Miracles in the Amazon

The Deepest Magic of All

It was encouraging to see the BBC giving space to one of the great missionary and martyr stories of the late twentieth century.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39039876

Killed for Christ in the Amazon
22 February 2017 Last updated at 01:45 GMT

In January 1956, five American Christian missionaries were brutally killed by members of a remote Amazonian tribe.

The missionaries had made contact with the Auca, or Huaorani tribe a year earlier, in an attempt to convert them to Christianity.  A small nomadic tribe, the Huaorani were notoriously suspicious of outsiders.

Valerie Shepard’s father, Jim Elliot, was one of the five men on the mission into the jungle.  She spoke to Witness about her father’s death and how she learned to forgive his killers.

The video available in the link gives more detail.  This event and the subsequent development of the Waodani people along with their response to the Gospel of God is one of the great missionary stories of the Church.

We read recently a follow up book by Steve Saint, a son of one of the martyrs, entitled The End of the Spear.  It is an enthralling and God-honouring account.  The video below gives startling insight into what has happened to the Waodani over the years.  There is a sense in which these things are not of this world, yet in another sense they are the foundations of the earth which shall not be moved.