We were meditating yesterday on “So Send I You,” often called “the greatest missionary hymn of the 20th century.” I grew up with it. Today, the rest of the story: here’s what author Margaret Clarkson said about it:

In 1935 teaching jobs were so scarce that I had to take my first job as a teacher in a lumber camp some 1400 miles from home, out in the Rainy River District of northwestern Ontario. From there I moved to the gold mining camp of Kirkland Lake, 450 miles north of Toronto. In all, I spent seven years in the north. I experienced loneliness of every kind; mental, cultural, but particularly spiritual, for in all of those seven yeaars I never found real Christian fellowship – churches were modern [not Bible-believing] and born-again Christians almost non-existent.

I was studying the Word one night and meditating on the loneliness of my situation and came in my reading to John 20, and the words ‘So send I you’. Because of a physical disability I knew that I could never go to the mission field, but God seemed to tell me that night that this was my mission field, and this was where He had sent me. I was then twenty-hree, in my third year of teaching. – Margaret Clarkson

“This was my mission field, and this was where He had sent me.” Where? To a mining camp in the middle of nowhere Canada. Doing what? Teaching school! The greatest missionary hymn of the 20th century was written by a schoolteacher. The hymn certainly applies to out-in-the-bush missionaries like Elisabeth Elliot, but it applies to the rest of us too. Wherever we are, working at whatever we’re doing, God wants us to feel “on mission” and Join the Adventure!

Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” (Matthew 9.37-38)