She wore a withered yellow daisy in one ear as an earring. Her lips sagged into the spot where her front teeth should have been. Her eyes darted nervously, but the confidence of her younger companion assured her, so she spoke boldly, almost rudely. “I am here to get sweet medicine for my child’s cough.” The toothless mother pointed to the wisp of a child suspended in a colorful cloth sling across her shoulder.

“After I finish class, I‘ll eat a quick lunch, and then I’ll see your baby,” I replied, trying not to sound irritated that my plans for the afternoon were once again interrupted by patients. I would need to find another time to plan for the next week of class.

I felt sorry for the mother and her companion and decided to see them before eating lunch. It’s difficult to enjoy lunch anyway when you know someone is waiting to get home before afternoon rain clouds drench the steep, slippery trails. “Come on down to my house, and I’ll take a look at the baby,” I said, leading the way to my tent under the huge mango trees a few steps from the school.

The younger companion had come with her husband a month or two ago to get medicine. She had been so shy she could hardly speak to me or even look at me. But today she acted as if I were an old friend. “My child’s cough went away thanks to that medicine he gave me last time,” she remarked to her friend.

I took a good look at the scrawny, malnourished one-year-old. I gave his mother some medicine and explained to her that she should bring the child regularly, and I would weigh him and give him vitamins.

By that time, the mother had cast off the last vestiges of shyness and began telling me about her children. Then she paused, and when she continued, her voice had changed. “And then there is Runilin,” she said. Her body tensed, her head bowed, and she looked away as she continued in tight, pinched syllables. “She was old enough to run. But not now . . . If I had only known! You don’t have that kind of medicine, do you? Oh, I feel so horrible.” The mother sighed in deep grief.

“Aunty, I don’t understand. What are you trying to tell me?” I prompted.

Her face twisted in pain as she gestured across the valley. “She is buried over there in our garden. Her grave is still fresh.” Clenching her teeth, she groaned. “Oh, if I had only known that you had medicine, she might have lived. You were here all along . . . if only I had known.”

Her pain pressed into me and I stood silently listening. I thought of the thousands of other people who have never known. The thousands in the next valley, and the next, and the next. The thousands throughout the world whose faces would twist in anguish when they realized there was something that could have been done to avert the suffering and death of their loved ones.

But no one has told them yet, so the suffering continues. No one has told them of freedom from disease, of freedom from bondage to Satan. No one has stepped out of their comfort zone to fight for them. So men, women, babies and children just old enough to run continue to die without hope. I am not speaking only of people on the fringes of the frontier. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of the world has little to no understanding of the plan of salvation.

What work could be more important than caring for people who are forgotten? What could be more cutting edge than devising plans to bring hope to people who have never had it? Let the pain of the greater part of this world press heavily on you and stop to think. Of what value is your career, your plans, your very life in contrast to this huge need? As Eric B. Hare urges in Fullness of Joy, “Go, therefore, lose your lives in the furrow of the world’s great need, for ‘except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ John 12:24.” I urge you: choose today to live your life and even to die to make an eternal difference to others. Lose your life to bring hope to people who have never had hope before. And find it again as faces twisted in grief melt into smiles of assurance of God’s love and the hope of eternal life.

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