“The Law of the Lord,” taken from Psalm 19, is one of our family’s favorite evening worship songs. Its slow, melodic cadence is wonderful for calming our active four- and six-year-old kids and putting them in a bedtime frame of mind.

Recently, as I was reflecting on the chorus of the song: “More to be desired are they than gold, Yea, than much fine gold . . .” I began to think about gold. Wherever you go in this world, people value gold. When the stock market starts to wobble, what is seen as a good investment? What fever drew thousands of Americans in the 1800’s to leave their east-coast lives and rush west? What is stored in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that undergirds the financial stability of many nations? The answer to all of these, of course, is gold. And when it comes to valuing gold, Mali is no different than anywhere else in the world.

Here in Kangaba and the surrounding villages, gold prospecting is a major source of employment. Along the Niger River close to town, a number of gold dredges are at work, some of them financed and run by Chinese owners, and many run by Malians. The dredging activity on the river is so intense that no one is able to fish in the river there anymore because all of the fish are gone. On land, there are many well-known areas where people congregate and spend months at a time looking for gold. Their methods include digging holes in the ground and panning out the dirt, or digging narrow shafts down into the ground and then digging horizontally when they find a promising type of soil. This is of course very dangerous, and many people are hurt or killed in accidents. Thousands of people work in these mining areas—even coming from Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Cote d’Ivoire—all united by gold fever.

Recently, a new prospecting method has become popular. Rumors have been spreading about the wonders of metal detectors. It is said that someone with a metal detector can find pounds of gold in a very short time. Imagine what that possibility must seem like to poverty-stricken Malians. People believe these rumors and desire to have one of these magic metal detectors.

The kids and I were alone at home one day while Neil was visiting a village. While preparing our lunch, I heard motorcycles stopping some distance from our house. Our dogs started barking so I knew it wasn’t someone we knew. I went outside and saw four men, one carrying a plastic bag of disassembled parts and another carrying a large white booklet. Stopping a safe distance from our growling dogs, they explained that they had a metal detector they wanted to put together, but the manual was in English, and none of them could read it. I sympathized with their plight but explained that Neil was away. I offered that they could come back later when he was there to help them. I never saw them again, and later I told Neil that he had missed a chance to assemble a metal detector. But I was wrong about that.

Several weeks ago, Neil’s friend Ali came to see him in a state of high excitement. With him was a large carton concealed in a blue plastic bag—a metal detector! Ali’s brother had bought it for about $700 and wanted Ali to use it to find gold. Once again, the manual was in English, so Neil got his chance after all. He painstakingly assembled it for Ali and then they went outside to try it out. Ali was grinning from ear to ear, like he expected to find lumps of gold littering our courtyard. When they returned with only a few pieces of non-gold metal Ali was very disappointed. He thought the metal detector must be defective. Neil tried to explain to him about soil composition and how the machine worked, but Ali looked dubious. He asked if he could store the detector at our house, fearing it would be stolen at his. Over the next several days, Ali took the detector out several times with a group of his friends, always expecting to come back with gold, but returning each time empty handed. Then he took a job in the gold business, running a rock-crushing machine in another town, and he left the metal detector at our house. Here it still sits, a symbol of disappointed hopes.

Is the human desire to find gold a bad thing? No, of course not. Many people all around us add to their small incomes by searching for gold. After several days of panning, a woman might find enough grains of gold to earn four or five dollars, a significant addition to her family’s finances. However, the desire for gold shouldn’t supersede all other desires. Let us return to the song, “The Law of the Lord.” The psalmist prefaces the chorus by mentioning the primary desire that should be more desired than gold. The Lord and His law, His statutes, His commandments, respecting Him above all else, honoring His judgments. In my own life, I want to honor the Lord above all else. We want the people who live around us to come to know our God so they can honor Him above all else, too. Please continue to pray for us and for the people here. We want them to desire truths that are more precious than gold.

• Twitter