Years passed.  The Hursts enjoyed a fruitful ministry.  Aggie gave birth first to a daughter, then a son.  In time her husband became president of a Christian college in the Seattle area, and Aggie was intrigued to find so much Scandinavian heritage there.

One day around 1963, a Swedish religious magazine appeared in her mailbox.  She had no idea who sent it, and of course she couldn’t read the words.  But as she turned the pages, all of a sudden a photo stopped her cold.  There in a primitive setting in the heart of Africa was a grave with a white cross and on the cross was her mother’s name, SVEA FLOOD.

Aggie jumped in her car and drove straight to a college faculty member who, she knew, could translate the article.  “What does this say?” she asked.  The instructor translated the story: It tells about missionaries who went to N’dolera in the heart of the Belgian Congo in 1921 . . . the birth of a white baby girl . . . the death of the young missionary mother . . . the one little African boy who had been led to Christ . . . and how, after the all whites had left, the little African boy grew up and persuaded the chief to let him build a school in the village.  The article told how that gradually the now grown up boy won all his students to Christ . . . the children led their parents to Christ . . . even the chief had become a Christian.  Today (1963) there were six hundred Christian believers in that one village.

Because of the willingness of David and Svea Flood to answer God’s call to Africa, because they endured so much but were still faithful to witness and lead one little boy to trust Jesus, God had saved six hundred people.  And the little boy, as a grown man, became head of the Pentacostal Church and leader of 110,000 Christians in Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo).

At the time Svea Flood died, it appeared, to human reason, that God had led the young couple to Africa, only to desert them in their time of deepest need.  It would be forty years before God’s amazing grace and His real plan for the village of N’dolera would be known.

For Rev. Dewey and Aggie Hurst’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the college presented them with the gift of a vacation to Sweden.  There Aggie met her biological father.  An old man now, David Flood had remarried, fathered four more children, and generally dissipated his life with alcohol.  He had recently suffered a stroke.  Still bitter, he had one rule in his family: “Never mention the name of God because God took everything from me.”

After an emotional reunion with her half brothers and half sister, Aggie brought up the subject of seeing her father.  The others hesitated.  “You can talk to him,” they replied, “even though he’s very ill now.  But you need to know that whenever he hears the name of God, he flies into a rage.”  Aggie could not be deterred

She walked into the squalid apartment, with liquor bottles everywhere, and approached the seventy-three-year-old man lying in a rumpled bed.

To be continued . . .