CHAPTER nine
CHAPTER nine
The Call That Changes Everything: How God Summons His Servants and What They Do With the Summons
I want to talk to you about the missionary call. Not in the abstract, theoretical way that books about missions often discuss it — as a category of religious experience to be analyzed and defined. I want to talk to you about it the way a man talks about something that happened to him and changed the entire trajectory of his existence. Because that is what the missionary call is: not an idea, not a theological concept, not a denominational program. It is an encounter. A personal, specific, life-altering encounter between a particular human soul and the living God who made that soul and has purposes for it that extend far beyond anything that soul would naturally choose for itself.
I know this because it happened to me. And in the thirty-seven years of Burma that followed, I had the opportunity to watch it happen to others — to Ann, to Luther Rice, to George and Sarah Boardman, to the dozens of Burmese and Karen believers who heard the gospel and discovered that responding to it was not a matter of choosing a new religion but of surrendering to a call they had not known was coming. The call of God is distinctive. It leaves marks. And once you understand what those marks look like, you can recognize them — in your own life, in the lives of those around you, in the history of the church that has been answering this call for two thousand years.
(Isaiah 6:8 KJV) "Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me." Here am I. Send me. That is the whole of the missionary call, compressed into four words. But between the hearing of the voice and the speaking of those four words lies a journey — sometimes long, sometimes agonizing, always transformative — that I want to trace carefully in this chapter.
Stage One: The Burden of Lost Eternity
Every genuine missionary call I have ever observed or experienced began with the same thing: a real, felt, personally experienced weight of the lostness of people who do not know Jesus Christ.
I do not mean a theoretical acknowledgment that people who have not heard the gospel are in spiritual danger. That acknowledgment is available to any Christian who reads the New Testament carefully. I mean something deeper and more visceral than that — the kind of awareness that keeps you awake at night, that interrupts your ordinary daily life with the faces of people you have never met, that makes the comfortable pursuit of your own happiness feel not merely selfish but impossible. The burden. The specific, located, personal burden for specific people in a specific place.
For me, it began with Jacob Eames. Not with Burma — Burma came later. It began with the death of a brilliant young man who had rejected the gospel and gone into eternity without Christ, and the realization that the horror I felt standing outside that inn room was not merely grief for a friend but the full weight of what eternal separation from God actually means. Something cracked open in me that morning that never fully closed again. From that day forward, I was a man who could not think about lost people abstractly. I could only think about them as people — as Jacob Eames, as the millions of Burmese who did not know the name of Jesus Christ, as specific human beings with eternal souls who would go somewhere when they died.
The burden deepened at Andover. The revival fires of the Second Great Awakening were burning across New England, and the men around me were being captured by the same vision that was forming in me: that the Great Commission was not a historical document but a current assignment, that the God who had sent His Son to die for every people and tongue and nation was not satisfied with the evangelization of New England while three-quarters of the world remained in darkness. I read Dr. Buchanan's sermon about missionary work in the East and felt something that I can only describe as a holy restlessness — the deep, settled discomfort of a man who knows he is supposed to be somewhere he is not yet.
Here is what I want to say to you about the burden: if you have felt it, take it seriously. Not every burden of this kind is a call to overseas missions. Some people feel the burden for their neighborhood, their city, their workplace, the specific population of lost people that God has placed within their ordinary daily reach. But every genuine burden for the lost is from God, and every genuine burden deserves a serious response.
(Romans 9:2-3 KJV) "That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." Paul's heaviness and continual sorrow for his own people — for the Jews who had not received their Messiah — is the model of what this burden looks like when it is deep and genuine. It is not a passing mood. It is not a feeling that comes and goes with the sermon topic. It is continual sorrow. Great heaviness. A weight that does not lift because the situation that produced it has not changed. That is the first mark of a genuine calling.
Stage Two: The Discipline of Preparation
The burden alone is not the call. The burden is the beginning of the call. What follows it — and this is something I wish I had understood more clearly in my early years — is a season of preparation that is as essential to the effectiveness of the mission as the mission itself.
