Cultural Compasses — Don Richardson

John the Baptist Introduces Jesus as the Lamb of God

Thank You Miles and all of you for this delightful privilege to be your guest. May God forgive him for his exaggerations. May He forgive me for enjoying them. The most important introduction in the history of the world happened about 2 ,000 years ago when a man named John the Baptist had the privilege to introduce Jesus as the Messiah among the Jewish people.

For the purpose of that introduction, John used what must surely be regarded as the most meaningful metaphor ever used in any language. Pointing to Jesus of Nazareth that day, John the Baptist said, look the Lamb of God who does what?

Say it with me, who takes away the sin of the world. That metaphor, Lamb of God, was so meaningful within the cultural context of the Jewish people at that time because for centuries they'd been offering animal sacrifice to illustrate the need of an atonement for human sin.

An atonement that God could accept as a basis for forgiving the guilty. And those who sacrificed oxen, goats, sheep, doves, down through the centuries probably thought there was actually that animal blood that was atoning for their sin.

Was it really? We learn in the epistle to the Hebrews that the blood of bulls and goats does not put away sin. But that does not mean that they sacrificed those animals in vain. That practice of sacrificing animals kept alive, kept before the minds of the people, the need for an atonement, and served as a kind of cultural compass that was pointing forward in time to Jesus who would in time be revealed as the Lamb of God, the one foreshadowed by the sacrifice of animals.

Just as physical compasses from anywhere on the earth point to just one place, magnetic north, so God has ordained cultural compasses designed by him to point not to one place but to one person and that one and only one person is Jesus.

Old Testament Foreshadowings of Christ

Well I just gave you one example of an Old Testament cultural compass, Jesus as the Lamb of God, John chapter 1 verse 29. But in the Gospel of John you turn another page, you're in chapter 3, and there you find another example.

Jesus conversing with the teacher of the Jewish law named Nicodemus made reference to something that Nicodemus knew about that had happened 1 ,400 years earlier during Israel's exodus from Egypt heading for the Promised Land.

Jesus said, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up. Thus our Lord identified that event from the Exodus account as foreshadowing him lifted up in the cross for us.

Turn another two pages in the Gospel of John, you're in chapter 6, begin reading in verse 28. And there Jesus made reference to the provision of the manna for the children of Israel during those same wilderness wanderings and on that basis said, Moses gave you not the true bread from heaven.

He went on to explain that true bread from heaven is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. And then Jesus made a statement that would cause us to regard him as either insane or speaking something unusually true.

He said that he is that bread of life. How could a man dare to make a claim like that and expect to be taken seriously unless it really is the truth? So as you read on through the New Testament, you'll find many more examples of these cultural compasses, especially in the epistle to the Hebrews where the writer takes care to make sure you and I understand the features of the construction of the tabernacle in the wilderness and later of the temple in Jerusalem.

Aspects of the priesthood and the sacrifice of themselves were all foreshadowing one aspect or another of redemption later to be provided for mankind in the person of God incarnate Jesus. I'm sure you'll agree with me it was good of God to give the Jewish people all those foreshadowings of the Savior.

Gentile Cultural Compasses and the Missionary Task

But now I invite you to ponder a major question with me and the question is what about the rest of the human race? Did God take care to give only one small percentage of mankind foreshadowings of the Savior and leave the rest of mankind without that providence?

Down through the centuries those of us have been trained to be frontier crossers with the gospel, encouraged to go out into regions of the world where the message had never been proclaimed, learn languages in which it had never been expressed, have not been encouraged by our instructors to expect to find what could be called Gentile cultural compasses waiting out there on the other side of those frontiers to help us fulfill our mission, enable us to make the meaning of the gospel poignantly meaningful even to people hearing the message for the very first time.

Apparently our instructors just didn't think God went to that much trouble so shouldn't encourage to look for things that are not there to be found. In spite of the fact our instructors apparently didn't think God took the time and care to give Gentile cultures around the world foreshadowings of the Savior, guess what we frontier crossers have been finding and using down through the centuries?

Gentile cultural compasses. And we've been privileged to loosen little arrows on their dials and see those arrows point men and women to Jesus in culturally relevant ways. And lives have been transformed, the grace of God breaks through.

And often when we frontier crossers came back home for a furlough we didn't even bother to tell our instructors about the amazing things we found out there. Guess we thought it might confuse them, might not fit into their systematic theology, so we've tended to leave them in the dark.

I ask you would you like me to share some secrets with you from the other side of those frontiers? Would you like me to? I just love it when people really want me to tell them what I really want to tell them.

