I’m Dave Thompson. Since 1977, I, with my wife Becki, have served as missionaries at the Bongolo Hospital in Gabon, central Africa.  My parents were Ed & Ruth Thompson, and their violent death at the hands of Communist forces in Banmethuot, Vietnam in February 1968 changed the direction of my life.  That day was the most terrible day in my memory.  But it was also the best.  Had it not happened, the Bongolo Hospital as it stands today would probably not be here and all the wonderful things that God has done here over the past 32 years might not have occurred. 

Here, very briefly, is the story of how their martyrdom changed the course of my life.

If on that day in 1968 I had not decided to trust God completely with my life, my family, my future, my career, and my ambitions, I would never have gone to Africa. My dream as a young man was to return to Cambodia, where I grew up, and serve there as a medical missionary.  But after I completed my medical training God led me instead to central Africa, to a people I did not know or even care about.  On the day my parents died, I was so convinced that I already knew God’s will for the rest of my life that I would most certainly have returned to Cambodia or Asia and missed what God had in store for me here.

When God called me to go to Africa it was like asking me to jump off a cliff in the fog without a parachute.  What if God didn’t take care of me?  What if my children died? What if I failed?  I had heard that people who went off to serve as missionaries in Africa came back weird!

Several of my professors told me I was crazy to throw away a promising career in surgery.  In the years that followed there were times when I thought they were right.  But God always helped me and showed me what to do.  Then one day he opened an opportunity for me to impact Africa in a way I never dreamed possible.  By this time I had learned that if God asked me to do something impossible, if I trusted Him and obeyed, he could make it happen.  The dream he gave me was to train and disciple 100 Christian African surgeons and multiply what I was doing more than a hundred fold.

God turned that dream into a reality when other surgeons joined me to create the Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons.  Today we are training 30 surgeons at seven hospitals in Africa and one in Bangladesh, and have graduated nine African surgeons.  They are serving at Christian hospitals in Madagascar, Angola, the Republic of Congo, the DRC, Cameroon, and Kenya!   Our goal is to train and disciple 100 African surgeons by 2020.

Over the past 10 years, many, many of the patients who have come to Bongolo Hospital have found Christ.  Teams from our hospital have planted five churches among three different tribal groups.  Two graduates from our nursing school are serving as medical missionaries from Gabon to Hope Clinic in Guinea, West Africa.

What if my parents had not died violently in the highlands of South Vietnam at the hands of Communist soldiers?  What difference would that have made?  I can think of two things: 

First, I would not have made the radical commitment to trust God with my life, my career, my children, my safety—everything I had and loved—until much later in my life.  I would have missed the best that God had in store for me.

Second, the Alliance church in Vietnam would probably not have grown to more than 1 million strong.  Tertullian, the great early Christian theologian who died 220 years after the resurrection of Christ wrote, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.”  

Much good has already come out of this tragedy, but I do not believe that God is finished with this incident yet.  He says in Psalm 116:15 that he “cares deeply when his loved ones die.”  That we are still talking about this martyrdom testifies that God is still sowing the seeds of the death of the Banmethuot martyrs throughout the world.  I can say without hesitation that today he is calling some of you to trust him unreservedly, just as he called me.  It is God who is not willing that any should perish, so this very day he is calling some of  you to show mercy to the poor and enslaved peoples of the world and to take the news of Christ to them!

Let me close with the words of Jesus that were inscribed on their gravestones, taken from John 12:24-26:  “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives. Those who love their life in this world will lose it. Those who care nothing for their life in this world will keep it for eternity. Anyone who wants to be my disciple must follow me, because my servants must be where I am. And the Father will honor anyone who serves me.”

I died too, that day in February, 1968.  And I thank God that I did!  What if you died to yourself today and gave your life and your future entirely to God?  If God could use me, imagine what He can do through your life!

Dr. David C. Thompson is a surgeon at Bongolo Mission Hospital in Gabon, West Africa.