Helen Roseveare: A Life in Her Own Words

by Helen Roseveare

All three volumes of Helen Roseveare’s autobiography combined for the first time, with a foreword by John & Noël Piper, and an introduction and afterword by Betsy Childs Howard.

Throughout her eight years in training for the mission field and her first twelve years in the Congo, Helen Roseveare had prayed that God would give her a mountain–top experience of his glory and power. God’s answers formed the basis of her best–selling autobiography, Give Me This Mountain.

However, after enduring civil war, brutal mistreatment, and having to rebuild work from scratch, and later while caring for her elderly mother, she realised that God’s work is also done in the valleys.

The third of her autobiographies, written after her mother passed away, emphasises her faithful, daily obedience, digging ditches as God led and trusting him to fill them with life–giving water in his time.

These three books are combined in one volume for the first time giving an overarching view of the amazing ways God used Helen’s life. Includes the books Give me This Mountain, He Gave Us a Valley and Digging Ditches.

664 pages, Hardcover

Published May 13, 2025

About the author

Dr. Helen Roseveare was born in Hailebury, Herts, England in 1925. She became a Christian as a medical student in Cambridge University in 1945. She continued to have strong links with the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union and was designated as the "CICCU missionary" during the 1950s and 1960s. She built a combination hospital/ training center in Ibambi in the early 1950s, then relocated to Nebobongo, living in an old leprosy camp, where she built another hospital. After conflict with other staff at the hospital, she returned to England in 1958.

She returned to the Congo in 1960. In 1964 she was taken prisoner of rebel forces and she remained a prisoner for five months, enduring beatings and rapings. She left the Congo and headed back to England after her release but returned to the Congo in 1966 to assist in the rebuilding of the nation. She helped establish a new medical school and hospital (the other hospitals that she built were destroyed) and served there until she left in 1973. She helped many people from different countries, and helped them when needing food, and drink.

Since her return from Africa, she has had a worldwide ministry in speaking and writing. She was a plenary speaker at the Urbana Missions Convention three times. She is now retired and lives in Northern Ireland. Her life of service was portrayed in the 1989 film Mama Luka Comes Home. Her touching story about how the prayer of Ruth, 10-year-old African girl, for a hot water bottle to save a premature newborn baby after its mother had died has been widely forwarded by email. She survived rape and trial during the Congolese civil war in 1964 because of the intervention of the villagers she had helped previously.

(Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Brittany Roberson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the honesty in this story. Sometimes we put great heroes of the faith on big pedestals - I know I do. And yet, as I read this autobiography of Helen…she had the same struggles so many of us do: sharing her faith, feeling the need to prove herself, doubts, fears. And yet through all of that, the Lord met her and “filled the vacuum” of her incompetencies with Himself. “How simple, when one realizes that the Lord knows me as I am in all my weakness, loves me, and waits to impart Himself, His own holiness, His life, living in me.” (pg 79)

For those of you not familiar, Helen Roseveare spent the majority of her life a missionary doctor to the jungles of the Congo. Some of that time was during civil war and great unrest. And great oppression. Yet through it all, the Lord was with her. Faithful.

Helen wrote several books in her life, and this brand-new volume combines three of those autobiography books into one cover! You will be challenged by this book as you read the story of Dr. Helen Roseveare.