It's about community. Yes, the enduring biblical dynamic of community that transcends colliding cultures and what can seem to the natural mind as impossible. For years, I've recommended "Anointed for Burial," by Todd and Deanne Burke, as the best missionary book I've ever read -- because it deals with the realities of faith under fire, when in the 70s, the Cambodian church had to go underground to survive. I now put Steve Saint's "End of the Spear" alongside it, for similar reasons -- of the need to rethink the realities when faith and the challenges of life and death, without simple answers, collide. I was drawn to this book having been acquainted with the story of the author's father's and four compatriot's tragic deaths as missionaries. I knew the author's mother and step-father. His stepfather Abe, together with one of his closest friends, a business owner, became mentors to me in the mid-80s, reshaping my perspective in a calling as a businessman-missionary. While most readers are touched by the stories of the author's and his missionary family's valiant response to tragic loss -- of refusing to either "stuff it" or live in the shadows as victims, a response to loss which I personally can relate to, the subtle, underlying message of "The End of the Spear" is one of community and its fruits, where faith is put to the test when answers require the courage to get out of the box with much more than the superficial. The author's keen insights shout to the issue plaguing too many within mission thinking to this day -- of the need for higher dimensions to address the loss of cultural identity and self-sufficiency because of the misplaced good-intentions of those who regard standard abbreviated Western Christian thinking as synonymous with Kingdom thinking. Steve Saint is a gifted and compelling writer whose thinking and exploits as a missionary I salute ....a man of depth who has learned to view life and his faith through the prism of a brutally honest heart and sensitivity to the spiritual realities of the Bible with a wisdom that transcends the cultural boundaries and shallow confines of thinking, that too easily can be defined by the precepts of men.