The Martyrs of the Ecuador Mission
8 January 1956 (modified by sermon author)
In the dense rain-forests of Ecuador, on the Pacific side of the Andes Mountains, lives a tribe of Indians.
-They simply call themselves the “people” but their neighbor’s call them “savages”
-For many generations they have been completely isolated from the outside world, disposed to kill any stranger on sight, and feared even by their head-hunting neighbors, the Jivaro tribe.
-Nate Saint was 32 years old (born 1923), and devoted to flying.
-With his wife, Marjorie Farris, he established a base at Shell Mera and flew short hops to keep missionaries supplied with medicines, mail, etc.
-There were 3 other families there and another family joined later.
- These were men and woman that love God and felt his call and answered.
-Nate and Ed found a settlement from the air.
-They would fly over the village and drop gifts as a means of making contact and establishing a friendly relationship.
-Eventually they would try for closer contact. Nate had discovered that, if he lowered a bucket on a line from the plane, and flew in tight circles, the bucket remained almost stationary, and could be used to lower objects to the ground. He had devised a mechanism to release the bucket when it touched down.
-Soon the Huaorani were responding with gifts of their own tied to the line: a woven headband, carved wooden combs, two live parrots, cooked fish, parcels of peanuts, a piece of smoked monkey tail....
-After three months of air-to-ground contact, during which they made far more progress than they had hoped, the missionaries decided that it was time for ground contact.
-They located a beach that would serve as a landing strip, about four miles from the village.
-After some discussion, they decided to carry guns, having heard that the Huaorani never attacked anyone who was carrying a gun, and having resolved that they would, as a last resort, fire the guns into the air to ward off an attack, but would shoot no one, even to save their own lives.
-On Tuesday they flew in and made camp, then flew over the village to invite the Huaorani to visit them. The first visitors showed up on Friday: a man, a woman, and a teen-aged girl. -They stayed for several hours in apparent friendliness, then left abruptly. On Saturday, no one showed, and when the plane flew over the village, the Huaorani seemed frightened at first, but lost their fright when presents were dropped.
-On Sunday afternoon at about 3 PM, all five missionaries were speared to death at their camp.
What in the world could their brutal deaths so far away from home in the service of their God could have accomplished in the jungles of some foreign land?
-Because of their deaths the efforts were intensified not abandoned.
---->More than twenty fliers from the United States promptly applied to take Nate’s (the pilot) place.
---->More than 1000 college students volunteered for foreign missions in direct response to the story of these
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