All right you asked for it. I'm inviting you to travel back in time with me. Nod your head if you're willing to go back in time with me for a few minutes. You are? You got to fasten your seat belt. Let me hear the click.

Okay you're ready. On the count of three. One, two, three. It's 1807. Where are we? Look we're standing by the docks in the port city of China. Here's a ship flying a British flag. It's docking. Who's this one British or disembarking?

Robert Morrison and the Chinese Cultural Context

Robert Morrison. Why is he setting foot in China in 1807? Oh he's here to be a missionary. Doesn't he know there are already four other ancient religions in China? Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and in some areas of China even Islam is already entrenched.

What chance does he think he has? One man to establish a significant foothold for the gospel of Jesus Christ in the world's most populous nation. Look at the expression on Robert's face. I think he's tempted to feel discouraged about the chances of any success.

He's just found out the Chinese language is tonal. It's not enough to produce the right sound with your vocal cords. You have to produce the right sound with the right pitch or you're totally misunderstood.

You may think you're saying grandmother. People hear you saying pig because you pitched it wrong. And he's thinking why does it have to be a tonal language? Why can't you just talk it? Why do you have to sing it?

He has no choice. He's got to master the tones. He's also found out the ancestors of the Chinese 4 ,000 years earlier did not sit down and invent a phonetic alphabet of 26 or so symbols like our A to Z.

They wanted something more complex. They got it. They invented a writing system that utilizes more than 200 little pictures called radicals that get combined in complex ways to make Chinese words. Look at Robert Morrison.

He's looking at a sample of Chinese writing, shaking his head in dismay, saying this reminds me of chicken tracks in the mud. How can I possibly learn to master something so complex? He may have been tempted to complain just a little bit to God saying where were you Lord when they invented this?

Couldn't you have exercised a little more of your marvelous capacity for sovereignty to cause him to come up with something simpler? But he has no choice. He has to master it. Robert has found a Chinese man with some knowledge of English who's willing to use his rather minimal knowledge of English to help Robert Morrison crack the code of Chinese grammar and amass vocabulary.

He's sitting down with his Chinese language instructor. He's in for a surprise. One morning Robert gave his pen to the man and said please I want you to explain to me which of these symbols you used to form the word that means righteous in your language.

Chinese man said yes I can show you that. He went swish swish swish swish on a piece of paper and showed Robert Morrison that the Chinese used two symbols to form that word drawing one over the other.

The upper symbol is the Chinese symbol for a lamb and there's a knife included which shows it's a sacrificial lamb. And underneath that is another symbol for first person singular pronoun. He realized when the Chinese write the word that means righteous they're actually writing the lamb over me.

Righteous. Robert said to his Chinese language instructor sir do you know where is the lamb? Pointing to the upper part of what the man himself had just written. The man under whom you and I must be found in the sight of Shang-Ti the Lord of Heaven.

That's the Chinese name for God. In order to be righteous in his sight. Chinese man said no I don't know where that lamb is. How about you foreigner do you know? Enabling Robert Morton to say oh do I have good news for you and for your people.

And Robert said to himself that there's one spiritually significant encoded message in this ancient writing system. There may be others and I'm gonna find them. He pressed on and day after day began to discover dozens of eventually 120 Chinese words that have spiritually significant messages encoded according to how the ancestors of the people had chosen to use little pictures instead of words to instead of phonetic symbols to make their words.

Robert found the Chinese symbol for a ship requires you to draw something resembling the shape of the hull of a ship. But it doesn't mean ship until you specify the precise number of people sailing in it.

Right any other number than the one I'm about to mention you will lose one mark in a Chinese language exam. And the number is eight people sailing in a ship. Hmm why do they think eight people was somehow a significant number?

Why not one two three four five seven any other number? Has to be eight. According to Genesis what was the first ship that ever floated? How many people were delivered from the flood in the ark? Ocho personas, eight people in a ship.

Chinese word for covet, desiring something that doesn't belong to you, requires you to draw two trees and a woman standing between two trees making some kind of a choice between two trees. What could that possibly have to do with coveting?

And the Chinese word for come just the verb come is more complex. To begin you draw the symbol for a tree at the center and it's a tree shaped like a cross. The Chinese symbol for a man is like our letter Y upside down.

Guess what is superimposed right over the center of the cross-shaped tree an upside down Y, a man suspended on a tree. Another part of it means mankind and the meaning of this combination is the verb come it reads like an encoded message mankind come to the man who hung on a tree.

