Here’s a book worth reading. Don Richardson may use a hefty dose of imagination in explaining the “Unknown God” in the book of Acts, but his prose shines when he begins to describe modern-day tribal people and the legends and traditions that hark back to a great God whom they think they cannot know.
For these people—and we’re not talking about one or two isolated tribes, but many, many tribal groups scattered in different continents all over the world—when the true God of the Bible, Jesus Christ, is shown to be the God they’ve been waiting for through untold generations, the people embrace Christianity en masse. Mr. Richardson tells us a number of stories in detail, some from his own experiences in Irian Jaya (now called Papua, Indonesia), but also from Africa, the Indian subcontinent, east Asia, and more. And since the first publication of this book in 1981 (it has gone through multiple printings in its thirty years) even more missionaries have told him about evidence in the cultures where they have worked.
This book is especially meaningful to me, because when I first read it almost thirty years ago, I was inspired to want . . . someday . . . to have the privilege of writing some of these amazing stories for children to read.
Years later, in 2007, an old cassette tape was placed in my hands that held some amazing stories that eventually resulted in a book. And then another set of stories came to me, resulting in another book. And then a video. And, though I didn’t know it at first, I came to discover that the video led me to the area where that man had worked who had originally inspired me, so many years ago.
Don Richardson’s mission work—the same work he talks about in Eternity in Their Hearts—is recounted in Witness Men: Stories of God at Work in Papua, Indonesia. It is a privilege to me to let others know about the ministry of the man who influenced me so long ago.
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