction.
But when the “final” manuscript was presented to her, she found to her horror that “soo” had been translated as “500”, which of course would have suggested that deacons could have 500 wives! Just one aspect of the trials and tribulations of translation.
Among the many miracles witnessed was that of a heavily pregnant and haemorrhaging newly converted woman who walked 25 miles in the hot sun so she could attend “Christ’s house” rather than be seen by a witchdoctor. She was rushed to hospital along rickety roads and had to be dragged unconscious into the ward after collapsing.
Not surprisingly, then, Lily was thrilled to see her turn up at her clinic a few weeks later looking so well and sharing the story of her long walk. “I was so thirsty, but nobody gave me anything to drink. Then Jesus came to me… He put his hand on my head and said: ‘Don’t be afraid. I am with you.’ Then I fell asleep and when I woke up, I was in a proper bed and had a bottle of blood dripping into my arm.”
Lily’s expectation of the miraculous probably dates from her Bible College days when, feeling grossly inadequate after an unsuccessful door to door outreach, she afterwards suggested to her companion that perhaps they needed “this baptism of the Spirit that some people talk about”. So they retreated (after ‘lights out’) to an upstairs broom cupboard to seek the “rivers of living water” Jesus promised (John 7:38). And she never looked back.
For all her amazing energy and accomplishments, Lily was quite hard on herself, readily confessing many failings, which most of us will identify as being problems and inadequacies from which we also suffer.
In the appendix at the end of her book, she describes how she learnt the lesson of keeping the spiritual fire burning in our hearts. She was gathering wood for the fire with her African friends who pointed out that not all wood is good for fuel. Some types put the fire out, some just smoke and others would send sparks likely to set their straw roofs alight.
Not everything we watch or hear or read will keep our fire burning for Jesus. And I found that lesson hugely helpful. Fully aware of her flaws, however, Lily is a legend I wish I had met, bringing succour and the Saviour to my fellow Africans.
1Lily’s autobiography God’s Needle was written with John Butterworth and published by 10Publishing in 2023, though first published by Monarch Books in 2013.
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