Customer Reviews

Peace Child

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Years ago my family and I saw Peace Child in a theater; we already had met Don Richardson and read both Peace Child and Eternity In Their Hearts. Now we're glad Peace Child at last is available on DVD. Revisiting the stories, I'm startled to realize their continued relevance to our "culture war" today, and to critical issues of ethics and faith. Peace Child created a sensation as a Readers Digest book selection for the same reasons. Now I've overlaid subsequent "life experiences" for an even richer appreciation. For example, two Wycliffe missionaries once showed me a film of their own story of benighted tribal people in a cannibalist culture. They worked in Papua New Guinea, adjacent to Richardson's Irian Jaya. I remember a vivid scene of a feeble but living woman being buried while the missionaries stood by, protesting but impotent to stop the burial. Why did tribal elders view the woman as dead, though her limbs were twitching and her mouth moved soundlessly? Because the poor woman was disabled, having ceased to speak. Her condition for them defined death. Last week, I heard three learned physician-researchers at the National Institutes of Health discussing three views of "Defining Death", which reminded me that a Terri Schiavo tragedy may recur anytime caregivers stop supporting life. Yesterday I met Mrs. Kate Adamson-Klugman, inspiring author of "Kate's Journey", "Paralyzed, but not Powerless" and various articles on her experience of "Locked-In Syndrome". Kate testified before a Senate committee, passionately opposing "euthanasia". At one point she was trapped alone with her frantic thoughts, while to others, the only evidence that she lived was her beating heart. Her long struggle back from total paralysis began when she and her husband discovered she could blink, and therefore communicate. A volume of insight emerges from her simple testimony, "In a blink, I was a person again." So a movie like Peace Child tells us, by juxtaposing the light of truth against all the murky darkness of sinful hearts, what it means for a person to be alive, in a "civilized community", and rightly aligned with the redeeming power of Jesus Christ.Kate's Journey: Triumph Over Adversity

little slow at times,but still a good book. My teenagers will be reading this.