GOD’S NEEDLE:
Healing and Hope in the Land of the
Witchdoctors
By Lily Gaynor and John Butterworth
10 Publishing. 225 pages. £8
ISBN 978 1 914 966 286
If you haven’t picked your summer biography yet, this could be it. Helen Roseveare, Lily’s peer and one for whom this story resonated, wrote in the Foreword: ‘I couldn’t put it down’!
Lily Gaynor, despite failing her 11+, became a highly qualified nurse, midwife, and linguist. She worked for 35 years as a missionary amongst the unreached Papel tribe in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa with WEC International.
Leaving Liverpool in 1957, Lily was tasked with translating the New Testament into a language not previously written down. The overwhelming medical and maternity needs of the isolated tribe led to Lily juggling nursing and midwifery alongside the slow work of Bible translation. The struggle is tangible.
‘God’s needle’ is penicillin. It brought life in otherwise deadly situations. Administered alongside the offer of true life found only in Jesus – the result was remarkable.
Raw and honest
This reads like a journal. Raw and honest as it describes the most challenging of moments with a northern lass ‘matter-of-fact’-ness. No words are wasted. The succinct yet graphic accounts of African village life, dosed with malaria, witchdoctors and superstition, are riveting. One moment I was laughing, the next in tears. Threaded through her story Lily opens a poignant window into the spiritual struggle of a weak, vulnerable believer on whom so much hangs! Lily’s repeated refrain is ‘I have no rights’, which she embraces with Jesus-like humility. This truly is the story of how God used little Lily to germinate and grow a church in a hard place.
Unlike some biographies which leave, in Lily’s shorthand, the ‘idle rich’ feeling uncomfortable with middle-class guilt, this instead magnifies the miraculous power and provision of our great God in situations that are humanly beyond even the most faithful believer. There is nothing the Lord cannot do. He takes centre stage – and that makes this little episode in God’s big story a worthy read.
