Unaware of the Countdown

Dannah Gresh: It’s known as deputation. For over two years, Charles and Stephanie Wesco traveled from church to church sharing their vision to join God’s work as missionaries to Africa and inviting others to join their support team. Charles often preached.

Recording of Charles Wesco: Serving Christ always comes with a cost, and yet, in America, we’re like the rich, young ruler sometimes. “I’ve been here/done this.” We want to figure out some way to make a side hobby out of Christianity. We want to figure out a way without the cost, without losing any of earth’s treasures, to still have a comfortable life and still lay up treasure in heaven. How foolish! How utterly foolish that is!

Dannah: And Stephanie kept the family going. They lived in a motor home along with their eight children. She wrote this in her journal looking back on that time.

Stephanie Wesco: Those were days of great anticipation and excitement as we looked forward even then to getting to Cameroon to begin what we hoped and thought would be serving the Lord there for the rest of our lives.

(Recording) Charles: We can have so many things . . . It can be family, it can be business, it can be ministry, it can be church that our young people aren’t willing to stretch out their necks and go out into the world and preach the gospel to every creature across the world.

We need to realize that serving Christ always comes with a cost.

Stephanie: Those twelve days the Lord gave us in Cameroon will always be treasured memories. We absolutely loved being there. God gave us the desire of our hearts being with the people we loved so much.

Though I will never understand the “whys,” I know my Savior does all things well. How I pray that multitudes Charles maybe never could have reached in life with the gospel will be reached through his death and come to know the God my husband loved with all his heart.

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, co-author of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, for June 30, 2020. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy is continuing in a conversation she had about a year ago with Stephanie Wesco. If you missed part one, you can listen to the podcast from yesterday or find it at our website, ReviveOurHearts.com.

If you have a little one nearby, you should be aware that today’s program will mention the sudden death of Stephanie’s husband Charles. You can decide if your little one’s ears can handle it. Here’s Nancy.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Stephanie, you shared with us yesterday that your family had this two-and-a-half-year experience, adventure with some real hard things along the way of raising financial support, deputation, traveling in different states, different parts of the country sharing with people what God had called you to. You saw God provide through people who shared that burden.

Stephanie: Yes. The Lord was so good. We made what we called “Our Mission’s Family.” That’s what God gave us through those years. We developed friendships that now mean even more to me than they even did then.

Charles just loved meeting new pastors, seeing new ministries, being involved in prison ministries or radio ministries sponsored by the churches, just whatever the pastor was involved in. God gives different pastors different burdens. He just loved coming alongside wherever we were, if he could help, getting involved. That’s just how he was.

He tuned pianos—tons of pianos—on deputation. Pretty much every church we went into, their pianos got tuned. He just did it to be a blessing. It was a ministry. I loved it because I always knew I had a good, nice, newly tuned piano to play on. So that always made me happy, too.

Nancy: And people committed to support your family and churches did. So you saw that?

Stephanie: Yes. Mainly churches. We had some individuals, but the majority of our support came from churches. We watched it climb. We’d have spells where it would climb by leaps and bounds and then dead spells. But God was always so faithful to give us encouragement along the way.

You have your experiences of some churches where the offering wasn’t quite as big, and I really struggled sometimes with being like, “Oh no. That’s barely going to cover gas.” And Charles was always like, “That’s okay. God will take care of us.” And the love offering at the next church would make up the difference. God just always provided.

And even for our kids, it was like the Lord would bring along churches that would just do extra special things for the kids. My kids still talk about those churches. Those churches made a huge impact on my kids in that way.

Nancy: Your kids felt like they were part of it, it seemed like, not just that they were being dragged along with their parents.

Stephanie: Yes. They were very much involved. We tried to keep them excited. We didn’t want them to feel it as, “This is Dad’s ministry,” or “This is Dad’s and Mom’s.” We wanted it to be viewed as, “This is our family serving God together.”

They loved traveling. The motor home wasn’t a new one; it wasn’t a fancy one; it wasn’t a big one, but we were so happy. You learn that you can be really happy with very little.

