Some people live with sincere burdens for places they’ve never been. I’ve met a number of them. They spend months and years praying for a geographical location that is not their home, nations inhabited by people they wouldn’t understand linguistically if they collided together on the street, and yet pursue living amongst them. These burden-bearers pack their bags, grab their passport, board a plane, and move to live amongst these people who are not their own people, far away from anything they’ve known as “home,” learn the language they don’t understand, and miss Christmas with their families year after year. And they want to do this for the sake of the Gospel, for the fame of Jesus, because they are moved by the glory of His incredible worth.
I, to be clear, am not one of these people. I did not grow up with this kind of burden, and when I met people who did, I truly thought they were idiots.
Or, perhaps to put it more politely, I thought they were foolish.
In November 2018, I was living in the Mediterranean Basin when the news broke that an American man—just a month shy of his twenty-seventh birthday—had been killed by the Sentinelese in the Andaman Islands. More specifically, nearby fishermen saw Sentinelese dragging his body along the sandy shore of North Sentinel Island—long considered inhabited by the “world’s most isolated tribe,” the North Sentinelese. Their interactions with the rest of the world have been limited, and the few instances we know about did not go well. As Kiona N. Smith reported for Forbes by the end of that month, British engagement with the islanders began in the neighborhood of 1871 by accident, and went dramatically awry when a questionably anthropological naval party went to the island in 1880. Smith continues:
They found only hastily-abandoned villages; the people seem to have seen the intruders coming and fled to hiding places further inland. But one elderly couple and four children must have lagged behind, and Portman and his search party captured them and carried them off to Port Blair, the colonial capital on South Andaman Island. Soon, all six of the kidnapped Sentinelese became desperately sick, and the elderly couple died in Port Blair. Portman somehow decided it was a good idea to drop off the four sick children on the beach of North Sentinel along with a small pile of gifts. We have no way to know whether the children spread their illness to the rest of their people, or what its impact might have been.
But the experience definitely didn't leave the Sentinelese with warm fuzzy feelings toward foreign visitors. In 1896, an escaped convict tried to flee the Great Andaman Island Penal Colony on a makeshift raft. In an excellent illustration of the concept of "out of the frying pan and into the fire," he washed ashore on North Sentinel Island. A colonial search party found his remains a few days later, full of arrow wounds, with his throat cut. The British wisely decided to leave the Sentinelese in peace, at least for the next century or so.[1]
The 1880 incident is one of too many colonial episodes that are as regrettable as they are innumerable. There is no question that while exploration has always been a worthy pursuit, imperialistic exploits are more of a blight on human history than they are admirable; while no people group on the planet holds a thoroughly righteous record, the ones that have rocked up out of nowhere have typically had more developed technology than the indigenous tribes they would encounter upon arrival, and won ensuing territory wars as they invariably arose. These gun-wielding victories were, unfortunately, aided in part by the fact that illnesses introduced by the newcomers often had already killed off substantial factions of the indigenous population. While we may be grateful for the luxuries afforded by globalization in our own day, international relationships came at no small cost to many indigenous people groups.
Understandably, then, the statement issued by the Director General of Police in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (within the jurisdiction of the Indian government) on November 21, 2018 got the world’s attention. A young American had been killed abroad, but the circumstances ruled out terrorism or run-of-the-mill criminal activity. “Fog of war” clamor ensued: He’d illegally gone to a restricted island! Well, no, technically the restriction had been removed, but no one thought anyone would try going there. He could have introduced pathogens and killed them all with sickness! Well, no, he’d gone through thorough immunological preparation and had quarantined extensively before loading on the boat. Speaking of the boat, he paid pirates for his criminal expedition! Or no, they were just fishermen. He duped them! Or did they know? Well, now they’re in prison. What was he thinking? What were they thinking? Who would do such a stupid thing? What kind of able-bodied American man in the prime of his life would pursue such a doomed endeavor?
Why this waste?[2]
Curiously, two fishermen experienced a similar fate to this American man twelve years prior, in 2006.[3] For whatever reason, their boat strayed to the shore or ran aground—one way or the other, they ended up where they shouldn’t have—and it was definitively the last thing they did. The Sentinelese killed the intruders, and violently resisted efforts made by the Indian government to retrieve their bodies. John Allen Chau is not the only man in the last twenty years to be killed and buried by the Sentinelese; why didn’t we hear much about the 2006 incident when it happened? Why did #JohnAllenChau go viral?
Within a day or two of the news of John’s death going public, his journals were released. Turns out, he’d first approached the shore the day before he died, and it didn’t go well. A young boy saw him coming and shot him with a bow and arrow, but not before the American shouted out (in English), “My name is John, and Jesus loves you!”
And there, ladies and gentlemen, lies the ultimate rub: the ill-fated American man in a kayak in the Bay of Bengal wasn’t an overly ambitious tourist drunk on exotic wanderlust. He was a Christian, and perhaps the worst kind: the kind with a burden for people he’d never met, who packed his bags and grabbed his passport to board a plane and introduce himself to these people who would surely not understand a word he said, because he felt a pressing need to tell them about Jesus. John Allen Chau wasn’t just an American Christian, he was a missionary.[4]
To many, that made him a de facto colonialist. To me, makes him the kind of person I described at the start of this chapter—the kind of folks I thought to be idiots (but politely described as fools).
