The Land Of The Fire

The Land Of The Fire

About the year 1800 the mother of Allen Gardiner entered her little boy’s bedroom and found him sleeping on the cold hard floor.

WHEN SHE asked him why, he replied that he intended someday to become a world traveler, and such an ambition required that one be accustomed to hardship.

Drawn by the romance of the sea, Gardiner joined the navy as a teenager. Navy life led him away from his mother’s godly influence, yet he knew that she loved him and prayed continually for his salvation. When a letter informing him of his mother’s death reached him at a port of call in China, a hunger for things Christian reawakened in him. In Lima he visited the site of the Inquisition and was sickened at the cruel instruments of torture.

Then his ship stopped in Tahiti. There Gardiner found an atmosphere of peace and rest. Missionaries had been there only a short time, but many people had been transformed. Gardiner attended church and was particularly impressed observing a native teaching small children.

His journal records the change that took place in his life as they approached South Africa: “The last time I visited this colony I was walking in the broad way and hastening by rapid strides to the brink of eternal ruin. Blessed be His name, who loved us and gave Himself for us, a great change has been wrought in my heart, and I am now enabled to derive pleasure and satisfaction in hearing and reading the Word of Life.”

After his wife died in 1834, Gardiner’s thoughts turned to the many people he had met on his naval adventures who had never heard about Jesus Christ. Gardiner longed for them to meet Jesus as he had and didn’t care how many cold hard floors he’d have to sleep on to accomplish it.

That year he established the first mission station among the Zulus of South Africa. He won the Zulu king to the Lord, but a treacherous Dutch trader forced Gardiner to flee for his life back to England. In 1836 Gardiner, not one to be discouraged, turned his energies to the Indians of South America whom the Lord had laid on his heart during his navy days.

Gardiner remarried, and he and his family spent more than fifteen years in Chili and Argentina laboring to make the Patagonian Missionary Society a reality. He established a supply system from the Falkland Islands to support his endeavors. On December 5, 1850, he and six others landed on the island of Tierra del Fuego, or “The Land of the Fire.” As they moved inland hoping for evangelistic success, hostile Indians drove them back to their small boat. They possessed only six months of rations and stretched them out as meagerly as they could, awaiting the scheduled supplies from the Falklands.

In January of 1852 the supply ship arrived—three months too late. Gardiner and his companions had slowly starved to death. His journal told the tale: “Poor and weak as we are, our boat is a very Bethel to our souls, for we feel and know that God is here. Asleep or awake, I am, beyond the power of expression, happy. . . . Great and marvelous are the loving-kindnesses of my gracious God unto me. I neither hunger nor thirst, though five days without food.”

The story of Gardiner’s death had a powerful impact on the Christians of England. Gardiner’s Patagonian Missionary Society became the South American Missionary Society, and six years later eight more missionaries sailed below the equator. As they held a worship service on the shore, seven of them were slaughtered by Indians.

The Land of the Fire became a holy crucible, refining the South American Missionary Society for evangelizing South America. Today throughout southern Chile and Argentina tens of thousands of Christians are the result of its faithful efforts and a realization of Gardiner’s dream.

Reflection

God is able to bring victory out of seeming tragedy. The death of Allen Gardiner raised up more missionaries than he could have recruited had he lived. His death brought the message of life to tens of thousands.

Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life. No one who comes to me will ever be hungry again. Those who believe in me will never thirst.”

John 6:35