I was fortunate in that my preparation was largely forced upon me. I did not choose to spend years at Andover learning Hebrew and Greek and theology. I was directed there by the circumstances of my life and the guidance of men who could see what I needed even when I was too impatient to see it myself. But in retrospect, I am profoundly grateful for every year of that preparation. The Burmese Bible that I translated drew on everything I had learned in those years — the Hebrew, the Greek, the Reformed theology, the careful habits of textual exegesis that the Andover faculty had drilled into me. Remove any one of those years and the translation is poorer for it.
What does proper preparation for missionary work look like? I want to be careful here, because the answer is not simply 'go to seminary.' Seminary was the right preparation for me, given my particular calling to translation and teaching. For someone called to medical missions, medical training is the preparation. For someone called to work among a specific people group, intensive study of their language and culture is the preparation. The form of preparation follows the form of the calling.
But there are elements of preparation that are universal regardless of the specific shape of the calling. Deep immersion in the Scripture — not as a student who is gathering information but as a disciple who is being formed by the living Word of God. Rigorous development of whatever intellectual and practical gifts God has given you. The cultivation of a disciplined prayer life that will sustain you when the work becomes hard and the fruit is not visible. Honest self-examination that identifies your genuine weaknesses before they manifest as catastrophic failures in the field. And — this is one I learned the hard way — physical preparation, the deliberate cultivation of a body that can sustain the demands of the work without breaking down before the work is done.
I was already watching for signs of consumption in myself when I was at Andover. I developed the cold-water sponging routine, the breathing exercises, the long daily walks, specifically because I knew that the work I was being called to would make physical demands that my naturally slender constitution might not be able to meet without deliberate strengthening. That physical preparation bought me years in Burma that I would not otherwise have had. The body is not the whole of the person. But it is the vessel that carries the whole person, and a missionary who neglects the vessel does the work a disservice.
(Luke 14:28-30 KJV) "For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish." Count the cost. Not to be discouraged from the building. To ensure that the building gets finished. Preparation is counting the cost carefully enough to know what you will need, and then acquiring it before the foundation is laid rather than discovering its absence when the wall is already half-built.
Stage Three: The Information That Crystallizes the Vision
William Carey read everything he could find about India before he went there. I read everything I could find about Burma before I went there. David Brainerd immersed himself in everything available about the North American Indian peoples before he went among them. This is not coincidence. It is a pattern, and the pattern points to a principle: the missionary call is crystallized by information.
The burden gives you the why. The preparation gives you the how. But the information gives you the where — the specific people, the specific place, the specific face of the lostness that God is calling you toward. And information works on a burdened, prepared heart the way a lens works on sunlight: it focuses the diffuse warmth of general concern into a concentrated beam that can ignite something specific.
For me, the crystallizing information came through Dr. Buchanan's sermon about missionary work in the East, through what I could find about Burma in the Andover Seminary library, through the letters and reports of Felix Carey and the Serampore missionaries. Each piece of information I absorbed about Burma made the burden more specific, the calling more defined, the sense of personal responsibility more acute. By the time I stood before the General Association of Congregational Ministers in 1810 and offered myself for overseas missionary service, I was not offering myself in a general way to whatever God might have in mind. I was offering myself specifically, with specific preparation, to a specific people in a specific place.
I want to urge you — if you are in the early stages of what feels like a missionary call — to do the same work. Read. Research. Find out everything that is available about the people and the place that the burden is pointing you toward. Learn their history. Learn their language, at least at the introductory level. Understand their culture, their religion, their particular form of lostness, their particular questions about ultimate things. The more specific your knowledge, the more specific your prayers. The more specific your prayers, the more effective your intercession. And the more effective your intercession, the more clearly you will understand what God is asking you to do about the thing He has already given you the burden for.
