A vignette of Adoniram Judson
Bethany and I started a book together on our honeymoon called “The Life of Adoniram Judson.” It is a pretty beasty book, but we figured we would be married a while… . It tells how he was one of the first people in America to become a missionary. Not long after William Carey had left for India, Adoniram Judson and his wife left (and ended up being with William Carey’s brother for a little while).
It will steel your will against hardship to read about the life of this couple. They started with no American missions agency to support them. He went to Britain to talk to the London Missionary Society, but his ship was captured by a French privateer, and he was imprisoned for three months. He escaped in the large overcoat of a nobleman, and talked to the British missions agency—but they said they wouldn’t send him either… . So the Judsons and their associates chartered one. They could have given up, resigned to the “will of God.” But they didn’t get their idea of the will of God from circumstances—they got it from the Bible. And they knew that He wanted the Gospel to reach Asia. God’s will cannot be separated from His mission.
After changing denominations based on conviction, being baptized by British missionaries during the War of 1812, being ordered out of India by the British East India Company, and going through a miscarriage en route, they arrived in Burma, refreshed and ready for the field. Right?
What made it worth it? I would tell you about their first convert, Moung Nau, six years after their arrival. But even that was not the guarantee that kept Noah or Jeremiah preaching. On the inside cover of one of his books, Adoniram wrote:
“In joy or sorrow, health or pain,
Our course be onward still;
We sow in Burmah’s barren plain,
We reap on Zion’s hill.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=04MG7p7YP8kC&lpg=PA129&ots=IKpqLQJoqv&dq=moung%20nau&pg=PA124#v=onepage&q=moung%20nau&f=false
