MARGARET COWELL: Compassion on Mission
If I were to sum up my mum, Margaret Cowell, in one phrase it would be “Compassion on Mission”.
My best working definition of compassion is “feeling your pain in my heart”. When it comes to the word “mission”, I think of someone leveraging their time, energy, and resources on an important assignment. When you bring these two ideas together, you get a picture of Margaret Cowell, a woman who feels your pain in her heart and then assigns her time, energy, and resources to do something about it.
Compassion on Mission for the Unwell
At Seaforth Baptist Church at 14 years of age, Margaret trusted in Christ as her Lord and Saviour. Just a few years later at the age of 17, she married Laurie Cowell, my dad. Touched by Christ’s unconditional love and compassion Margaret trained to be a nurse specialising in midwifery and spent her late teens and early twenties caring for the unwell in Ballarat Base Hospital and the Royal North Shore Hospital.
Compassion on Mission for the Unreached
Responding to God’s call on their lives in January 1964, with a 7-week-old baby, Mum and Dad boarded the Oriana, waved goodbye to family and friends, and departed for Chad, a land-locked country in north-central Africa, where they served as missionaries to the unreached Gabri tribe. In Koyom their compassion overflowed into a variety of mission work, with Mum focusing on language and literacy programs, running a medical dispensary, raising and homeschooling four children, three of whom were born on the mission field.
Highlights of Mum’s time in Africa included seeing an unreached tribe respond to the Gospel, the New Testament being translated and printed, and dozens of village churches established. Sadly, however, tragedy struck in the form of my sister’s drowning. As painful as this was God used this loss to help my mum show compassionate care to many Gabri mothers, for whom losing a child was all too common. Mum always had a compassionate heart, but from that point on other people’s pain would never be far from her heart.
Compassion on Mission for needy sons
Re-entry into the home country for missionary kids is never easy. This combined with the difficulty of processing a sister’s death and adjusting to a foreign culture, where bullying new kids was cool, resulted in Mum embarking on a long mission of showing compassion to needy sons, of whom I am one. I could tell many touching stories of this in action, but I will leave it to Stephen, my younger brother, to tell a story that encapsulates my mum’s relentless compassion directed on a mission for one of her needy sons. See the sidebar for more details.
Compassion in a Time of Need
by Stephen Cowell
“It was in Year 6 at the half-yearly Parent Teacher Meeting that Mum was made aware of my difficulties with reading and writing. According to my teacher, my reading and writing ability was like that of a year 4 student.
For some time now I had a rather serious stutter. This caused me to not put up my hand in class to answer questions as the kids would tease me for my stutter. My Year 4 and Year 5 teachers wouldn’t get me to read out aloud either due to how long it would take for me to read a paragraph, let alone a page. Thus, I’d fallen through the cracks. It’s not that I was illiterate, but I wasn’t far from it. My Year 6 teacher was trying to help me but with a class of 30+ kids, his time was in high demand.
So Mum, after returning home from the Parent Teacher Meeting told me, “From tomorrow son, I will teach you how to read and write.” Most days after school Mum would guide me through Year 4 and Year 5 standards of basic English – spelling, forming and sounding out words, comprehension etc. Cut to the chase, in the comments section of my final Year 6 Report for English my teacher wrote, “A great improvement and the money you are spending for a tutor is money well spent.”
Going into High School I had to sit an Entry Exam and I failed dismally. As a result, I was put in the remedial class, as it was referred to at that time. This made Mum even more determined, and she said to me, “Come Year 8 and you will be back in class with everyone else.”
My mum was right. What my schooling of 6 years failed to teach me in English my Mum made up for in one-and-a-half years. Mum somehow not only gave me the gift of being able to read and write but at the same time cured me of my stutter. Feeling stupid created in me a severe lack of self-confidence and anxiety which in turn affected my speech.
Mum was time-poor due to spreading herself out in all directions around the family and God’s work, yet she found time to fix me of some pretty heavy difficulties. Selflessness sums it up for me. It’s just one act of many she has bestowed upon me that has helped me to where I am, and who I am, today.”
Compassion on Mission for Women & Children
In addition to caring for four needy sons, sometimes single-handedly as Dad travelled on mission trips, Mum always made time for serving. This included teaching Scripture and Sunday School, running After School Kids Club, holding Holiday Bible Clubs, leading and delivering ladies Bible studies and KYB studies, and serving with CWCI as a women’s speaker. Mum is a gifted Bible teacher and has a way of summing up complex Bible passages in simple yet memorable ways. But more than that, as I have listened to patchy recordings of some of my mum’s messages it is hard to miss a heart overflowing with compassion inviting people to experience Christ’s unconditional love and life-changing compassion.
Compassion on Mission: Supporting a Husband
The two best messages I have seen my mum deliver, however, were unspoken messages of loving support and compassion that lasted for years.
The first was a message of loving support for my dad as he led GLO Ministries and pioneered new works. It is no exaggeration to say that without Mum selflessly looking after us boys and compassionately serving week-in-and-week-out in the local church Dad would not have been able to do all that he did. Behind Dad’s great work with GLO was my mum doing the greater work of serving compassionately and selflessly in the background filling gaps that were left behind. For this, I and many others are truly grateful.
Arguably the greatest message I saw my mother deliver, however, was a message of compassionate love delivered daily to my father in his later years as he suffered from cardiovascular dementia. Watching my mum preach that sermon right until the day my dad was called home to be with the Lord is a timeless message of “compassion on mission” that I will never forget.
Compassion on Mission for the World
This year my mum will turn 84. Her days of embarking on overseas mission, planting churches, and teaching the Bible to women and children have passed. Nevertheless, her mission of compassion for the unwell, for the unreached, for needy sons, and for women and children continues unabated in the form of three prayer walks each day. On these walks she expresses her compassion for the world in prayer to her loving and compassionate heavenly father, the true source of “compassion on mission” for the world.
Summing up your mum in a few words is always a difficult task. Nevertheless, when mum’s “great compassion” is joined together with her “great mission,” what you are left with is a “Great Commission,” which happens to be Jesus’ last words to the church and a fitting portrait of my mum.