Broken Stick: Mission to the Forbidden Islands by Eileen E. Lantry

Broken Stick is a wonderful story about God's power working through the lives of an amazing, adventurous couple who were willing to give everything to advance His kingdom of love, within an extremely challenging social and environmental context.

The stories are usually very well told, but unfortunately there are some occasions when the characters are made to look simple, or even naive. For example, I was surprised with the way the missionary wife, Ruby Ferris, is first introduced. Apparently she asked her husband Norman whether it is really possible for Jesus to save a devil worshipping priest and his young warriors. When I read this, the thought struck me, would an intelligent woman like Ruby Ferris, after years of training and experience at home in Australia, really go out to a frontier mission for the sole purpose of sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, if she had any doubts whether God's grace extended to everyone? The rest of the book reveals Ruby to be a wonderful woman of faith, so I don't picture her being this naive. If she was though, she certainly would have learned very quickly how powerful God's love for these people was when miracle after little miracle attended their efforts!

The only other negative I can think of, and unfortunately there are many examples of this, is all the errors in the text; grammatical errors, spelling errors, and typographical errors. Some of these errors are so obvious it's apparent that no one has bothered to proof read the final draft before the book has been printed. This is so sad to me, as it distracts from the wonderful story.

One particular error really stood out to me. On the third line of page 12 one finds a lower case "h" followed by an upper case "H", used together in the word "hHis". Here is a portion of the sentence as it reads: "exceeding riches of hHis grace..." I don't think too many readers are going to miss that one! How sad that this, and all the other minor errors were not picked up by the editor, prior to this wonderful book going to print.

Unfortunately I find that this problem of poor editing is all to common in the books published by Seventh-day Adventist Church publishers these days, which makes me feel reluctant to share such books with my skeptical friends and family, most of whom are highly educated and very intelligent people. What will they think of stories like this, that must seem so fictional to a rational, secular, post-modern mind, especially when there are so many errors in the text? I cringe at the thought that they will conclude that if so many minor errors were not corrected, then perhaps gross errors were made in the research for this book too, giving rise to doubts about the historicity of the events described in Broken Stick.

I don't want to focus too much on negatives, but as Christians, I believe we should strive for everything we do to glorify our Father in Heaven, and I just think the editors could have easily done a better job with this otherwise wonderful book.

I certainly feel blessed to have discovered this gem of Adventist pioneer mission history. And I've also been inspired to follow in the footsteps of Norman and Ruby Ferris, their family, and their co-workers from the Solomon Islands who gave their lives to the work of sharing the gospel with those living in darkness.

Excellent story on mission work in Solomon islands and Guadalcanal

Great story