Resources that did not exist in my day are available to you now. Operation World — a comprehensive guide to the spiritual state of every nation on earth — can acquaint you in a single evening with the specific situation of peoples you have never heard of and places you have never considered. Mission Frontiers publishes information about the unreached people groups of the world — the eleven thousand or more distinct ethnic and linguistic communities that still have no witnessing church, no Bible, no access to the gospel in a form they can understand. The information is available. The question is whether you will pursue it with the same intentionality that you pursue information about the things that already interest you.
(Proverbs 25:2 KJV) "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." Search out the matter. The unreached peoples are not hidden from those who seek them. They are hidden from those who do not seek them — who consume the information that comes to them without effort but do not pursue the information that requires deliberate searching. Be a searcher. The specific person and place that God is calling you toward is waiting to be found by a heart that will look for it.
Stage Four: The Community That Confirms
Here is something that is easily missed in the romantic version of the missionary call: the call is never purely private. It is always confirmed, shaped, and ultimately authorized by the community of believers to whom the called person belongs.
Look at how my call developed. The burden began privately, in my own heart. The preparation happened in a community — Andover Seminary, where the missionary vision was shared by a group of students who prayed together and pushed each other toward greater clarity of calling. The first public expression of the call happened in community — the four students standing before the General Association of Congregational Ministers and offering themselves together, not individually. The call was confirmed by the community when the Association voted to form the mission board. And the sending itself was a communal act — the church committing resources, the church praying, the church holding the ropes.
This communal dimension of the call is not a bureaucratic formality. It is a spiritual safeguard. Private religious experiences — however intense, however emotionally compelling, however logically consistent in their own framework — need to be tested against the perception of people who know you, who observe your life from the outside, who can see both your gifts and your blind spots with a clarity that self-examination cannot always produce.
I have seen men go to the mission field on the strength of a private conviction that was intense and sincere but was not confirmed by any community, and I have watched those missions founder not because the men were insincere but because the call was not what they believed it to be. They had confused genuine religious enthusiasm with a specific directive from God. The community would have helped them distinguish between the two — not by dampening the enthusiasm, but by directing it toward the specific form of service that their actual gifts and character were suited for.
This is why Wayland argued so strongly — in his biography and in his general ministry — for the importance of the local church in the missionary call. Not as a gatekeeping authority that gets to decide who God can and cannot call. But as the body of Christ that both confirms the call and becomes responsible for the called person once the calling sends them out. (Acts 13:2-3 KJV) "As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away." The Holy Ghost said — the call was divine. But it was confirmed in community, recognized by the church, and the sending was a communal act with communal responsibility. That pattern is not incidental. It is the pattern of the New Testament, and it is the pattern that produces sustainable, accountable, lasting missionary work.
Stage Five: The Counting of the Cost
I wrote a letter to Mr. Hasseltine asking permission to court his daughter that listed, in unflinching detail, every possible suffering and danger that lay ahead for Ann if she agreed to marry me and go to Burma. My friends thought I had taken leave of my senses. Why would a young man attempting to court a young woman present his case in terms of probable death and certain hardship?
Because I believed — and I believe it still — that the only sustainable missionary commitment is one that was made with full knowledge of the cost. A commitment made in ignorance of what it will require is not a mature commitment. It is an enthusiasm. Enthusiasms fade when they encounter their first serious obstacle. Mature commitments, made in clear-eyed awareness of what they will cost, deepen under pressure because the pressure was already accounted for when the commitment was made.
Ann read that letter. She understood what I was telling her. And she said yes to all of it — not in ignorance, not swept along by the romance of the missionary vision, but in full knowledge that what she was saying yes to included grief and hardship and likely an early death in a foreign country. Her yes was one of the most courageous things I have ever witnessed, precisely because it was informed. She had counted the cost before she committed. And when the cost began to be extracted — in the death prison, in the illnesses, in the final fever that took her life — she did not feel betrayed. She had known. She had chosen anyway.
What does counting the cost look like in practice for someone considering a missionary call today? It looks like honest research into the health risks of the specific field. It looks like honest assessment of what the separation from family will mean — for aging parents, for siblings, for the friendships that sustain ordinary life. It looks like honest financial calculation: What support will be needed? Is it realistically available? What happens if it is withdrawn? It looks like honest evaluation of one's own emotional and psychological resilience: Am I the kind of person who can handle prolonged isolation, cultural disorientation, and the specific kind of loneliness that comes from being permanently different from everyone around me?