Nancy: And there are ten people in this motorhome, for those who may not have heard yesterday’s conversation—Charles and Stephanie put eight children in a thirty-six-foot motor home.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: So contentment had to be something that you were learning along the way, too.

Stephanie: It was. You learn that it’s okay to have laundry piled up. I needed to learn that because I don’t like full laundry baskets. I like empty laundry baskets. It had to pile up. And so you learn things like that are okay.

And even little things like that when we got to Cameroon. We didn’t have electricity, so I couldn’t do the laundry in Cameroon. One load a day. Well, that didn’t keep up. But because God had taught me contentment with a pile of laundry before, it didn’t bother me. There were just little things like that, that before we started deputation would have driven me nuts.

Nancy: It’s sweet to see how God in each chapter of our lives brings experiences, happenings, opportunities to trust Him, to lean on Him. They are not just for that moment, but they are all part of this training He’s taking us through, equipping and fitting us to be more useful, to serve Him down the road for another season or chapter of our lives.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: Of course, we can’t see what’s ahead. We don’t know where God is taking us in this story He’s writing for our lives. But He doesn’t waste any of our experiences, does He?

Stephanie: No. Even little things. There are so many things that we just take for granted in life as just happenstance, and it’s not. There are just so many things the Lord taught all of us during those days.

Because of all of my injuries, it forced my kids to have to learn to do even more, which was a good thing. The Lord knew that Daddy was going to die, and they were going to need to know how to do a lot. I’m very thankful for the character that God helped develop in them because of things through deputation.

So, yes, deputation was fun. We never would have dreamed that deputation would be our family’s ministry. That would have never been our thought or in our thought process.

Nancy: What I love is that you weren’t just out there asking people to support your ministry, but you were out there ministering the Word.

Stephanie: We were seeking to, yes.

Nancy: I watched, because your families are both known in this area and have a reputation. There’s a lot of ministering that’s gone on through different ones of your family members, but Charles was the one I knew the best and knew that his heart was to preach the Word, to see people come to know Jesus, to see people reached.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: And all those times you had your eyes and your heart set on Cameroon. Did you guys talk a lot about this as a family?

Stephanie: Oh, we did. We would dream through, “What kind of house will we live in? What food will we eat? Mom, start getting recipes.” And Charles would be like, “How about making plantains? Try to come up with some new recipes that use plantains.”

So, yes, we were constantly talking about Cameroon. And because we were going to work with the St. Clairs, we kept in contact with them.

Nancy: That’s the local missionary family there.

Stephanie: Yes, they were the missionaries there in Bambui, so there was a lot of contact. Even though there was a conflict going on in the country, because of the fact that the missionaries had been so safe and the conflict had totally avoided them, there wasn’t a worry that that was a problem.

Even now, looking back, I see God’s hand because I am very much a worrier. My natural tendency is to freak out over stuff, and I was not scared in the slightest about going to Cameroon. Even looking back now after everything that happened, I would still go back. There was never a fear there in my heart. The thought never crossed my mind that one of us would be shot there.

Looking back, it had to have been the Lord. His Word says, “Perfect love casts out fear.” There was not a fear in any of us that, “Oh, there’s conflict.”

My husband used to say, “The safest place to be is always in the center of God’s will.” We could stay in the States, but if that’s not the center of God’s will, that’s the most scary place to be. The safest place is the center of His will.

And so, even up until the day we left . . . I remember the day before we left for Cameroon, I was packing. We had all been seeking the Lord’s face. My dad, who was our pastor, and our mission board director, the missionaries over there, we had all been praying, “Lord, should we go?” And we all had a peace. God wanted us to go.

Nancy: You were praying about whether it was the right timing?

Stephanie: Yes. Should we postpone? Should we wait?

Nancy: What made you wonder that?

Stephanie: Because of the conflict. It was just so clear.

Nancy: Could you just tell a little bit about the conflict?

Stephanie: Sure.

