David Livingstone spent his childhood working 14 hours a day in a cotton mill. He trained to be a medical missionary to China, but the Opium War shut that door. Then he heard Robert Moffat describe “the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before,” and he went to Africa. Things were hard. His only convert in those early years went back to his old ways. Livingstone was not an easy man, and he fought with many fellow workers. Still, he kept pressing into the interior to open what he called God’s Highway. Years later, worn out and lost in swamps, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer. He ended his race the way he ran it.
