The Insanity of God

Nik Ripken (a pseudonym used to protect people in danger) is a Christian missionary and relief worker whose memoir traces his journey from a rural Kentucky childhood through humanitarian work in war-torn Somalia, the death of his teenage son, and a global pilgrimage interviewing persecuted believers across more than 70 countries.

Nik grew up the second oldest of seven children in a poor but hardworking Kentucky family whose parents dropped them off for Sunday school but rarely attended church themselves. An Easter sermon at 11 briefly stirred his spirit, but the congregation's indifference convinced him faith was irrelevant, and he spent the next seven years uninterested. At 18, while working a night shift at a cheese factory before leaving on a veterinary scholarship, he heard a voice: "Are you ready to stop running and serve me?" (31). He surrendered his life to Christ, gave up the scholarship, and enrolled at a small Christian college, taking the Great Commission in Matthew 28 as a personal command.

During college, Nik met Ruth, a preacher's daughter called to Africa since elementary school. After a rocky courtship they married, and in 1984 they arrived in Malawi with two young sons, Shane and Timothy. Rapid church growth followed, but recurring malaria forced a move to South Africa, where they worked during apartheid for nearly six years and welcomed a third son, Andrew. Rereading the Book of Acts, they felt called to unreached places and began preparing to work among Somali Muslims.

In February 1992, Nik hitched a ride on a Red Cross plane into Hargeisa, the regional capital of Somaliland, a breakaway region in the Horn of Africa devastated by civil war and government bombing. He found armed men everywhere, land mines discovered at a rate of 50 per day, and only seven intact roofs among 70,000 residents. In the marketplace, armed convoys delivered not food but khat, a narcotic drug, to desperate people trading their last possessions for hours of forgetfulness. He concluded that the supply line for evil outpaced the supply line for good.

Nik and Ruth established a relief organization, launching health clinics and food distribution in Mogadishu, where 90 percent unemployment prevailed, hundreds of thousands had died of starvation, and warring clans split the city. At a hospital in the interior city of Afgoie, Nik brushed the cheek of a starving three-year-old who smiled radiantly; she died hours later. On scouting trips, mothers chased his truck, thrusting babies through windows and begging him to save their last surviving children.

When US Marines arrived in December 1992 as part of Operation Restore Hope, the team expanded to five feeding centers serving 50,000 people per day, but Somalis increasingly viewed Westerners as occupiers. In a shelled-out building, Nik and three Westerners shared a secret communion meal with four Somali believers, breaking bread in remembrance of Christ's sacrifice. Weeks later, all four were assassinated in coordinated attacks. Within two months, 70 Western workers dwindled to four, and the known Somali believers were reduced to almost none.

On Easter Sunday 1997, 16-year-old Timothy went into cardiac arrest from an asthma attack and died. Omar Aziz, Nik's Muslim chief of staff from Mogadishu, traveled five days across minefields and borders to attend the funeral, calling Timothy "our son" (132). Omar asked why only followers of Jesus seemed to know where their loved ones go after death. On a final trip to Mogadishu, Nik blessed his staff and departed, wrestling with whether his years of work had accomplished anything.

Back in America, Nik and Ruth settled at their alma mater. A life-giving idea took shape: They should find believers who had survived persecution elsewhere and learn from them. They formed a Persecution Task Force, compiled a list of 45 countries, and began research trips in Russia and Eastern Europe.

In Russia, Nik met Dmitri, a believer imprisoned for 17 years after his home Bible study grew to 150 people. Two disciplines sustained him: each dawn he sang a personal song of praise to Jesus despite prisoners' abuse, and whenever he found paper he wrote out memorized Scripture on a damp prison wall, enduring beatings each time. When authorities claimed his wife had been murdered and his children taken, Dmitri agreed to sign a confession. That night, his family sensed his despair from a thousand kilometers away and prayed. Dmitri miraculously heard their voices, learned they were alive, and refused to sign. On the day he was dragged toward execution, 1,500 inmates stood and sang his song. The guards released him in terror.

Across Eastern Europe, Nik gathered stories that reshaped his understanding. An old Russian pastor told him that persecution was as normal as the sun rising in the east. Stoyan, an Eastern European believer whose name means "stand firm," recounted his pastor father's imprisonment, his mother's defiance, and his own underground publishing network. Stoyan challenged Nik with words that become the book's central exhortation: "Don't ever give up in freedom what we would never have given up in persecution!" (196).

In China, Nik gained access to the house-church movement through David Chen, a Chinese-born pastor. Chinese leaders described prison as their theological education. At a secret conference of 170 house-church leaders, Nik shared stories of persecuted Muslim-background believers, and the leaders vowed to rise an hour earlier every morning to pray for them. When a leader asked how their movement could care for 400 imprisoned leaders' families, Nik delivered an unexpected message: If 10 million believers could not care for 400 families, they had no right to call themselves the church. The leaders wept and recommitted to caring for their own.

Across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Islamic world, Nik encountered believers who found Jesus through dreams, visions, and miraculous discoveries of Bibles. In a darkened apartment, a former militant who had killed more than 100 people told Nik that recurring visions of blood on his hands led him to Jesus. When the man demanded to know how God could ask him to risk his family, Nik asked if Jesus was worth it. The man declared through tears that He was.

Nik identifies music as a universal factor sustaining faith under persecution: Dmitri's daily song of praise in a Russian prison; the approximately 600 worship songs composed by Tavian, an imprisoned Eastern European believer, now sung in churches across his country; and the story of Aisha, a young Muslim-background believer whose spontaneous song from a police cellar so unsettled the Chief of Police that he escorted her home and asked her to tell his family why she was not afraid.

Over 15 years, Nik and Ruth conducted more than 700 interviews across 72 countries. Nik concludes that persecution stems from people surrendering to Jesus and refusing to keep Him to themselves. He identifies Satan's paramount strategy as keeping believers silent, arguing that Western Christians who never share their faith accomplish the same goal as persecutors. Samira, a young Muslim-background believer from Central Asia resettled in the American Midwest, attended a Kentucky church baptism and was overwhelmed that a family could be baptized publicly without being threatened. She whispered, "I never dreamed that God could do such things!" (320). Nik recognizes that what Western believers experience as ordinary, believers in persecution recognize as extraordinary grace. He closes by acknowledging that God sent him to learn who Jesus truly is from people who know Him far better.