Cameroon is divided into ten regions. There are eight French regions and two English regions. We were going to work in one of the English regions. There’s the Northwest and the Southwest. We were going to be living in the village of Bambui, near the main city of Bamenda, which was like one of the capital cities there in that region.

I believe it was the fall of 2016, somewhere in that time frame, there just started being some clash, friction between the French government and the English regions over multitudes of different things that seemed very little at the time, and that just kept festering over those years.

Nancy: Until, as I understand it, those English regions started appealing to become their own country.

Stephanie: Right. They wanted to become their own entity, so to speak. They speak English. The rest of the country speaks French. So there’s just differences. There’s cultural differences. Two of them were more English colonies and the other ones were French colonies. So it just had to do with that influence in the two different regions.

Nancy: So the conflict . . . am I right about this? . . . was between government troops and forces and insurgents?

Stephanie: Right. It started with protests. It built more into insurgents. Yes.

Nancy: So you were following the news.

Stephanie: Right. We were keeping up with the missionaries.

Nancy: And most people in the United States, I found, when this all happened—including myself—did not know about this conflict. There are other countries that we hear about all the time. But for some reason, there was not a lot of U.S. attention on what was happening in Cameroon. But you knew.

Stephanie: Right. Well, Cameroon has been dealing with Boko Haram. There had already been missionaries that had to leave the northern section of Cameroon. The government had pulled them out for their safety because of Boko Haram coming in, the terrorist group that was coming in.

We were putting a lot of effort, from everything I’ve understood, into trying to help their government, in helping equip them, train them, to fight against the terrorists. So in that sense, there was the relationship, but it just hadn’t made a lot of U.S. headlines up until Charles was killed.

Nancy: So you knew there were some challenges there, but you prayed, and the leadership . . .

Stephanie: Yes. All of our authority heads really did not feel like it was a thing of, “We’re telling you not to go.” Nobody had a sense of, “They should not go.”

And Charles came to me, I remember, as I was packing and said, “Honey, if you do not want to go tomorrow, if you’re not at peace with leaving, I will cancel our plane flights.” 

I said, “No. I have a total peace about going. I’m not afraid to go. The Lord’s protecting us. He’s protected us through all these things. 

So he said, “Okay.”

Dannah: That’s Stephanie Wesco in a conversation with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. She’ll continue the story in a moment, but first, I wanted you to hear a recording of the prayer Charles prayed during those support-raising years. Here’s the late Charles Wesco praying at the close of a message he gave in 2017.

(Recording) Charles: Heavenly Father, as we gather together here today with You in our presence, Lord, I fear that we see You very darkly through a glass, and we need to see You more. Lord, we need like Moses did, a new revelation of Your glory. We’ll never see it all, Lord. I think every one of us here as believers needs to see a new uncovering of Your glory, the next level.

Lord, we need You to help us not to see so darkly. Through Your Holy Spirit help us catch a little bit of a glimpse of the heavenly city where the streets are gold and the gates are made of pearls and Jesus sits on the throne with hands that have been pierced. Lord, He who humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, that at the name of Jesus, one day every knee shall bow.

Lord, I want to bow the knee, having done through Your grace what I could. Lord, I want to lay up treasures in heaven where moth and rust cannot destroy, where thieves cannot break through and steal. I understand, Lord, that where my treasure is, my heart is. We came into this world naked, and we shall go out naked. The love of money and shiny things is the root of all evil.

Lord, I pray You’d touch my life, my children’s lives. Lord, I don’t want them to see a hypocrite in a father. I want them to see a man who wants them to excel and surpass the servant opportunities You’ve given me to serve You even more.

So, Lord, I pray that we would start living that way more now. Help me. Help my family. Help each father. Help each family here today to be able to grow in You. We pray in Jesus name, amen.

Dannah: Charles Wesco had no way of knowing his own life would soon be poured out for the Lord. As his wife Stephanie put it, the clock was counting down, and they didn’t realize how little time was left.

Excitement for the Wesco family was high as they went to Cameroon.

Stephanie: We left October 17, arrived October 18, in the country.

Nancy: In 2018.