None of these questions are designed to discourage. They are designed to produce the kind of commitment that lasts. The missionary who goes with open eyes and counted costs is the missionary who stays when the going becomes what it always eventually becomes: harder than expected, longer than anticipated, more costly than any advance calculation fully captured.
(Luke 14:33 KJV) "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." Forsaketh not all. The cost of discipleship — which is what the missionary call is, in its most concentrated form — is all. Not most. Not enough to be comfortable with. All. That is what Jesus said. He was not exaggerating for effect. He was describing the actual requirement of the actual commitment. And the people who flourish in the long obedience of missionary service are the people who understood from the beginning that all was what was being asked.
Stage Six: The Step of Faith That Cannot Be Reasoned Into
After the burden, the preparation, the information, the communal confirmation, and the counting of the cost — there is still one more thing. And this is the thing that no process or program can produce, the thing that distinguishes genuine missionary commitment from a well-considered career decision: the step of faith.
When Ann and I stood on the deck of the Caravan in February 1812 and watched the coastline of New England disappear behind us, we had done everything that could reasonably be done to prepare ourselves for what lay ahead. We had studied. We had prayed. We had counted the costs. We had sought and received communal confirmation. We had done everything that human wisdom and Christian prudence could ask of us.
And none of it removed the need for faith. Because faith is not what you exercise before you have all the information. Faith is what you exercise when you have done everything reasonable and you still cannot see around the corner of the next year or the next decade. Faith is the decision to move in the direction that God has indicated, with the provision that God has supplied, toward the outcome that God has promised, without the ability to verify any of it in advance. It is trusting a Person rather than calculating a probability.
The step of faith is terrifying. I do not want to minimize that by dressing it in religious language that makes it sound manageable. Standing at the rail of a ship watching your world disappear is terrifying. Walking into a prison compound in Ava not knowing whether you will be executed tomorrow is terrifying. Sitting in a zayat for six years talking to people who are politely interested but not converted is a different kind of terrifying — the slow terror of wondering whether you have misunderstood the voice of God completely.
But faith is not the absence of terror. Faith is the decision to trust God in the presence of terror, to move forward when everything in you is screaming to move back, to hold the course when the feelings have long since abandoned it and only the word of God is left to navigate by.
(Hebrews 11:8 KJV) "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went." Not knowing whither he went. That is faith in its most naked form. A call received, a direction given, a step taken — without a map, without a guarantee, without the ability to verify in advance that the destination is what was promised. Abraham went. I went. Everyone who has ever answered a genuine call from God has gone into an unknowing that could only be navigated by trust in the One who knows.
How to Know If the Call Is Real
This is the question I am most often asked, in one form or another, by people who are in the early stages of what feels like a missionary call: How do I know if this is from God? How do I distinguish genuine calling from wishful thinking, from religious enthusiasm, from the influence of an inspiring book or a moving sermon? How do I know if what I am feeling is the Holy Spirit or simply my own imagination dressed in spiritual clothing?
I want to give you the most honest answer I can, which is that certainty is not always immediately available and that the demand for it can become a way of avoiding the responsibility of responding to what you already know.
But there are markers. Things to look for. Patterns that distinguish genuine calling from its counterfeits.
The first marker is persistence. A genuine call does not go away when you ignore it. It does not fade when circumstances become comfortable. It does not dissolve when you distract yourself with other things. It returns. It interrupts. It finds you in the middle of conversations and seasons of contentment and quietly reminds you of its existence. The burden for a specific people that keeps coming back to you despite your best efforts to file it away under 'interesting but not my department' — that persistence is itself a form of evidence.
The second marker is specificity. Vague spiritual restlessness is common and can have many sources, not all of them a missionary call. But when the restlessness begins to attach itself to specific people in a specific place — when you find yourself praying specifically for the Karen people or the Burmese lowlanders or the unreached peoples of Central Asia or the urban poor of a specific city — that specificity is significant. God calls to particular places. He calls to particular people. The particular-ness of the burden is part of how you know it is His.
