An African Love Song

Facing an empty nest and an uncertain future, the author embraces the unknown to fulfill her life-long dream. In thirty-one years of marriage, she coped with her husband’s little-understood brain disease, raised four children, and pursued a teaching career. At fifty-four she goes to Africa as a missionary and for eighteen years encounters adventures, surprises, and love beyond expectation.
Loneliness, misunderstandings, and fatigue interweave with the excitement of reporting on miracles, teaching Mozambican refugees literacy, and establishing a Bible translation project. Past poinsettias higher than her head and the seductive fragrance of frangipani, she jolts on pot-holed roads through endless gray-green bush. She battles to balance turbulent emotions with common sense as she struggles with the test of her loyalties. Conflict erupts when her co-worker fears that a scandal in the village will destroy their project. At last Betty Lou realizes that the Lord does not intend the deepest longing of her heart to be fulfilled by family, service to humanity, a successful career, or another human being, but by a vital relationship with God. Betty Lou’s story, An African Love Song, tells how she finds the answer to her dreams in unforeseen dimensions of love, both human and divine.