If you are expecting commentary about the current immigration situation at the Mexican/US border, you will need to wait for a future column. At the same time thousands of people were trying to crash our southern boundary crossings, an individual man did the same thing at a different faraway place and the cost was his life and possibly more.

The man is John Allen Chau. Mr. Chau was 26 years old, a well-educated Christian missionary who hailed from Washington State. His final mission was a fool hearted expedition to “share the love of Jesus” with a hostile ancient tribe on the remote North Sentinel Island.

Here’s some geographical background; North Sentinel Island is claimed and governed by India, but it lays thousands of miles offshore in the Indian Ocean. It is one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. The island is inhabited by the Sentinelese tribe who are very aggressive and intolerant, living in a culture thousands of years removed from our own. The population is unknown and could be anywhere from 40 to 400 tribesmen. In order to protect their unique culture, it is a crime to make contact with the Sentinelese or to even approach the island.

With all of that in mind, John Chau decided his mission was to travel around the globe, find and bribe Indian fisherman to break the law by taking him to North Sentinel Island where he could basically commit suicide. Not only did he put himself and the fisherman at risk, but he also imperiled the tribe of Sentinelese by introducing disease and pathogens by stepping foot on their island. The fisherman said it took John, not one, not two, but three attempts at going ashore before he was killed by hurled spears and arrows.

This situation begs the questions; at what point did Mr. Chau become so committed to his religion that it manifested itself as mental illness? Also, who enabled this journey financially? His dangerous folly of introducing his religion to the unreceptive Sentinelese is reminiscent of the kind of people at the zoo who scale fences, swim across moats, and climb over culverts all because they want to pet a tiger – then end up as tiger dinner.

Mr. Chau graduated from Oral Roberts University whose self-proclaimed reason for being is a message from God to “teach students to hear my voice and to go where my light is dim.” It appears Mr. Chau kept this motto close to his thoughts by ignoring warnings and breaking the law in order to die. We will probably never know what he thought he was going to accomplish with his deeds.

Possibly he thought he was going to speak to them – in English – and quickly convince the elders of the tribe that this was their lucky day if they accepted John’s belief in divinity. Or, it might have been his plan all along to die a martyr and use that fame from the grave to further spread his message and gain more like-minded followers.

At last report, the Indian police remained at sea watching with binoculars as the tribesmen presumably buried Mr. Chau’s perforated body on the beach. The police now have a quandary on their hands. Do they consider this a homicide which would require them to go ashore on the island to investigate, and in so doing breaking the law by having contact with the tribe? Any police contact with the tribe would surely become violent, and the Sentinelese would be at a distinct weapon disadvantage. It might best for the police to motor away and let this be a lesson to others. We did learn from the police that Chau kept a journal. He wrote before landing attempt number three; “I don’t want to die”, even after he’d been shot at and hit by arrows in attempts one and two.

I am by no means an atheist. I am not trying to make light of a man’s death and bring any more hurt to his family. But who among us would consider it a good idea to go to a strange and far-off land to try to impose personal spiritual beliefs upon violent strangers? Sadly, John Chau probably won’t be remembered for being a Christian missionary. He may well be remembered as that idiot who tried to convert wild men and ended up contaminating and killing a whole island civilization.