The third marker is the confirmation of gifts. God does not call people to tasks for which He has given them no equipment. He may call you to a task that requires gifts you do not yet fully possess — gifts that will be developed through the training that the calling demands. But there will be recognizable seeds of the necessary gifts already present. If God is calling you to Bible translation work, there will be evidence of linguistic aptitude and love for precision in your existing life. If God is calling you to evangelism among a specific people, there will be evidence of cross-cultural curiosity and relational warmth. Look at the gifts God has already given you. They are often the clearest indication of the direction He intends for you.
The fourth marker — and this is the one that the others must ultimately be tested against — is the Word of God. Not a specific verse that you have read and felt personally addressed by, though that can be part of it. The whole counsel of God, applied to your specific situation by the Holy Spirit who inspired it. The Great Commission is not a call addressed only to the apostles. It is a call addressed to the whole church, to every generation of the church, until Jesus returns. The question is not whether God calls His people to go to the nations. He clearly does. The question is which specific members of the church He is directing to which specific nations at which specific time — and that question is answered by the pattern of burden, preparation, information, communal confirmation, and Spirit-led conviction that I have been describing.
(John 10:27 KJV) "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me." Hear His voice. Know Him. Follow. The sheep do not follow a stranger's voice — not because strangers never speak, but because the sheep have learned, through the accumulated intimacy of relationship, what the Shepherd's voice sounds like. The more deeply you know Jesus through His Word and through prayer, the more clearly you will be able to distinguish His call from the noise around it.
The Devoted-for-Life Standard: What Full Commitment Looks Like
I wrote in 1833 that the motto of every missionary ought to be 'Devoted for Life.' I have already described what prompted that letter and what it said. But I want to return to the phrase itself and unpack it carefully, because I think it is the standard by which all missionary commitment should be measured — and because I think it is frequently misunderstood.
Devoted for life does not mean that God never calls a missionary home. There are seasons and stages in a missionary's life, and not all of them are spent on the field. Luther Rice was called home from the field and spent his life holding the ropes — which was as essential to the Burma mission as anything Ann and I did in Rangoon. Sarah had to leave Burma temporarily for medical reasons and would have gone permanently if her health had demanded it. Devotion is not measured by physical location. It is measured by the orientation of the whole life toward the mission God has given.
Devoted for life does not mean that circumstances never require a change of field or a change of strategy. Missionaries are expelled. Fields close. Political circumstances make some forms of witness impossible in some places at some times. The devoted-for-life missionary responds to these realities not by abandoning the mission but by finding the form of faithfulness that the new circumstances permit. (Matthew 10:23 KJV) "But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another." The flight is not abandonment. It is adaptation — the tactical movement of a strategic commitment that has not changed.
What devoted for life does mean is this: that the missionary call has been received and accepted as a defining commitment of the whole life, that personal ambition and comfort and reputation have been subordinated to its requirements, that the question 'What does the mission need?' takes precedence over the question 'What would I prefer?' in the allocation of time and energy and resources, and that the commitment will be maintained through whatever circumstances arise — not because the missionary is heroic, but because the God who gave the call is faithful to sustain those who answer it.
I chose the devoted-for-life standard for myself. Ann chose it. Sarah chose it. Emily chose it. And I watched each of them live it out to the end of their lives, giving everything they had to the work that God had called them to, and finding — as I found — that the life given away in obedience to God is the life most fully and most genuinely lived. (Matthew 16:25 KJV) "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." Find it. Not lose it. The life poured out in obedience is not a life wasted. It is a life found — discovered in its truest, deepest, most lasting form in the very act of giving it away.
The Call to Those Who Will Never Cross an Ocean
I am aware that the preceding pages may have created the impression that the missionary call is exclusively for those who go to foreign fields — that if you are reading this and you are not planning to board a ship or a plane for an unreached people group, this chapter does not really apply to you.
