TWO CENTURIES LATTER

What are the possibilities of someone accidentally taking up writing as a means to earn to pay off debt, and actually making it big, and becoming the reason, two hundred years latter, for a migrant seeker, who is thousands of miles away, in another country, coming to know Jesus as his personal Saviour? Daniel Defoe’s book, “Robinson Crusoe” did exactly that.

Daniel Defoe, an Englishman, was primarily a trader, but was also a writer, journalist, pamphleteer and a few other things. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is claimed to be second only to the Bible in its number of translations.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Defoe wrote it from a Puritan non-conformist point of view.” Two centuries after Defoe’s death, Neesima Shimeta, a Japanese youth, comes to Christ by reading Defoe’s book “Robinson Crusoe. [Christian History Institute]

“Niijima Jō, is better known by his English name Joseph Hardy Neesima, who went on to become a Protestant missionary, and an educator, and establishes Doshisha English School of Japan.”

What was written to help earn money to pay off a debt, turns out to be an instrument in helping a man of another country, some two centuries later, living far far away, to come to Christ. God can use anything. Even something that is not directly connected, and even insignificant. Just like the five loaves and the two small fish of little boy. The LORD works in His own mysterious ways.