Sadhu Sundar Singh

Sundar Singh was born into a devout Sikh family in the Punjab and lost his mother at fourteen. Grieving and angry, he burned a Bible in his courtyard in front of neighbors, and three days later, by his own account, woke in the night to a vision of Christ in his room. His father disowned him and, he said, his family tried to poison him. At sixteen he put on the saffron robe of a wandering holy man and set out barefoot - a sadhu, but a Christian one, presenting the gospel in the dress and idiom of India rather than of England. He walked the north again and again and crossed into Tibet almost every summer, where the accounts of imprisonment in a dry well and of a hidden Christian hermit come only from his own telling. Europe and America filled halls to hear him in the early 1920s. In April 1929, in failing health, he set out for Tibet once more and was never seen again.