The Lion's Jaws After the Laying of Hands

On a November evening in 1840, David Livingstone knelt in a small London chapel as elder missionaries laid hands on him. He was ordained, commissioned, sent — beloved and blessed for the work ahead. Within months, he stood in the Kalahari Desert.

The wilderness came fast. Malaria struck repeatedly. In 1844, a wounded lion seized him by the shoulder, crushing bone, shaking him "as a terrier does a rat," as he later wrote. He carried that mangled arm for the rest of his life — eleven fractures that never fully healed.

But Livingstone did not turn back. For thirty years he pressed deeper into the African interior, not despite the wilderness but through it. The testing refined his mission. The man who entered the bush as a young medical missionary emerged as something larger — an explorer, an abolitionist, a voice crying out against the slave trade that devastated the continent he loved.

Mark tells us that immediately after the heavens opened and the Father declared Jesus His beloved Son, the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness. Not eventually. Immediately. The affirmation and the trial were not contradictions — they were companions.

When God claims you as His own, the wilderness often follows. Not because He has abandoned you, but because He is forging you. The voice that says "You are My beloved" is the same voice that sustains you among the wild beasts.