That impression is wrong, and I want to correct it explicitly.
The Great Commission is addressed to the whole church. Every Christian is called to be part of the mission of God in the world. For some — for those who fit the pattern I have been describing, who have the burden and the gifts and the communal confirmation and the counted costs — that call takes the form of going to unreached places. But for the majority of Christians in every generation, the call takes a different form: supporting the ones who go, praying for the nations, giving sacrificially to the work, educating the next generation in the missionary vision, holding the ropes.
Here is the specific vision I had for how the church at home should be engaged with missions. I wrote to the mission board in America that the mission stations were opening on every side and the fields were growing whiter every day and there were no labourers to reap the harvest. I wrote those words not simply as a lament but as a summons — a call to the churches of America to take the missionary enterprise seriously enough to produce, fund, and send a new generation of devoted-for-life workers.
What does that engagement look like concretely? I asked that question then and I want to answer it now. Is there a regular place at your prayer meeting for a focus on missionary vision — on specific missionaries serving in specific places, on specific unreached peoples that the church has committed to pray for? Is there a missionary fellowship in your church — a dedicated time when the members who are most burdened for the nations can come together, pray together, inform each other, and stir each other toward greater faithfulness? Does missionary support form a significant portion of your church's budget? And do you — individually — write encouraging letters to missionaries? Do you pray for them by name? Do you read the news from their field with the same interest that you read the news from your own country?
Robert Morrison, the great pioneer missionary to China, reported that he received only one encouraging letter from his homeland for every two hundred newsletters he posted. Two hundred newsletters sent home. One letter received in return. That ratio is a measure of the gap between the church's stated commitment to missions and the church's actual engagement with the people it sends. Close that gap. Write the letters. Pray the specific prayers. Give the deliberate money. Hold the rope with both hands and all the strength you have.
(3 John 1:7-8 KJV) "Because that for his name's sake they went forth, taking nothing of the Gentiles. We therefore ought to receive such, that we might be fellowhelpers to the truth." Fellowhelpers to the truth. That is the calling of the church at home — not passive observers of the missionary enterprise but active partners in it, sharing in both the work and the reward. The fellow helper who holds the rope shares in the gold that is brought up from the mine. The fellow helper who prays for the harvest shares in the joy when the sheaves come in. You do not have to cross an ocean to be part of what God is doing in the nations. You have to be faithful to your specific role in a shared mission.
The Call to Pray: The Foundation of Everything
Before I move on, I want to say one more thing specifically about prayer, because I believe it is the most underestimated element of missionary engagement and the one that most Christians can do more of, starting today, without any change of circumstances.
The history of missions is a history of prayer. Not exclusively — the history also includes brilliant scholarship, heroic courage, creative strategy, and sacrificial giving. But behind all of those things, sustaining all of those things, is the prayer of the people of God for the mission of God in the world.
I have already told you about the Haystack Prayer Meeting — the small group of Andover students caught in a thunderstorm who turned their shelter time into intercession and out of whose prayers came the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. That is a pattern, not an anomaly. Movements of the Spirit in missions are consistently preceded and sustained by concentrated, specific, persistent prayer. The people who pray for Burma are as essential to the Burmese church as the people who went to Burma. God could have built His church without human prayer — He is not limited by our participation. But He has chosen, in His sovereign wisdom, to include the prayers of His people as a genuine instrument in the accomplishment of His purposes. That means that when His people pray, things happen that would not otherwise happen. And when His people do not pray, things that would have happened do not.
(James 5:16 KJV) "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." Availeth much. Not a little. Not something. Much. The prayer of a righteous person has real effects in the real world, effects that are not merely psychological or motivational but genuinely causal — producing outcomes that would not have been produced without the prayer. Take that seriously. Pray for the unreached peoples by name. Pray for specific missionaries by name. Pray for specific language groups that do not yet have the Scriptures in their own tongue. Pray for the political leaders of countries that are currently closed to the gospel, as I prayed for the king of Burma. Pray with the specificity that faith makes possible and that information supplies.
