If you haven’t heard the song “Beautiful Fool” you might want to take a moment to look it up. It was popularized by Country artist, Kathy Mattea. However, the version I am familiar with is by its composer, Don Henry (also wrote “Mr. God” a funny but definitely instructive song). It is an ode to Martin Luther King Jr. (and some others). The chorus is:

Oh, you beautiful fool

Swimming upstream,

kicking up waves.

Dreams weren’t meant to come true,

That’s why they call ’em dreams…

Oh, you beautiful fool.

In my last post I mentioned Baron Justinian Von Welz (1621-1668), who renounced his title becoming, I suppose, just Justinian Welz when he went on his ill-fated mission trip to Surinam. 

He was a man before his time. Few listened to him as he gave excellent suggestions on how Lutherans (and Protestants in general) could do missions, just a matter of years after the Treaty of Westhphalia (ending the sectarian Thirty Years War).

Few if any listened to him or took his ideas seriously. Finally, he took up his own call and went by himself to Surinam as a missionary, and died soon afterward… no measurable impact from his mission work.

Yet, his ideas reappear in the Danish-Halle missions of the late 1600s and the Moravian missions movement in the early 1700s. And all of these inspired William Carey, the London Baptist Society, and what we sometimes call the “modern missions movement.”

Baron Von Welz was before his time, and died with no measurable impact of his ideas. Yet he inspired a whole movement that is alive and well today.

Instead of giving his biography. Here is a nice simple biography of his life and impact.  CLICK HERE

Definitely a beautiful fool… may those like him increase.