"I don't live under the shadow of death - I live in Christ who is my life."

 

 

Interview done on August 15, 2011

Part 1

 

Interview done by Dan Wooding
(Founder of ASSIST Ministries)

 

 

World missionary, Geoff Richards, who has served in India, Nepal, the Middle East, the UK, and his homeland Australia, has become a cancer pilgrim to the world despite battling prostate cancer now for several years. He has sold up everything in his native Australia, and is now “A Joyful Cancer Pilgrim to the World".

 

 
This amazing Christian, who has suffered a series of terrible set-backs in his life that would have crushed many, is again touring the world bringing his message of hope - and I caught up with him during the most recent leg of his tour. I met him at the train station in Irvine California, and we soon settled down to do a Front Page Radio show that will soon be broadcast.

 

I had first met Geoff in Cyprus when he was working with Open Doors, Brother Andrew's ministry, that was reaching out to the Middle East - and we had kept in touch over the years.

 

I began by asking him to share about his early life, and Geoff said that he had given his life to Christ many years ago in Australia while attending a meeting addressed by Dr. J. Edwin Orr (born in Belfast in 1912) who Billy Graham once described as "one of the greatest authorities on the history of religious revivals in the Protestant world" (Dr. Orr passed away in 1987).

 

Richards said that the date of his conversion - May 11, 1957 - was also a time he will never forget because on that same evening he felt God's call to be a missionary to India - where he went a few years later and met and married his wife Jan, who was the daughter of a family that had pioneered a wide-ranging Gospel literature service in Mumbai (then called Bombay).

 

"I found a delightful life in India for eleven years - and then, subsequently, the Lord took me onto Nepal for a couple of years helping to set up student work in Kathmandu - and later we had a couple of years in Kenya - and then onto Cyprus", he said. "So that was a very happy time indeed before the Lord took us back to Australia for our children’s education.”

 

I had once had the privilege of staying at the Richards' home in Sydney, and met his wife, children and his father who was born in England… But then, after I returned home to the United States, Geoff began to face a series of incredible setbacks.

 

 
"The first was when my father suddenly became quite ill in January of 1991 and died within a few days", he said. "And then, on the following morning, my son Timothy, at the age of twenty-one, was also taken home. He had a massive seizure in the night and was suffocated. We had a double funeral and it was a huge wakeup call for me. It was like hitting a brick wall at 60 miles an hour, and at that time of pain, the Lord really met me, and He just said, 'I love you'. It was then that I realized, as never before, just how deep that love was. I had been a very driven missionary before then and I now knew that I needed to get to know the Living God: the tender, very present Father, an immediate help and a constant presence, and I found that to be the greatest joy of my life as I went on from there."

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