Sundar Singh

Sundar Singh was born in 1889 at Rampur in the Punjab, in the north of British India, into a devout and well-to-do Sikh family, and as a boy he hungered for God and could not find peace. He searched the Sikh and Hindu scriptures, he was sent to a Christian mission school, and the more the missionaries pressed their faith on him the more he hated it; in his anger he once tore a Bible apart and burned the pages. By the age of fifteen he was in despair, and he resolved that if God did not show himself before morning he would lay his head on the railway line and let the train end his life.

He spent that night in prayer, and before the dawn of a December morning in 1904 he saw, by his own account, the living Christ standing in the room, not the figure of any picture he had been shown, but a presence of light who spoke to him in love and asked how long he would go on running away. He rose a Christian, and it cost him everything: his family disowned him, and tradition says they tried to poison him before they cast him out. He had gained Christ and lost his home in a single night.

Then he made the choice that defined his life. He would not put on a black coat and become a Western kind of Christian, as if the gospel were a foreign thing that came wearing English clothes. Instead he took the saffron robe of the sadhu, the wandering holy man of India, kept nothing, and went out barefoot to carry Christ to his own people in the form they already honored, the homeless seeker after God. For more than twenty years he walked, through the Punjab and across the north of India, up into the Himalayan foothills and over the passes toward Tibet, preaching in parables and living on what was given him. People called him the apostle with the bleeding feet. What he had found he set down with great simplicity in a little book of his teaching: Prayer is an effort to lay hold of God Himself, the Author of life, he wrote, and when we have found him who is the source of life, the whole of life is ours.

He told, too, of wonders on his hardest journeys, of being kept alive in the snows and of holy men hidden in the mountains, and not everyone believed him; in his own lifetime learned men argued over his stories, for he kept no records and traveled with no one who could confirm them. The church can be honest about that and still hold his witness dear, for the heart of his life was never in dispute: that he gave up wealth and family and comfort to walk after Christ, and that he proved with his bleeding feet that the gospel is not the property of the West but belongs to every people on earth. In the spring of 1929, old before his time and worn out, he set his face once more toward Tibet and climbed up into the mountains, and he was never seen again. The church does not know where he died, or how. It knows only the One he had gone to find, and into whose hills he disappeared still seeking the lost.