Stephanie: Yes, 2018. We were met at the airport by, we call him Uncle Ben—that’s what our kids call him. I remember the first words I heard him say were, “Welcome home!” And it really struck me, like, “Wow!” because you work towards going somewhere like that for that long, and your heart really is there long before you get there.

Nancy: And your kids were excited.

Stephanie: The kids were excited. Our two oldest had been there before. For all the other ones, it was all a new experience. But it was very much an excitement. The climate in the country was different because of the conflict, which was very sad. There was a lot more military there. There was a lot more tension.

Nancy: Different than when you had been there before.

Stephanie: Yes. On our survey trip, there was no tension, so that was different. It was sad. But again, there wasn’t any fear. The Lord just gave us such a peace and a joy in finally being there.

We drove all the way from Yaoundé all the way up to Bambui. We left at six in the morning and got there right before curfew that night. It was almost a twelve-hour day of driving to get from the capital all the way to the village where we were living.

Looking back, it’s like, “Wow! We never would have dreamed that we were on a time clock that was counting down the way it was.”

Nancy: You expected to spend . . .

Stephanie: . . . our lives. My husband would say all the time on deputation, “We’re soldiers in the king’s army, and our job is to march to His drum. If He moves us, we’re to say, ‘Yes,’ and follow.”

(Recording) Charles: Jesus is looking to hire you. He doesn’t care if it’s the eleventh hour and you don’t play the violin or harmonica or piano or do chalk talks. He made you who you are, and He has a purpose for you. We need to remember that. It’s so simple, and we make it so complicated. Just like Jesus is saying in the parable, He’s looking for people to work in His vineyard. Are you ready to work no matter what the hour is? Is it, “Yes, Sir. Send me! Where do I enlist? Where do I sign? Where’s the dotted line?”

Stephanie: It’s not our job to question. It’s not our job to change our location. That’s up to Him. I’ve thought of that so many times since then. Abba King said, “You’re done here. I’m moving you back to the States.”

Nancy: Way sooner than you would have ever dreamed.

Stephanie: Yes! We had packed barrels and sent all of the stuff ahead, thinking in terms of living there permanently, obviously. And then we had all of our luggage.

So right away, jet lag or no jet lag, I just wanted to get moved in, because it’s hard to minister and be moving in all at once. We had a dear friend, Liberty Hicks, with us, and she helped us start unpacking. We had two little, sweet kids from the compound where we lived that pretty much lived at our house during those twelve days. They came over on day one. Their names were Diane and Caleb. And Diane and Emmy were best friends.

Nancy: Your little Emmy.

Stephanie: Yes. They just played together and had so much fun.

And looking back, we arrived there on a Friday, I believe, worked Saturday at unpacking, and then Sunday went to church for the first time. And the Sunday school lesson that Sunday—I’ll never forget now—was on perfect love casting out fear. Here you have a Cameroonian national man, who later would help carry my husband’s body, preaching on the fact that God doesn’t give us the spirit of fear; and that even in the midst of conflict, we can have peace because God is always there with us.

I never would have dreamed of what was coming, but when I look back, those are all those precious truths that God was giving us that later would be those rocks we could stand on and truths we could cling to.

That whole next week was just busy unpacking, going to town to get supplies. When I look back, I’m so thankful that the Lord . . . I had learned to be content in the tiny motor home. We moved into this Cameroonian house, and, yes, we only had electricity like three days of our days there. The rest of the days there was no electricity, and we were totally happy.

God gave us such peace and contentment. We had running water—praise the Lord—because our house had a spring It was fed from a spring; it was gravity fed. So we had running water. We could heat water on the stove. Having no electricity in the evening was a little bit of a challenge, but we just went to bed sooner. So I guess that was a good thing for the kids.

But the Lord just gave us so many sweet memories—interacting with people from the village, from Christians that were helping us work on the house. Charles was very much a list man, so even now, on his old phone that I still have, there are all these list—even from the day he died.

Nancy: A to-do list.

Stephanie: Yes, and of what needed to be purchased to fix the fuse box or whatever. He was doing his best to make that house our home. He wanted us to feel, me and the kids, like we had a home, that we were secure. He was working on that for us.

