Praying Hyde (For Children)

It is a children’s version of the full-length biography of John Hyde. It tells how a minister’s son from Illinois went to the villages of the Punjab in India, learned to pray with all his heart, loved the poorest people there, and helped many of them to follow Jesus.

An American missionary who lived from 1865 to 1912. He was shy, slow of speech and partly deaf, but he gave himself to prayer so much that the people of the Punjab called him “the man who never sleeps,” and Christians around the world came to call him “Praying Hyde.”

Every chapter is short and made to be read aloud. It begins with a Bible verse, tells one part of John’s story, shows one simple thing it means for you, and ends with a short prayer. Three questions follow, to talk about together.

A few parts are sad: John’s brother dies young, and at the end John becomes very ill and dies. The book tells these parts honestly but gently, without frightening detail. Above all it is a happy story of God’s love, of answered prayer, and of a man who died saying, “It’s just victory, victory, victory.”

Yes. They come from church records and from the friends who knew John Hyde and wrote down what they remembered. A few stories were told in slightly different ways, and some numbers in the old books cannot be checked, and the book says so gently when it matters.

It is for children, to be read aloud by a grown-up or read by an older child alone. There is also a teen edition, and the full-length biography for older readers.