And the Chinese people had no inkling of the way these symbols could be explained. But Robert Morrison did. He had 120 uniquely Chinese cultural compasses waiting to have the little arrows loosen on their dials to point Chinese people to Jesus and to the revelation revealed in Scripture.

There were of course those who opposed him calling him a foreign devil. But more and more Chinese people listening to Robert Morrison began to say it's incredible he's showing that somehow our own ancestors anticipated the teaching he would one day bring to our nation.

More and more Chinese people began to open their hearts to the Lord. Robert Morrison went on to translate the entire Bible into Chinese and he wrote letters to his supporters back in the British Isles.

Letters that took about six months to get there. Six months for an answer to come back. Email was not invented yet. And as more and more of his letters are being read in front of more and more congregations of Christians.

More and more Christians began to say that's incredible what's happening out there in China. Who was that fellow we send out there Robert Morrison never heard of him. By the way how many others did we send out there with him.

And the elders who commissioned Robert Morrison to go to China rather sheepishly said actually we sent only him and we almost weren't persuaded it would be worth the cost to do that. Apparently though it is working out.

It's worthwhile. So Christians began to say we should feel ashamed of ourselves for sending only one man on so great a mission. Are there others willing to follow the trail he's blazed out there. And there were others willing to go.

Following Robert Morrison's example. Some of them became more famous than Robert Morrison. I mean who did Pastor Miles mention Hudson Taylor. How many of you had heard of Hudson Taylor. How many had heard of Robert Morrison before I said his name this morning.

Not very many. Well seems a little unfair but that's all right. Robert Morrison has his reward anyway. And so soon the number of witnesses for Jesus began to increase in China. And more and more people were becoming Christians till by 1949 when the communists took control of China.

Persecution and the Growth of Christianity in China

The number of Christians had believed was believed to have risen to about 1 million. The communists set to work to try to eradicate all religious belief and establish atheism in its place. According to the US State Department they may have killed as many as 70 million Chinese people in the process.

That included about 500 ,000 Christians. And they confiscated all the Christian churches and schools in China. Changed the churches into warehouses. Changed the Christian schools into schools to teach communist atheism.

And warned the surviving Christians unless you give up your Christian faith you cannot be employed by the government. You cannot be a teacher in any school. And your children cannot receive public education.

You'll have to teach them yourselves. Furthermore you Christians can only be gravediggers or garbage collectors or tillers of the fields in the communes. Unless you give up your Christian faith you will not qualify for any kind of employment more meaningful than that.

These restrictions caused an estimated 200 ,000 Christians to capitulate to the pressure they gave up. That left about 300 ,000 who remained faithful and were determined to stay true to the Lord Jesus no matter what the communists did to them.

The communists knew they were there. They appointed a committee I heard about decades ago to find some way to discourage their faith. Weaken it without the expense of imprisoning them. Without the messiness of killing them and having to bury them.

And one member of the committee in Beijing the capital city said I've studied Christianity and I know where it is weak. He said Christians depend upon meetings meetings meetings meetings to keep their faith sustained.

It's only as they meet together and share their scriptures together and and pray together and sing their hymns together that their faith is strengthened by mutual encouragement. So we have a simple solution.

We'll send out an order if a dozen Christians for example are found in any one commune. We'll require that just one Christian or one nuclear family of Christians be left there and the others be scattered to other communes where there are no Christians.

Thank you said the other members of the committee would not have thought of an ingenious solution like that. So the order went out and the communist government of China completely at its own expense became the most efficient missionary sending organization in 2 ,000 years of church history.

The little dream the people they were scattering throughout virtually the entire commune system were men and women whose faith they themselves had strengthened by means of persecuting them. These were people who really radiated joy in spite of threats against their well-being by their own government.

People who were noted for it honesty integrity trustworthiness. People were drawn to them and drawn to the Lord Jesus through their witness. Thus the number of Christians in China began to grow exponentially.

It is now believed the number of Christians in China the minimum postulate is 80 ,000 80 million rather. Some say it's 100 million some say no we've done surveys and if those surveys are correct if we extrapolate from them to the rest of the provinces and areas of the nation's it's a hundred and twenty million.

It is believed the number of Christians in China is growing at an average daily net gain of nearly 30 ,000 new believers per day. And even some secular scholars are beginning to take note of this and are writing their own academic papers about what they call the Christianization of communist China.

The communists meanwhile are scratching their noggin saying somehow we made a mistake here and there's so many Christians we just have to show them a little bit of goodwill. So to show a little bit of grudging goodwill the communists have begun to give some of the warehouses back to the Christians.