That week we got to go to a traditional wedding, which was very special. We felt very honored to have been invited to that wedding.

So, just little things like that that God allowed us to be involved in that normally wouldn’t have been a part of the first week of a missionary family. God let us do that. There were many sweet memories—even things that involved bugs and lizards that freaked us out! But looking back, they are really fun memories.

Nancy: Especially for all those boys. 

Stephanie: Exactly! Hearing Liberty scream because there were lizards in her bathroom made my boys’ day! (laughter) So those are really good memories.

Nancy: You’re getting settled in, you’re getting acclimated and established and starting to meet some people. And in week two of your time in Cameroon, the entire script of what you had thought was going to be God’s plan for your lives there got upended, not at all what you could have ever imagined or expected.

It started on something that seemed like a normal day with you and Charles and one of your sons going for a drive.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: What were you headed for?

Stephanie: It was a Tuesday morning, October 30. Ben and Charles had planned to go to a city called Kumbo.

Nancy: Ben is the other missionary.

Stephanie: Yes. Ben St. Clair was our coworker. They had planned to go to Kumbo that day. None of us had a peace about them going to Kumbo. Because of the conflict, Kumbo was not a safe place to go to. We had talked. I had not asked Charles not to go, because my feelings were, “God directs through your husband, and He’ll direct through Ben and Charles.” Well, God very clearly did not give them peace to go to Kumbo.

So that morning they decided it was safer to go to town to get groceries. So Charles he came in the kitchen. I was either finishing up making breakfast or finishing cleaning up from breakfast, I can’t remember which. He said, “Get your grocery list together. We’re going to go to town today instead of tomorrow.”

I was really glad because we had used up a bunch of our fruit and things, and over there, you buy everything really fresh. It’s not made to last for days. You just have to make more frequent trips to market. So I was, “Hey, that’s great! Perfect timing.”

We gathered our bags—you have to take all your own market bags. (It’s not at all like American grocery stores.) We grabbed our market bags. We were also going to look for a vehicle that day because we still did not have our own vehicle. He had told me that morning, “Just so you know, we’ve used up our month’s support already. Anything here going forward, other than the vehicle, we’re dipping into our own money again, into our savings.”

Nancy: Until the thirtieth of the month.

Stephanie: I was, like, “Okay. I think we’ll just get through today, and we’ll be okay.” So we all got in the car. We met up at Ben and Becca’s house.

Nancy: So it was you and Charles and one of your children.

Stephanie: Yes, my second son.

Nancy: And Ben, the missionary.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: The other children are back home with your helper, Liberty.

Stephanie: Yes. They were with Liberty at the house.

Nancy: How far to where you were heading?

Stephanie: Bamenda from Bambui was between forty-five minutes to an hour. It just depended on traffic—all of those little things. If you got stopped at military checkpoints, that could way-lay it. So it just totally depended on whatever was going on.

That morning we had heard a lot of gunshots up near the village of Morosobga. In that direction, we had heard shooting, but down toward Bamenda, it seemed peaceful. So Ben says, “I think we’ll be fine.”

We got in the car. I remember as we got ready to head down the hill from Ben and Becca’s house, I asked Charles to pray for the Lord’s protection as we drove. He did. I don’t remember what he said, but that’s my last memory of him.

We started driving. As we drove, I just felt this huge impression on my heart to start quoting Psalm 91.

Nancy: Could you read just a part of that for us?

Stephanie: Sure. Psalm 91 says:

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee (vv. 1–7 KJV).

Somewhere in there was about as far as I had gotten. And we were coming through Bambui . . . Bambui and Bombili kind of intertwine as villages. They’re right next to each other. So we were coming through Bambui in their version of a roundabout. As we were just coming out of that roundabout, there were two shots within a few seconds of each other fired into our vehicle. One came more from head-on, and one came more from the side.

You’re going about five miles an hour, thanks to the dirt roads and the pot holes. So you’re going very slow. My first reaction was to throw my son, Charles, Jr., eleven at the time of the shooting, down, and then I laid on top of him. About that time there was the second shot that came through.

