Packing a Coffin with Your Belongings

Imagine being so committed to going to the mission field that you bought a one-way ticket to your destination and packed your worldly goods in a coffin, knowing you’d never come home. That is what A. W. Milne did. His destination was the New Hebrides, a destination that had already claimed the lives of every missionary that had gone before. Mark Batterson points out that he “did not fear for his life, for he had already died to himself.” His ministry lasted for 35 years. When he died, the tribe “buried him in the middle of their village and inscribed this epitaph on his tombstone: When he…