Should we call them revival books?

I’m reading about West Papua, Indonesia. It’s the western half of that big island above Australia. Formerly called Irian Jaya. Formerly, before that, called Netherlands New Guinea or Dutch New Guinea.

Confusing, I know.

I’m finding relatively obscure books, some in the library, some through the internet, about what God has been doing in that remote corner of the world.

I call them missionary books, because, well, they’re written by missionaries. That’s also what I call the books I write, because, well, they’re written about missionaries.

But more and more I’m wishing I could call them “Revival Books.” Because the work that the Holy Spirit did in these places is breathtaking. How do you explain, in Ethiopia (With Two Hands,) strangers crying out, “Do you have the Words of Life?” How do you explain, in the Central African Republic (The Good News Must Go Out), a teenage boy braving leopards to take the gospel to hungry neighboring tribes at midnight?

And how do you explain the sweeping work of God in primitive tribes so remote that they weren’t even discovered until 1938, who became so electrified by the Living Words that by the mid 1960s hundreds of thousands of them had come to Christ?

I wish I had a better word than “revival.” That’s why the subtitle of the books is “Stories of God at Work.”

Is He ever.

It’s keeping me awake at nights.