CHAPTER three
CHAPTER three
The Lion's Den: Arrest, Chains, and the God Who Did Not Leave
There are things a man can describe and things he cannot. What I endured in the death prison of Ava falls mostly into the second category. I can give you the facts. I can tell you the dates and the conditions and the names of the men who suffered alongside me. But the experience of those nineteen months—the smell, the darkness, the weight of the chains, the daily proximity to death—these are things that language was not built to carry. I will do my best. You will have to trust that the reality was worse than my words can make it.
I want to begin, though, not with my arrest but with the weeks immediately before it. Because what happened to me in that prison did not come out of nowhere. It came out of a specific political catastrophe that swept through Burma like a flood, and understanding that catastrophe is essential to understanding everything that followed.
The Storm Breaks: War Comes to Burma
For years the friction between Burma and Britain had been building. The Burmese leaders were, in the words of a man who watched them closely, 'intolerably arrogant.' They had no realistic understanding of British military capacity. They genuinely believed that their armies were invincible, that the British could be driven out of the region, that Burmese power was supreme and unassailable. This was not merely pride—it was a kind of mass delusion that their own propaganda had produced.
In 1824, the delusion shattered. Five thousand British troops attacked and captured Rangoon. The city fell. The Burmese were humiliated in the only way that proud people can be humiliated—not merely defeated, but overwhelmed, outmatched, made to look helpless against a force they had claimed to despise.
The aftermath in the capital was explosive. The Burmese leaders were furious, frightened, and looking for someone to blame. When powerful men are embarrassed and afraid, they need scapegoats. And scapegoats, throughout history, have tended to be the foreigners.
Ann and I were still in Ava, working on preparations for establishing the mission in the capital. We had no part in the British attack. We were Americans, not British. We were missionaries, not soldiers. We had spent the better part of a decade trying to serve the Burmese people—learning their language, translating their Scriptures, training their leaders, healing their sick. None of that mattered in the atmosphere that followed the fall of Rangoon.
What mattered was that I had received money through a British bank in India. That was how mission funds were transferred across the world in those days—through banking networks that happened to run through British institutions. It was entirely routine. It was also, in the paranoid logic of a government looking for traitors, cast-iron proof of collaboration with the enemy.
The Arrest: June 8, 1824
I remember the day with a clarity that has never faded. It was June 8, 1824. I was at the house in Ava when they came.
They did not knock. They did not present papers or explain their authority. A government officer accompanied by a group of armed men burst through the door, seized me, and dragged me out. There was no time for goodbyes, no time for preparation, no time to do anything except submit to what was happening and trust the God who had sent me to Burma to remain sovereign over what Burma was doing to me.
Ann watched it happen. She was nursing our infant daughter Maria—a child only months old, born into the most precarious circumstances imaginable. She watched her husband taken away by armed men and had no way of knowing whether she would ever see him alive again. If there was ever a moment that could have broken Ann Judson's faith, that was it. But Ann was not made of ordinary material. She was made of the stuff that Jesus makes in a person when they have genuinely surrendered everything to Him. She did not collapse. She began to plan.
I was taken to a place called the death prison. Let me describe it carefully, because the name is not rhetorical. It was exactly what it was called.
The Death Prison: One Hundred Men, One Room, No Windows
One hundred prisoners in one room. No windows. The only light came from whatever filtered under the doors and through the cracks in the walls. The air was thick with the smell of human bodies, human waste, sickness, and fear. The heat was unbearable—Burma in the dry season is already punishing, and a sealed room with one hundred men generated a temperature that made rational thought difficult.
The guards who ran this prison were not ordinary jailers. They were murderers—men who had been condemned to death themselves and reprieved on one condition: they would serve as executioners. These men, who had nothing to lose and no particular reason for mercy, were our overseers. They were not cruel in a calculated, professional way. They were cruel in the random, arbitrary way of people who have no accountability and no fear of consequences.
The prisoners were given nothing. No food, no water, no medicine. If you had family or friends outside who could bring you supplies, you might survive. If you did not, you starved. Simple as that. The death prison was designed not to hold its inhabitants indefinitely but to process them toward death—either by execution, which could come at any time, or by the slower execution of starvation, disease, and despair.