Christians gladly accept them back refurbish them as the churches they originally were. And so many Christians and other curious people strong to attend those reopened churches in cities of China. They've had to establish a rule for some of them a rule that says you are not permitted to attend this church two Sundays in a row.

If you do you'll be stealing standing room only from other people that need to hear the Word of God. Elsewhere in the world pastors are frequently heard to say I didn't see you in church last Sunday. In China some pastors are more likely to say wait didn't I see you in church last Sunday?

You shouldn't be here. So did God prepare the gospel for China? And did he also in an unexpected way even prepare the Chinese people for the gospel? They had a name for God. Shang-Ti the Lord of Heaven defined as the uncreated creator of the heavens.

Yeah they had their idols Buddhist idols but they also knew about him. And they knew that he did not want to be represented by an idol. In India the world's second most populous nation. 1792 William Carey another Englishman and his wife Dorothy arrived and set up housekeeping in the predominantly Hindu part of India the northern part.

William Carey, Hinduism, and Cultural Preparation in India

There are some areas in the extreme south of India where there have been Christians since the first century. They claimed that the Apostle Thomas came and planted churches and those churches are called the Martoma churches in honor of the Apostle Thomas.

And in the extreme east of India several million tribal people resisted the lure of Hinduism for many centuries. And then when a handful of Christian missionaries came among them enormous numbers of them became Christians in an amazingly short time.

I wrote about that phenomenal response in a book called Eternity in Their Hearts and there were cultural triggers there I don't have time to get into today. But what about Hindus in India? It didn't seem likely to William Carey that in a culture is totally given to idolatry.

I mean there are literally millions of gods in Hindu theology more than any one worshiper could possibly worship in his entire lifetime. You'd have to worship I don't know dozens a day to try to cover them all.

Because in polytheism there's a built-in inflation factor. Once you decide that the infinite God is not enough you got to add finite gods take finite gods instead of him. You soon find Judas May it takes an infinite number of finite deities to fill the infinite deities sandals.

So there's always a need for another God for this and another God for that. There were also some very horrifying things like sati. Sati in Hinduism meant when a Hindu man died his widow had to be burned alive on the same pallet fire with him which his body was cremated.

And William Carey encountered that and was horrified to find the British East India Company which had political control of India at the time had done nothing to make that cruel custom illegal. So William Carey said you should use your authority to make it illegal.

We should not allow people to burn women alive just because their husbands have died. And they said don't bother us about things like that William. It's not our concern. Their concern was to sustain a steady cash flow of profits for the mother country.

That's all that mattered. And they even threatened William Carey saying if you preach against Hindu customs and anger the people so they refuse to work for us that'll interrupt our cash flow and we will throw you in prison sir.

Appalled at the callousness of his fellow Britishers who were there only for political commercial purposes William shared his problem with some Danish friends of his in a Danish enclave on the coast of India called Serampore.

And the Danes said guess what William we can solve that problem for you. What? How can you Danes solve my problem with my fellow Britishers? They said it's very simple. Great Britain and Denmark have a treaty.

So we're going to give you a Danish passport William Carey. We're gonna make you a citizen of Denmark. You go ahead and preach whatever you think God wants you to preach and if the Brits come to arrest you wave your Danish passport in their faces it'll be a perfect shield.

It worked. I hope God has somehow rewarded a little Denmark for the encouragement its reps out there in India gave to a beleaguered William Carey back in the 1790s. And William was writing letters to supporters back in England when those letters were read in front of congregations of Christians people were made aware of things like sati.

And they began writing letters to the Parliament saying tell our representatives out there in India to make that cool custom illegal right away. And they did. So it was made illegal. Radical Hindus resented that.

But lo and behold when William Carey preached against Whittle-Burning he found out there were some Hindu intellectuals who agreed with him. But they were afraid to say anything until he the bold foreigner took the lead.

So it was made illegal. And radical Hindus were saying wait till we become independent from British rule we'll make sati legal again it's our right. India did become independent from British rule in the 1940s.

Radical Hindus have been pressuring the independent government ever since to make sati legal. Thus far they have not given in to the pressure. Pray they will not. Whatever happens in the future you can be sure tens of millions of women in the world's second most populous nation owe the extension of their lives beyond the death of their husbands to the goodness of God at last reaching India through William Carey in this special way.

