Never Too Late for God

Back in 1921 two couples from Sweden went to Africa as missionaries. David & Svea Flood and Joel & Bertha Erickson left all to go to what was then called the Belgian Congo, now called Zaire.

The Floods had a two year old son that they carried on their backs over 100 miles into the jungle. They literally hacked their way through with machetes.
When they finally reached a village the people would not let them enter.

The villagers said that if they allowed any white people to enter their village their gods would be offended. They were rejected by every village they tried to enter and ended upbuilding mud huts, isolated alone in the jungle away from any villages.

Sickness, malnutrition, and loneliness set in. They never were able to interact with any villagers except a single little boy. The Ericksons decided to go back to the mission station and tried to get the Floods to do the same, but Svea was now pregnant and couldn’t travel. She also had malaria.

The only real human contact the Floods had besides their own family, after theEricksons left, was one little boy from a near-by village. He would come and bring them fruit and listen to a pregnant Svea tell him about God, as she suffered with a fever from malaria.

Svea, who had been a popular singer back home in Sweden, died giving birth to a baby girl in the African jungle at age 27. She named her daughter Aina with her dying breath.

David Flood got mad at God as he buried his wife in the jungle. He headed back to the mission station and left the new baby girl, Aina, with the Ericksons. He went back to Sweden, became a drunk, and remained bitter and angry at God for many years. He never bothered to check up on little Aina and she grew up in the Belgian Congo with an American missionary couple—Arthur and Anna Berg, because the Ericksons also both died shortly after the death of Svea Flood.

The Bergs renamed Aina “Aggie.” Aggie spent much of her childhood alone and often played imagination games. She pretended she had four brothers and a sister and would set a table for them and would pretend she was talking to them. She pretended her sister was looking for her.

The Bergs went on furlough to America and they took Aggie with them. They stayed in the United States and Aggie grew up to marry a man named Dewey Hurst, who became president of Northwestern Bible College in Seattle, Washington.

Aggie found out her father had remarried Svea’s sister who had no heart for God at all. They had 3 boys and a girl plus Aggies older full blood brother, David Jr. The boy they had carried on their backs in the jungle.

Aggie really did have the four brothers and a sister that she had always dreamed about as a child and when she learned this she wanted to find them. The Bible college sent the Hursts back to Sweden in hopes Aggie could find her father, brothers, and sister.

David Wilkerson writes, “After crossing the Atlantic, the couple spent a day’s layover in London. They decided to take a walk, so they strolled by the Royal Albert Hall. To their joy, a Pentecostal Assemblies of God missions convention was being held. They went inside, where they heard a black preacher testifying of the great works God was doing in Zaire – the Belgian Congo!”

The young preacher turned out to be none other than the little boy that Aggie’s mother had witnessed to back in the Belgian Congo jungle! He had accepted Christ as his savior and become a missionary to his own people, which now included 110,000 Christians, 32 mission stations, several Bible schools and a 120-bed hospital!

Aggie did finally find her father, four brothers, and her sister. All of them were extremely bitter and angry at God and had little use for each other. Her siblings all hated their father.

When Aggie found her sister she told her, “All my life I’ve dreamed about you. I used to spread out a map of the world, put a toy car on it, and pretend to drive everywhere to find you.”

Aggie’s sister had no use for her father and hadn’t spoken to him in years either, but she agreed to help Aggie find him. When she did she saw a broken old man living in a tenement. He had had a stroke, his eyes were covered with cataracts, and he was an alcoholic.

Aggie told her father how God had taken care of her, but when she mentioned God he became enraged. He was still bitter after all those years until Aggie told him about meeting the little boy Svea had witnessed to back in the jungle at a missions convention there in London. When she told him how God had used that little boy to lead so many of his nation to Christ, David Flood broke down and cried and poured out all his bitterness to God.

David Flood asked God’s forgiveness then and there and died a Christian a short time later at the age of 73.

It is never too late to make peace with God as long as you are still breathing.

Taken from “One Witness” by Aggie Hurst, newer printings renamed it “Aggie : The Inspiring Story of a Girl Without a Country”

Aggie 👇🏻