Lift Up Lesotho: How Decades of Missouri Prayers are Still Being Answered
If you would have told me I would end up on a short-term mission trip to Lesotho with about six weeks advance notice, I would have thought you were joking. If you had told me I would be going because thousands of women in Missouri had been praying my way there for more than 30 years, I wouldn’t have believed it for a minute.
Yet that is exactly what happened.
Lesotho, Africa is a tiny country landlocked within South Africa filled with mountains, valleys, and, within these valleys, villages of people who do not know the love of Jesus Christ. Ridgecrest Baptist Church has adopted one of these valleys - the Makhoaba Valley - and committed to plant churches led by local Basotho pastors in every village in this valley.
Through several short-term mission trips, teams were working diligently to this end, until the COVID-19 pandemic banned travel to Lesotho for nearly two years. Then, in spring 2022, the field opened up again, and Ridgecrest sent a team. This was the team I had the joy to serve with on my first trip to Africa.
With the help of local missionaries Stan and Angie Burleson, and our translators Raney and Lucy, we traveled to the Makhoaba Valley to teach about Jesus, pass out Bibles, and learn as much as we could about our adopted valley in the two years which had passed without us traveling there. The work was slow and the hikes were long, but God was tremendously faithful as He kept placing us exactly where we needed to be and when we needed to be there.
But it wasn’t until after the trip that I began to realize the bigger story of which our team was a part. Soon after returning home, I read Until the Stars Appear by Randy Sprinkle, one of the first missionaries to Lesotho in the 1980s. In this book, Randy told the story of how God used the Missouri Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU) to pray over his ministry through their PrayerWays newsletter and a prayer initiative called Lift Up Lesotho.
As it turns out, over 30 years later, the WMU is still praying for Lesotho, and the PrayerWays newsletter is still in existence.
And that’s where things get really unbelievable.
Six months before our trip to Lesotho, on November 13, three of our team members were traveling back from a missions conference and talking about the needs in Lesotho and how much they longed to return someday. One of them wrote in his journal that night that he was going to start praying for open doors in Lesotho.
The next morning, November 14, I met up with another of our team members to begin praying regularly together. We didn’t know what exactly we were supposed to pray for, but our answer was yes to whatever it was to which God might be calling us.
Fast forward to after our trip to Lesotho. Learning about Randy Sprinkle’s story and the WMU, I looked up the PrayerWays newsletter to see if it was still active. Once I discovered it was, I started looking over the past few issues to see if Lesotho was still being prayed for. What I discovered shocked me.
This was the prayer need on November 14, 2021:
Give thanks that Covid numbers have decreased quite a bit in Lesotho during the last few weeks, causing the Prime Minister to open the borders again. The open borders have paved the way for the Burlesons to return to Lesotho. Please be in prayer for them and their travels.
Do you see how unbelievable this is? Half our team was yearning to go to Lesotho, then two of us gathered to pray for wherever the Lord may be calling us to. Unbeknownst to any of us, that very morning, faithful believers all over Missouri were rejoicing that Lesotho’s borders were open again and praying for safe travel there.
We had no idea at the time, and our team hadn’t even been formed yet, but we were each joining thousands of believers in over three decades of prayer for the Gospel to spread to Lesotho.
And we don’t want the work to end there. In response, we’ve committed to continuing the work Randy Sprinkle began - not just in a valley in Lesotho, but right here in Missouri as well. By God’s providence, we’ve started the Lift Up Lesotho prayer network again with a modern twist: everyone who signs up receives a text message every morning featuring a different prayer need for the work in Lesotho.
A text a day may not seem like much when it comes to bringing the light of Christ’s salvation to the villagers of the Makhoaba Valley. But I believe the prayers behind the texts are interceding for light to pierce the darkness and pave the way for the Spirit to move in mighty ways.
I traveled to Lesotho, Africa on the prayers of Missouri believers, and now I have the joy and privilege to join that same group of believers praying for God’s Kingdom to come to Lesotho. I had no idea so many people were praying for me to go to Lesotho, and they had no idea they were praying for me specifically, yet God united us all in His will.
Which makes me wonder - have we already begun praying for you to be a part of the story God is writing in Lesotho?
To join the Lift Up Lesotho prayer network and receive a prayer need at 7am every day, text @lesotho to 81010.