What My Life Says to Your Life
I want to close this chapter by making it as personal as I can. Because I have been telling you a story about a specific man in a specific time and place, and I am aware that stories about specific men in specific times and places can be received as interesting but ultimately distant — inspiring in the way that a great painting is inspiring, something to admire rather than something to apply.
I do not want that. I want something more than your admiration. I want your obedience — your obedience to whatever God is already saying to you, not what He said to me. My Burma is not your Burma. My specific call is not your specific call. The specific form of surrender that God required of me — the years of language study, the chains, the graves, the translation — is not the form He requires of everyone. He requires different things of different people, all in service of the same mission, all expressions of the same love for the same lost world.
But here is what I believe is true of every person who reads this story with a heart genuinely open to God: there is something He is asking you to do that you have not yet done. There is a person or a people or a place that has been on your heart in a way you have not fully accounted for. There is a sacrifice you have been considering and setting aside. There is a step of obedience that you know would honor Him and that you have been indefinitely postponing because the cost seems high and the outcome is uncertain and the timing is never quite right.
The timing is never quite right. I went to Burma in 1812, which was precisely the wrong time by every human calculation — America was about to go to war with Britain, the British East India Company was at the height of its power, Burma was ruled by a king who could execute converts on a whim, and Ann and I had no institutional support and no guaranteed salary. Every condition that a reasonable person would require before taking such a step was absent. And yet it was exactly the right time, because it was God's time, and God's time is always exactly right regardless of what the human calendar says.
(2 Corinthians 6:2 KJV) "For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation." Now. Not when the circumstances are better. Not when the children are older or the finances are more secure or the political situation has stabilized. Now. The accepted time is always now — the present moment in which God is speaking and calling and waiting for a response from the soul He made and loves and has purposes for that extend far beyond what that soul can currently imagine.
Here am I. Send me. Those four words have launched more changed lives than any other four words in the history of the human response to God. They are available to you right now, in exactly the form you need to say them — with the specific calling and the specific gifts and the specific opportunity that God has already placed in your specific life. You do not need to say them loudly. You do not need to say them in a church service or a prayer meeting or any formal setting. You can say them right now, quietly, honestly, in full knowledge of what they cost and in full trust of the God who receives them.
He is listening. He has always been listening. And when you say them, He will answer — not with a thunderclap or a vision or an immediately clear set of instructions. He will answer the way He answered me: through the slow, faithful, difficult, beautiful unfolding of a life that has been given to Him and that He is shaping, day by day, choice by choice, into something that serves His purposes in the world He made and loves and is redeeming.
That is the missionary call. Not a dramatic experience reserved for special people. A conversation between a faithful God and a surrendered soul, carried out in the ordinary circumstances of an ordinary life, producing over time something that is anything but ordinary.
* * *
In our final chapter — Chapter Ten — we will bring the whole story together. We will stand at the end of Adoniram Judson's life and look back at the full arc of it: the prodigal years at college, the crack of grace in a roadside inn, the years of preparation, the voyage, the language study, the six silent years, the first convert, the prison, the graves, the harvest, the completed Bible, the death at sea. We will ask what the whole of it means — not just for the history of missions, not just for the church in Myanmar, but for you, today, in the specific circumstances of your specific life.
And we will hear, one final time, the call that started everything: the call of a God who loves the world too much to leave any corner of it unvisited by His grace, who sends His servants into the hard places not to make their lives convenient but to make them count, and who promises — with the full weight of His own character behind the promise — that the labor is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:58 KJV) "Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord." Not in vain. Not one day of the six silent years. Not one morning prayer in the death prison. Not one page of the translation. Not one grave under a hopea tree. Not one body committed to the Indian Ocean. Nothing. None of it in vain. All of it counted. All of it kept. All of it producing something that will be fully revealed only when the last trumpet sounds and the last harvest is gathered and the King of kings surveys what His servants have done with the time and the gifts and the calling He entrusted to them.
On that day, the accounting will be complete. And it will be glorious.