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Seven years ago, the Entwistles left Thomasville and the comfortable life of an American doctor’s family for a remote part of Mozambique, where the closest hospital lacks running water.

Dan, a pediatrician, and Lynda, a trained nurse, and their brood of five settled in an African village where everything is done by hand — sometimes painstakingly — to live simply and to live out their faith. They would move into the same row of houses as the people Dan Entwistle would serve as the hospital’s only pediatrician — and sometimes, the only doctor to be found.

“They went to a remote region where people needed medical help and the Gospel of Christ,” said the Rev. Chris Bitterman, a family friend and the assistant pastor at their church, Meadowview Reformed Presbyterian Church in Lexington. “And they took both.”

That sacrifice is heavy on the hearts of the people now raising money to help the missionary family come home to bury one of their sons.

Their eldest, 20-year-old Ben, died from heart-related problems in a MedEvac plane en route to Johannesburg, South Africa. His funeral is tentatively scheduled for 1 p.m. July 26 at the church. The family is expected to arrive in the United States earlier in the week.

“These are people who live exemplary lives, and they are worthy of our greatest admiration and deepest support, and in times like this our hearts just break,” said L. Gregory Jones, the dean of Duke University’s Divinity School. “A missionary’s vocation is always a sense of their going on behalf of a larger community back home, a community they depend on for financial and emotional support. That’s what enables them to take the risks they do.”

That’s what makes this loss especially personal for the people back home.

Since last week, e-mailed updates from Dan Entwistle and his brother Steve have been posted on the Lexington church’s Web site, asking for prayer. Ben had developed a high fever and was hospitalized in Nairobi, near the missionary school.

Four years ago, Ben underwent surgery on a valve in his heart. He had fully recovered, even playing varsity soccer this past year at a Christian college in Georgia. He had gone to Kenya last week to meet up with the family for a younger brother’s graduation from a school missionary children attended.

While in the hospital, Ben suffered a stroke, and doctors determined that an infection had developed around a valve in his heart and spread to his brain. As his condition deteriorated, the medical team attempted to get him to a heart surgeon in Johannesburg.

But Ben wouldn’t make it. He died three hours into the flight Tuesday, with a doctor, nurse and all the equipment imaginable at his side.

“It hardly seems possible that six days ago, we knew nothing of the storm that was looming and sweeping down on us,” Dan Entwistle wrote in an update the next day.

“Yet it has blown by, wreaking havoc in our hearts, and here we are ... and as always God is faithful. We have each sensed His presence and moments of calm, then moments of intense grief.”

The 500-seat Lexington church is preparing for an overflow crowd. During visits back to the states, the Entwistles were familiar to many people as they traveled to churches outside their denomination for support for their ministry, which is a part of the nonprofit Africa Inland Mission.

Bitterman saw that Christian testimony firsthand when he traveled to Mozambique two months ago with his wife to carry medical supplies and items the family needed. While there, Bitterman saw the impact they were making. He saw his friend’s devotion to a 6-month-old with rotting flesh beneath shots he had received from a medical worker when the doctor wasn’t there.

“Dan gathered around a nurse and another assistant and began working on this baby right away,” said Bitterman, who held the baby for them. “He began cleaning out the wound. Every day he cleaned out that wound, and there was no anesthesia. The mother was outside crying, and the baby was screaming. Even on Saturday and Sunday, when he wasn’t supposed to go to the hospital, he went back and worked on that wound.”

Later, Bitterman was standing outside the hospital with Dan and his brother Steve, who also moved his missionary family there, when Steve began sharing the gospel and nearly 80 people gathered, spur of the moment. Soon after, they began to disperse.

“Dan’s brother turned to me and said, 'The only reason we can do this, be here and share the Gospel, is because of Dan.’ I said, 'What do you mean?’ He said, 'Dan has so loved those people that his reputation of caring for the children and their families has opened the door.’”

Now, some of that love is needed to bury Ben.

“There are moments my faith fails, too,” Dan Entwistle wrote in an e-mail. “I look back and just ache, thinking what if I had only borrowed a stethoscope and listened to his heart a few days earlier.

And then I have to be reminded that there are no what-ifs. We cannot go back, and of course God is more than strong enough to cover any failings on our part. But I suspect it is something I will have to work through for some time to come.”

Contact Nancy H. McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com