Summer Reading Challenge, Wk 3: Nate Saint: Operation Auca

Have you seen our new tab for the Summer Reading Challenge?  In it, you’ll find all the links to our Summer Reading Challenge–both the main posts and all the fun extras.

This week in the challenge, our intern Abby Burns who just graduated from high school leads us in reading Nate Saint: Operation Auca.  If you’re looking for more missionary stories for your kids, or if you’d like to involve kids who aren’t old enough to read this book, take a look at our 100 Great Adventure Books for Kids?  For now, though, take it away, Abby!

Book Review by Abby Burns

Nate Saint: Operation Auca (Torch Bearers) by Nancy Drummond.  CF4K, 2012.  170 pgs.  Ages 6+.

Backyard roller coasters, death-defying winter mountain hikes, and flights over terrain that varies between beaches, jungles, and mountains. What could all of these three have in common? Nate Saint of course!  In fact, Nancy Drummond’s Nate Saint: Operation Auca often reads more like an adventure novel than a biography. Besides his adventures in jungles and on mountains, Nate also jumped a train, survived a plane crash, worked for the Army during World War II, and invented clever contraptions to help make airplanes safer and more efficient. Overall, there’s enough excitement to keep everyone from new readers to well-read adults captivated from start to finish.

Yet, Nate’s story has a unique element that sets it apart from other adventure tales. Where many books focus on the main character’s skills or quick thinking, Nate’s story always points to the power of God in his life. Whether he is lost on a mountain or just spending time with his family, Nate constantly calls out to God for protection and guidance, and God never fails to answer Him. We glimpse God working on Nate’s heart as a child, preparing him for a life on mission, and we marvel as God keeps him safe through many dangers in order to bring him to the right place at the right time to do His work.

This particular novel, part of the Torchbearer series, moves at a quicker pace than the popular missionary biographies from YWAM’s Christian Heroes: Then and Now series and the Trailblazer Books. Nancy Drummond scales back to take a wide look at Nate Saint’s life, making his story accessible for even elementary readers. The YWAM and Trailblazer books, on the other hand, are more suited to later elementary and middle grade readers who can handle the longer stories and weightier subject matter. Nancy, however, by balancing narration and dialogue with a heavy dose of adventure, has created a story that provides a great starting point for readers daunted by the length of most missionary tales.

Beyond demonstrating the faithfulness of God, Nate’s life also reveals what it means to follow Him in all matters. His brother Phillip, an evangelist, once told him that “the happiest place for a man to be is right in the center of God’s will for his life.” Nate takes these words to heart and spends his whole life seeking and following God’s will.

He faces a dilemma, though, when God calls him to be a missionary. Nate had always planned to work with and fly planes, a passion God had given him since childhood, but he could not see how they would fit into his missionary work. Despite his disappointment, Nate chose to follow God’s will. In response, God surprised Nate with an opportunity to use his knowledge of airplanes to help spread the Gospel. Thus, Nate was able to join his passion for the lost with his talent for planes, and God continued to work through Him.

Ultimately, following God’s will led Nate to Ecuador with his young family, where he helped pioneer an aviation ministry that provided needed material, medical, and spiritual support to the missionary families spread throughout remote Indian tribes. Soon God gave him and four other men a passion to reach the hostile Auca tribe with the Gospel, and, though He did it in an unexpected way, God used the lives and deaths of these five men to completely transform the tribe along with the hearts of people around the globe.

Overall, this book presents heavy topics like the nature of following God in all of life and the eventual martyrdom of Nate Saint in an accessible format for children. By coupling these heavy topics with some good old-fashioned adventure, Nancy Drummond has written a great book for igniting summer imaginations and for pointing young and old alike to the greatness of God.

Worldview/Moral Value: 4.5 (out of 5)

Literary Value: 4

Discussion Questions

1. Which of Nate’s adventures did you like the best? Would you like to have that adventure?

2. Can you think of a time in your life when God kept you safe or comforted you? (It’s important to remember that God works in our lives just like he worked in Nate Saint’s. Not all children will have ready answers to this, so you can provide examples or help prompt them to remember what God has done in their lives.)

3.  How did God use Nate’s talents and interests in spreading His kingdom? What are some of your talents and loves? How might God use them?

4. Romans 8:28 says that “in all things God works for the good of those who love Him” (NIV). How did God use Nate’s death to do good?

Thanks so much, Abby!  We really appreciate your help in opening this book to our kids.  Later in the week, we plan to talk about some crafts your kids can do to help missionaries.  But in the meantime, for more Around the World reading, see Janie’s recent review of a Christian Children’s Atlas. 

You might also like to check out our interview of Elisabeth Elliot’s daughter, Val, about her children’s book, Pilipinto’s Happiness, which deals with her time with the Auca people.  For older kids or family viewing, see the movie version of the story, End of the Spear and the documentary, Beyond the Gates of Splendor.