The death of John Allen Chau hit the global news cycle and social media like a Category 5 hurricane: hard, and heavy. But it was like a slow Cat 5, the ones that just crawl over land and spin the wrath of their strength over your hometown. John’s name was on front pages and feeds for weeks after he died; even now, years after his death, major studios are working on feature films and documentaries based on his story.
But at the eye of the storm, at the center of the story, is not the tale of a misguided American man. It’s not ultimately about colonialism, or pathogenic concerns. The nations weren’t all of a sudden confronted with a guy named John; the nations were confronted with the Man Christ Jesus, and His claim on every single one of them, now and through eternity.
SPORTS CARS & PLOT TWISTS
When I was twelve years old, my family began to venture outside of Catholic mass on Sunday morning to explore the Protestant circuit.[5] This was the late nineties, so there’s a lot about evangelical culture my millennial peers will bemoan on social media today that I missed entirely and still don’t understand. There’s still a lot of language in the subculture that I myself do not speak. So you can imagine the culture shock I experienced as a little junior high kid in this new context. Back then, I was still adjusting to and observing the novelty of worship teams with like…bands. Playing instruments. And people in the congregation would sing along and raise their hands. I didn’t know what was going on. But one Sunday service in particular was a special kind of bewildering.[6]
The pastor introduced a couple who were, I can understand now, back home on furlough from India. I don’t know what their background was; they were both ethnically Indian, but I can’t remember if they were born in America or had immigrated. We lived in a diverse area with a vibrant aeronautical engineering industry, so in my recollection something like every third person around me had moved from abroad to work at a local firm and made bucketloads of money. But as this couple told their story, they recounted how the Lord had met them and they grew in their faith in Jesus—and then He called them to relocate back in India to preach the Gospel and make disciples. I’ll never forget—I mean I don’t even remember their names, but I remember the husband saying, “So, you know, we sold the house and sold the red sports car, packed up, and went to India.”
I was appalled.
I scoffed; “You did what with the red sports car? You clearly didn’t deserve it and couldn’t be trusted with it. That red sports car would’ve been better off with me, and I’m only twelve. Cmon, guys. That was stupid.”
In other words, “Why this waste?!” I thought they were idiots. At best, they were fools. But everyone around me applauded them. I was so confused.
Jesus has a funny way about Him; I don’t know what He said over me in that moment, if anything. Was it a, “Oh, just wait and see, kid.” Or was it, “Ohhhhh okay. Guess what you’ll be doing then?” In any event, by the time I found out about John Allen Chau….I’d already joined the ranks of these idiots and fools. Minus the red sports car. I skipped that step altogether, unfortunately.
It’s a long story to explain my journey from scoffing at twelve years old to fully participating by the time John died twenty years later. Jesus got in my way while I was in college, and I couldn’t get around Him. Gone were the days when inch-deep theology and youth group faith were enough to ride the wave of discipleship. There’s a difference between disciples and bondservants; the former are on a journey discovering the beauty and nature of the Man Christ Jesus. The latter are owned by Him, and my college career was the season He drew distinct lines in the sand. I was either all-in, or He was just a passing fad I used to alleviate the dysfunction of a broken home. And the more I discovered about Him—His kindness, His gracious demeanor, His merciful shepherding—the more I figured I was better off letting Him write my story than trying to come up with one myself. I ditched my Plan A that would’ve put a few more letters at the end of my name, and began wandering down what often feels like a dimly-lit path featuring a few scattered breadcrumbs to let me know which direction to keep going in.
Those breadcrumbs landed me, as I said, in the Mediterranean Basin when John was killed. The moment I heard the news is marked in my mind as viscerally as the moment I saw the second plane strike the South Tower on a Tuesday morning in September my sophomore year of high school. But when I look back on the twelve-year-old that scoffed at the testimony of two laborers who didn’t flinch at the loss of a red sports car, I wonder if, in fact, the joke was on me.
I might’ve been the only actual fool in the room.
Stephanie Quick is a writer/producer serving with FAI. She cohosts The Better Beautiful podcast with Jeff Henderson. Browse her free music, films, and books in the FAI App and at stephaniequick.org.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/11/30/everything-we-know-about-the-isolated-sentinelese-people-of-north-sentinel-island/?sh=38526c6735a0
[2] Matthew 26:8; John 12:5
[3] https://au.news.yahoo.com/american-killed-tribe-remote-indian-island-trying-convert-christianity-212211984.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAD9ut9gRQAPIbnrWpD6lajofRHk-4D1cNJdRZebXD1Oz4QsOxrjiVcHLlHQ9Gy9xV9Na_XL52boHqd-b04KFxtDJIccflqfgKvHWft_ls8SZO9bzGZDyOgNKKUfUdG6S0Huz2o8MJpZHLF9cGgBsfdgV12oBJKUhm1CLAF7eV8Pt
[4] The word “missionary” is fluidly defined, depending on who you ask. Some would consider missionaries to be covert colonialists (which, unfortunately, used to be true but shouldn’t have been; we’ll address that issue later), or members of the CIA (this also should never be true), but the worst-case scenario would describe someone hell-bent on “converting the heathen” somewhere far away. The problem with these misunderstandings and caricatures is, we’ve given them credence in the past. They’re all inappropriate. I’ll address them in chapter two.
[5] I want to be really clear: I value both Catholic and Protestant streams of the Body of Jesus and I’m deeply grateful for my exposure to both.
[6] I’ve shared this story in To Trace a Rising Sun: God, the Gospel, and Your Life in This Age. If you’ve read it already, I apologize for the redundancy.
