What About That One?

“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, and having lost one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?” — Luke 15:4 (ASV)

In the summer of 1908 Hyde went to the hills to escape the heat and pray. His host, very probably his close friend McCheyne Paterson, saw that he was “bowed down with sore travail of soul.” He missed meals. Paterson would find him “lying as in great agony, or walking up and down as if an inward fire were burning in his bones.” Day after day they heard him pleading for the people of his district, with sobs: “Father, give me these souls or I die!” (Later books word it differently; this is how the earliest one records it.) It echoes Rachel in Genesis, longing for a child: “Give me children, or else I die.”

Now for the most famous claim about Hyde, which needs care. The story goes that in 1908 he asked God for one soul a day and won more than four hundred that year; then two a day the next year; then four a day, and when four didn't come he couldn't eat or sleep. All of that comes from one memoir, written by friends more than ten years later, which doesn't say who counted. It did define “a soul” strictly: “not enquirers simply but a soul saved — ready to confess Christ in public and be baptized in his name.”

No mission report yet found gives Hyde's own numbers for those years. What the records do show is that baptisms in his Moga district “steadily increased for five years past,” reaching 685 in 1910. And we have a line from Hyde himself, in a letter to his old seminary classmates:

“For three full years now God has given us decisions and baptisms every day when we have been out in our district — over a thousand the past two years … never a day if we were right with God without souls.”

Notice the “us.” The baptisms belonged to the whole team, Hyde and his Indian evangelists together. Notice “when we have been out in our district”: the days of touring, not every day of the year. The honest version is smaller than the legend, and still extraordinary.

The story his friends loved most isn't about totals anyway. One morning Hyde and two Indian evangelists felt sure God would give them ten souls that day. They drove a cart to a distant village along a river road that was dangerous after dark, and preached all day. Nobody was interested. At last a man offered them milk, invited them in, and the whole family, nine people, decided to follow Christ and were baptized.

By then it was getting dark, and the evangelists wanted to go. Hyde wouldn't get in the cart. “What about that one?” he kept asking. One evangelist lost his temper and said something sharp about their wives and children waiting at home. They almost forced him in. Then the father of the family came to see what was wrong, and Hyde told him one soul was still missing. “Why, there he is!” said the man. It was his adopted nephew, who had been out playing. The boy answered Hyde's questions clearly and was baptized too. “That is the ten,” said Hyde, and climbed into the cart. The evangelist told the story years later “with shame.”

Love counts differently. Nine is a great day by any normal standard, but the Good Shepherd still goes after the one. Numbers can turn into a scoreboard, and Hyde wasn't immune to that pressure. What kept his prayer from becoming a quota was that he cared about each person, not the total.

One thing to do this week: ask yourself who the “one” is near you: the person nobody has thought to invite or ask about. Pray for them by name every day this week, and look for one real chance to show them they've been noticed.