Maharishi Valmiki is a renowned figure who wrote the epic ‘Ramayana’. It is said that once upon a time he was a highway robber who used to rob people before killing them but later on he realised his sins and left everything to become a ‘rishi ‘ and drowned himself in the name of lord Rama.

Sam Childers was born to a family of iron workers in USA who during his teens went into a destructive relation with cigarettes, marijuana, heroin and much more. This relation of his teenage years propagated him into several years of addiction to drugs, drug dealing, alcoholism and many other illegal activities. He was crazy about motorcycles and loved to live like an outlaw biker. This criminal nature at last landed him in jail.

After being released from jail he converted to Christianity and went to Sudan for the first time in 1998 to help Sudanese people battered by civil war. In the numerous trips that followed he saw humanity bleeding helplessly under the terror of Lord's Resistance Army(LRA). The bloodshed and barbaric atmosphere challenged the fighter inside him to stand up and raise a war for the unknowns. He stood up for the cause of orphans and ‘child-soldiers’ not only to support them by mere words or some thousand dollars but to rescue them from hell with his firepower. He became their preacher, a preacher who used to sleep with Bible on one side and gun on the other. This heroic act gave him a new name “MACHINE GUN PREACHER”.

“It’s something when you can take a child who may not have a good life, maybe the schooling is not good, maybe the food they’re eating is not good. But they still have a smile on their face, they’ll still laugh and giggle. Children are the same all around the world, and I believe, sometimes, the more a child has, the more spoilt they can get – because in America there’s a lot of children who just aren’t thankful for what they’ve got. But I noticed in Sudan, you can take a bottle of Soda, you can give it to ten children and they’ll take little sips until everyone gets a sip, they would just keep passing it around, sharing. You don’t see that a lot in America.”

He is also criticised by some ‘idiots & hypocrites’ who talk of right and wrong ways sitting in their safe comfort zone but they do not know that ‘when bullets are flying in air instead of butterflies, you have to grab a gun if you want to breathe’. They talk about tolerance, non-violence and all that diplomatic crap but they can’t ignore that this man had not fought for some piece of land or money, he had fought only to rescue and protect children from being abducted, killed or forcibly converted into ‘child-soldiers’. I too support non-violence until the person in front starts considering it as my weakness or cowardliness and tries to cause some harm.

From last 13 years he protected, rescued and nurtured children in a distant undeveloped country crumbling under civil war but now after peace some people want to steal the good-will he earned by accusing him in different mean ways. Throughout the human history great people were  always accused after their services are not required and Childers is not an exception but at the end Childers  have successfully propagated his message of ‘A Missionary With Muscles’ through his book 'Another Man's War'.On September 23 2011 a movie named ‘Machine Gun Preacher’ was released on his life featuring Gerard Butler(300 fame). 

 

Valmiki left robbery to become a saint and wrote about Lord Rama who fought against evil to rescue his wife, Sam Childers left his criminal past and modern ,safe and secure life behind to fight against PLA on their own land to rescue African childrens…..definitely this man is BETTER THAN VALMIKI.