The Gospel and India’s Caste System

Something else in India is the world's most massive system of racist apartheid. When I said apartheid which nation came to mind? South Africa. But the world has a double standard justifiably opposing racist apartheid in South Africa till it was abolished a few years ago.

But the world overlooks, appeases, condones a massively greater system of racist apartheid in Hindu North India. Why do I say it's racist apartheid? Because the original inhabitants of India were the Dravidian race.

Later a different race the Aryan race invaded from the north and it was the Aryan conquerors who set themselves up as high caste Hindus relegating the entire Dravidian population to be the low caste Hindus and the lowest of the low are called Dalits which means untouchables.

Hindu priests of the Aryan race tell Dalits of the Dravidian race you must be careful to assure that not even your shadow falls on the skin of a high caste Aryan person. Just your shadow is contaminating, defiling.

And so it didn't seem likely to William Carey and others that they could expect to find anything in that kind of a cultural context pointing to Jesus. But as William and others began to learn language after language of India they eventually learned a language called Sanskrit.

Sanskrit is to India what Latin is to Western civilization. A language no longer spoken in the street but it has a significant body of ancient literature preserved which scholars study and are able to read.

Well William and others learned Sanskrit and began to find that the oldest writings in the Sanskrit language called the Vedas were written in some cases four thousand years ago before Hinduism had emerged.

But these things are preserved in the Hindu context even though Hinduism cannot claim them because they were there before Hinduism developed. And some of those ancient writings have read like biblical prophecies.

One for example, somewhere in the world there is an upside-down tree. What can cause a tree to be upside down besides a hurricane Katrina, a tornado, or a bulldozer? This is a tree that is upside down because it is rooted in heaven and it grows down toward the earth instead of up from the earth.

The upside-down tree spreads its branches out above the earth in every possible direction yielding fruit for all mankind. It goes on to say the trunk of the upside-down tree will be gashed and the sap that bleeds from the wound and the side of the upside-down tree is for the healing of mankind.

Nourishing fruit from the branches, nourishing sap from a wound in the side. Now that's a strange metaphor don't you agree? In spite of its strangeness does it remind you of someone you know and love?

Who else but Jesus can possibly offer to Hindus in India, Hindus in Nepal, or a Hindu in a 7-eleven near you? Jesus is the only one can possibly be offered that corresponds in every detail. Well more and more people in India are turning to the Lord in increasing numbers and where do you suppose the greatest response to the gospel would be?

Among the high-caste Aryan Hindus on their pedestal of privilege or among the Dravidians especially the Dalits, the lowest of the low. The Dravidians especially the Dalits are turning to the Lord in increasing numbers.

It is estimated 200 new house churches are opening the doors for the first time every month in India and you can understand why. Here are people who are taught by Hindu priests that they are virtually subhuman finding through the gospel of Jesus Christ that they are created in whose image?

In the image of God and who loved them enough to die to atone for their sin and reconcile them to God. God himself incarnate in the person of Jesus and they're invited by repentance from sin and faith in Jesus to enjoy not some demeaning kind of citizenship but full citizenship and the most glorious kingdom will ever be the kingdom of God.

Does that sound like good news? And every now and then a high-caste Aryan Hindu also believes in the Lord. When that happens that high-caste Aryan forfeits the privilege of being considered a high-caste person.

That person tumbles down the social scale even lower than the Dalits is regarded as an outcast with zero recognition. Well China and India the world's two most populous nations ancient cultures but what about Stone Age tribes hidden away in remote jungles especially if they're cannibals that eat human flesh and headhunters that cut off human heads and save skulls as trophies you couldn't expect to find anything in that sort of a cultural context that would be pointing men and women to Jesus could you or could you?

Missionary Work Among the Sawi People of New Guinea

In 1962 my wife Carol Joy who's been with the Lord now for six and a half years sailed with me and our little baby son Stephen our firstborn across the Pacific Ocean to a huge island north of Australia called New Guinea.

It's easy to find on a map because it's big it would reach from San Diego California almost to New Orleans in Louisiana 500 miles wide at the widest shape like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The head is at the western end with open jaws there's a narrow neck a huge hulking body and a tail several hundred miles long tapering along the western edge of the Pacific Ocean and New Guinea is the home of a thousand tribes speaking a thousand languages that means almost one out of every seven languages spoken on earth is spoken in New Guinea and we went there under a mission called world team please everyone say world team now please say world team org look us up on the web.