I just remember hearing the car rev, and thinking, Ben’s not hit. The thought never even crossed my mind that Charles was hit. Looking back, he had been talking and simultaneously, he wasn’t. He had been asking Ben some questions.

We were kind of in shock at that point. My son sat up, and he said, “Dad, are you all right?” And then I just heard him scream, “Mom, Dad’s hit.” I just remember looking up and seeing what no human should ever have to see.

It’s hard to remember everything that’s going through your mind, but I remember thinking, This can’t be possible.

Ben was just driving; trying to get to a hospital. I remember just trying to hold Charles together. From where I could see, he had been hit multiple places. I didn’t even see where he had been hit from the front because I was sitting behind him. I remember thinking, If there is a God, He better be very real right now because we’re not going to make it through this otherwise.

Nancy: You know, Stephanie, it’s just even hard for us to imagine what you must have been experiencing at that moment and what you’ve experienced since. We’re going to talk more about that when we come back tomorrow.

But I just think it’s precious how, in God’s providence, the passage He put on your heart minutes before that shooting that resulted in the death of your husband, twelve days after you got to the country where you felt the Lord was sending you was Psalm 91. That psalm talks about God protecting, about the arrows and the dangers not taking you out. And yet, minutes later, that’s exactly what you’re experiencing. So in a way, it could seem that God’s Word wasn’t true in that moment.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: And yet, you had come to know enough about God—the God that you and Charles both had served—you knew from His Word that He is trustworthy.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: And that He doesn’t make mistakes.

Stephanie: Right.

Nancy: And those shots didn’t make God go, “Oh no!”

Stephanie: Right.

Nancy: There was a presence of God that you prayed for.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: And a purposefulness in . . . I mean, just seconds more or less earlier or later, this would have been avoided.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: As you’ve processed this, you’ve acknowledged that those shots were not outside God’s purview, God’s plan, God’s purposes.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: But you were doing in that moment what I’ve watched you doing since—trusting God to write your story and your husband’s story and your children’s story in moments when there seemed to be—there was—no human explanation for what was happening.

When some might have concluded, “God botched it!” or “God fell asleep!” or something, the anchor in your heart, as you said, has been these promises of God and knowing that He doesn’t make mistakes. He is faithful.

Stephanie: Yes.

Nancy: And knowing that your instinct was to cry out to Him, when we pick up with this story, I want to just unpack that a little bit more about what it’s been like to cry out to God when your world was being torn apart . . . and finding that in the midst of crisis and tragedy and loss, God is still good, and God is still faithful.

Stephanie: Yes.

Dannah: We’ll hear more of that story tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has been speaking with Stephanie Wesco, whose husband Charles went to be with the Lord in the fall of 2018. As Nancy just mentioned, Stephanie and her eight children were suddenly thrown into a situation where they had to trust God in ways they could never have anticipated.

Nancy and her husband Robert wrote the book You Can Trust God to Write Your Story for unusual situations like the Wescos faced or for more common things, like an unexpected illness or a sudden turn in your finances. There’s a brand-new digital study guide to go with their book. It’s coming out soon. This discussion guide will make it perfect for a small group or a Sunday school class just to go through the topic together.

This week, we’re offering it to you as our way of saying, “Thank you for your donation in support of Revive Our Hearts.” When you contact us to give, ask for the book on trusting God, and you’ll automatically receive a code for downloading the study guide as soon as it’s ready. We want you to be the first to have it. To donate, just visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1–800–569–5959.

Well, Ecclesiastes tells us “it’s better to go to the house of mourning than the house of feasting.” Tomorrow, we’ll enter into the shock and mourning of Stephanie Wesco in those first few minutes and hours after Charles was shot. It’s something I hope you won’t miss because as that verse goes on, “the living will lay it to heart.”

Find out what lessons we can all learn from Charles and Stephanie Wesco, next time on Revive Our Hearts.

Encouraging you to embrace the mysteries of God’s providence, Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.