Peace Child

My children and I absolutely loved reading this book! I had to skip certain parts when we read out loud, because it is very graphic and horrific in its description of the lifestyle and customs of the cannabalistic tribes who greatly esteemed treachery. God has indeed "set eternity in the hearts of men" and even in these truly savage, treacherous cultures, He has left "bread crumbs" in their traditions and customs to help them understand the Truth and draw them back to Himself. By the time we finished the book, my children were begging me to get the next one. Truly impactful and encouraging book!

This was an exciting memoir about a family who laid the groundwork for a group of people who had never heard of Jesus Christ. Contact with them was complicated by the fact that this group of people valued treachery and betrayal. It was very eye opening.

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".

This book Peace Child portrays with such vividness what the mission field is, and is not. This book brings out bizarre cultural customs such, as headhunting cannibals who used their victims' skulls as pillow. In 1962 Richardson reaches three Sawi villages;one named Mauro. Richardson seems to be taunted by the wildness. As the "Peace of God" descended on him, the strange place became home. Don Richardson was the first to live among the Sawi, his goal was to combine faithfulness to God and the Scripture in respects for the Sawi culture. Once Richardson observed that a child was offered as a peace gift. The living peace child was indeed a culturally built-in cure to the Sawi idealization of violence. Richardson realized that the gospel beard the same spiritual message. That true peace can never come without a peace child. Richardson used this peace child story because it was something the tribesman related to in a personal way and it was the some much like the story of the gospel. Richardson went on telling the stories of the bible and how God had but one son and how Jesus was offered to man as a peace child. This book should be read by anyone who wishes to become a missionary.

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.