World team began back in the 1870s second oldest interdenominational faith mission second to the one established by Hudson Taylor and founded by a man Grattan Guinness who was the Billy Graham of the British Isles back in those days and we began working in the Congo in Africa and then across in India later in Nepal then in Peru and now in Indonesia and so Carol and I joined world team and arrived in New Guinea 1962 with little Stephen and found that the other young couples had gotten there just a little ahead of us.

We're all working in the mountains. The mountain tribes especially a tribe called Adani and another tribe called the Yali and the Danis had already begun to respond to the gospel by that time and so they said welcome Don and Carol you can join us in the work in the here in the mountains there's lots to be done but they said we do need to let you know another tribe has been discovered not here in the mountains but in the swamps away to the south swamps that extend over 30 ,000 square miles drenched with seven meters of rainfall a year that's like 22 feet of rain a year with crocodiles in the rivers poisonous snakes in the bush blood-sucking leeches in the grass and malaria mosquitoes.

Hey in the mountains you're a mile above sea level or more and that means that it's cool and you can grow vegetables that would not grow at sea level in the tropics and there was not even any malaria there yet.

So they said you don't have to go to that tribe in the swamps. We just need to let you know it's an option it's by mission agreement with other groups that's our responsibility but doesn't have to be you.

But as I was praying saying Lord I want to serve where you want me to serve. I want it to be your choice not mine. And I love climbing mountains and New Guinea has mountains that rise 2 ,000 feet higher than anything in the Rockies or the high Sierras ice-capped even though they're in the tropics.

And so I thought oh I just love to take a vacation and go climb this one or that one. That would have been my personal preference and I think everybody thought oh Don is for sure gonna say God has called me to the mountain tribes but the Lord was calling me to a swamp tribe and I knew it it was just so clear but I said to the Lord.

My wife Carol is a pastor's daughter from Cincinnati Ohio. She's been on a camping trip or two and it'd be so easy for her here with other missionaries that speak English you know up here in the mountains healthy safe cool.

If you want us to go to the Savi people those head under cannibals that have never heard of judges jails or policemen or law courts. We'd even don't even know if they'll invite us to dinner or please Lord give my wife Carol assurance from you that it is your call not just her husband wanting to go on a wild adventure and drag her along.

So as I was praying that way sure enough God spoke to Carol and she said Don ever since I heard the name of that tribe down in the south the saw way I can't get I can't forget the name. I keep thinking them.

I'm trying to imagine what they look like and what their language might sound like. I'm curious do you think God might want us to go to them. I said yes yes. I'm glad to hear you say these things. So we felt the peace of God about this and said send us to the saw.

We everybody said two or three times. Are you sure. Yeah we're sure. So we went down there and I left Carol and Stephen in a safe place and went in to test the attitudes of the saw we people I found out for a couple of years they'd been hearing positive reports about tall pale sickly looking beings called two ones.

That means European types. The saw with all the tribes. Are you getting our black skin. They're like the separated cousins of the sub-saharan black race. And they didn't know there were any people anywhere in the world of a different skin color.

But now they were hearing these reports and all the reports about these odd-looking beings were positive thank God wherever two months ago. They bring medicine they bring salt they bring steel tools to replace stone tools and nylon fish line the fish hooks and even something called soap.

And they never heard anyone. So that saw we began to say are there any spare two ones around. We think we'd like to welcome one only to have other tribes a little little closer to civilization. Say it to one live among you.

Who do you think you are. Don't you realize these strange beings are a scarce commodity so it's not enough for every tribe to have one let alone every village. And they're choosing about where they live and who they live among.

And you saw we are the worst of all the tribes. You're wretched awful people. You know that don't. You don't get your hopes up. You'll never be favored by the presence of one of these rare beings. Hearing these all nasty comments from their enemies the saw we people were saying wistfully.

Perhaps they're right. I guess we can't claim to be anyone special. But they also said just in case someday somewhere there's a two on the finds out that we live here and decides he wants to come and reside among us if he doesn't allow the antisocial propaganda of our enemies to turn him away from us.

When we find out that two and has chosen us we'll let him know. And no one certain terms we choose him. He'll be our two on will be his tribe. Guess which sort of a bloke you're looking at here. I'm a two on my wife Carolyn you know yeah a female to on even had a little baby to on little Stephen by then almost a year old.

And so when I made contact with them they looked at me so strangely. And then you know I tried to act reassuringly and and I gestured to indicate I wanted to help to build a little house and a little bit of high ground might not be flooded during the monsoon.

And they got the message. I handed out some steel those they went out in the jungle and cut poles and help me build a little 20 foot by 20 foot 400 square foot jungle home under a thatch roof. No glass in the windows.