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34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gripping true story, spellbinding page-turner, March 12, 2003
Talk about living on the edge, Don Richardson, his newlywed wife Carol and seven-month old son Stephen step from the 20th century into a stone-age cannabilistic cultural with gruesome and horrific practices. This book reads like the true adventure it is, starting with the narration of life, death, betrayal, parties where the honored guests become the special of the day. Enter this family of three into the midst of suspicious cannibals bringing three rival factions together each vying jealously for the knifes, steel axes, matches, machetes, mirrors and medicine, you get a powder keg with small to large explosions daily. Imagine living in a grass hut with your wife and baby huddled inside while fierce warriors and arrows fly throughout the sky. Imagine facing an entire clan beating and burning a man that the sorceress has declared to be a soul-less zombie and praying him back to life, only by a miracle of God. These and other adventures show what it's really like to walk by faith, trusting only God to protect you, and doing His will to win people to Christ. There are many hair-prickling turns in this story, leaving you at the edge of your seat, wondering if it'll all end in disaster. But the glory of the Lord is that He had left Himself a witness in the strange custom of the "Peace Child" that Richardson was able to use to point to the Perfect Peace Child, the Son of God, Prince of Peace, to bring the Sawi tribe to a knowledge of Jesus Christ. Truly awe inspiring. I am now reading the sequel "Lords of the Earth".
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34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a must-read for both Christians and non-Christians, October 4, 2003
For years, I have been fascinated with the question of how undiscovered, isolated groups of people would held accountable for their decision to accept or reject God. How could uncivilized people understand how God's message related to their lives? After reading this book, I found my answer! I realized that through what Don Richardson calls "redemptive analogies," God makes a way for ALL people to understand his loving message. Just as he ably used analogies that were particularly meaningful to the Jews and Greeks in the Bible, God is able to use analogies that are meaningful to cannibals and other isolated groups. Peace Child is Don Richardson's account of how he discovered the analogy that God had specially designed to make a cannibalistic tribe in New Guinea understand his love... and then of how he risked his life trying to share that analogy with those people. This book chronicles one man's purposeful encounter with a group of people who had never come in contact with Godly principles. Perhaps because I'm a wife and mother of two, Richardson's decision to include his wife and two toddlers in his quest to share righteousness really made me understand his degree of commitment to God. Richardson's powerful text outlines a sacrifice of earthly comforts for spiritual reasons and shows God's protection of the lives of people who actively seek to serve His purposes. While written by a very educated scholar, the text is very easy to follow. The careful reader will also notice that Richardson used a combination of both white collar and physical talents to convert members of the cannibalistic tribe. (To live and teach the cannibals, he was required to work not only as a carpenter and foreman, but also as a linguist and dictionary author.) That was a real revelation for me. I want to emphasize, though, that this book is more than the masterpiece story of Don Richardson's experiences as a missionary. It is also a book that really convicts its readers to think about what their own roles should be in influencing the moral compass of people who have no social rules and no agreements about how to live together in groups - people with no Ten Commandments and no Magna Carta. There was a point at which I put this book down for a minute because tears were rolling down my face. I felt such an inward "call" to become more involved in sharing both the message of love and salvation and the principles of organized group behavior with the forgotten people of this earth, even if it meant sacrificing the comforts I am so used to. My brother-in-law read it years ago, and as a result, he started sharing the Christian gospel with prisoners in his hometown every Saturday morning. He still does that today. Buy it and share it with your friends. It will change you inwardly and motivate you to inspire others.
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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A thrilling story from stone age New Guinea, March 17, 1998
I have had the good fortune of reading this book (twice), seeing the film, and hearing Don Richardson in person tell this story, and have been thrilled by each vehicle of communication (though I think Richardson's personal telling probably the most vivid.) The Sawi of New Guinea were a people still living at a stone age level when Richardson and his family went to live with them in the early 1960s, and their bizarre cultural customs make for fascinating reading. Their most developed form of treachery was betrayal, to 'fatten an enemy with friendship' before murderously turning on them. When Richardson told the Sawi the story of Christ's life, the real hero to emerge was Judas Iscariot, who had betrayed his close friend. Things changed among the Sawi when Richardson found how they stopped their wars through the means of a Peace Child, exchanged between warring tribes for adoption and peace. Read this fascinating account of what happened next.
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