I was chained. Iron fetters—heavy, rough, cutting into the skin. For the first two months of my imprisonment, I wore five chains. For nine months after that, three chains. For the final six months, one chain. That progression was not a mercy—it was simply the practical reality of adjusting restraints as the prison population shifted. The chains were never comfortable. They were never designed to be.
During those first weeks, I faced something I had not fully anticipated: the very real possibility that I might be executed tomorrow. Not in some distant, theoretical future. Tomorrow. The Burmese government was executing people it suspected of collaboration with the British. I was on that list. Every morning I woke up not knowing whether that day would end with my death.
I want to be honest with you about what that does to a man. It strips away everything that is not essential. When you genuinely do not know if you will be alive by nightfall, the things that seemed important the week before—reputation, plans, ambitions, the next stage of the translation work—they all recede. What remains is God. The question becomes very simple: Is Jesus Christ who He said He is? Is the resurrection real? Is eternity real? Because if the answers to those questions are yes, then death is not the worst thing that can happen to me. And if the answers are no, then nothing I have done with my life makes any sense anyway.
I had staked everything on the answers being yes. In that prison, I found that the stake held. (Romans 8:18 KJV) "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." I reckon. Present tense. Not past, not future—present. In the midst of the suffering, Paul reckoned. That is what I did in that prison. I reckoned. I counted. I calculated. And the calculation always came out the same: what Jesus had promised was worth what this prison was costing.
Ann: The Angel of the Death Prison
I would not have survived without Ann. That is not sentiment. That is fact, documented, witnessed, attested to by everyone who knew what was happening in that prison.
Ann was not imprisoned. She was the only European woman in Ava who was not confined—a situation that was precarious in its own right, because it left her entirely unprotected in a hostile city at war. But she used that freedom with a ferocity and a creativity that astonished everyone who watched her.
Every single day, Ann navigated the corrupt maze of Burmese officialdom to bring food to me and to Dr. Price, the other missionary imprisoned with me. This sounds simple. It was not. Every visit required bribes—officials who needed to be paid before they would allow food to pass through, guards who needed to be satisfied before they would permit Ann to approach, bureaucrats at every level who saw a desperate woman as an opportunity for personal profit. Ann paid them. Somehow she always found a way to pay them.
She also never stopped petitioning. While nursing infant Maria—who had been born just before the war began—and caring for two adopted Burmese girls, Ann spent every available hour seeking audiences with anyone who had the authority to improve our conditions. She was 'perfectly familiar with the Burmese language,' as my biographer Francis Wayland noted later, and she used that fluency as a weapon. She argued, reasoned, pleaded, and when necessary, shamed officials into acting with the basic decency their positions required.
Wayland called Ann 'one of the most remarkable women of her age.' He wrote that she was 'the only European female in Ava, and the only foreigner not consigned to prison. Her whole time, with the exception of twenty days when she was confined by the birth of her child, was devoted to the alleviation of the sorrows of her husband and his fellow prisoners.' He described her as 'encircled with a moral atmosphere in which she walked unharmed in the midst of a hostile city with no earthly protector,' and said she was 'universally spoken of as the guardian angel of that band of sufferers.'
Guardian angel. Yes. That is exactly what she was. And the God who sent angels to minister to His servants in the Bible sent Ann Judson to minister to me in the death prison of Ava. (Hebrews 1:14 KJV) "Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?" God ministers to His children through whatever means He chooses. In my darkest hour, He chose Ann.
After some months of imprisonment, Ann managed, through relentless petitioning, to obtain permission to build a small bamboo room within the prison enclosure. It was tiny—barely enough to serve as a shelter. But it gave me slightly more space, slightly more air, and most importantly, slightly more access to Ann. For a few weeks, that small room was the closest thing to a home either of us had.
Then everything changed again.
The Threat of Immediate Execution
One morning, without warning, all the prisoners were crowded back into the original confined space. Word came through—passed in whispers, confirmed by the expressions on the guards' faces—that we were to be executed. Today. Or perhaps tomorrow. The order had come from above. The prisoners were to be eliminated.
I want you to sit with that for a moment. Not read past it. Sit with it. One hundred men, crammed together, knowing that execution was imminent. The sounds of that room—the praying, the weeping, the silence of men who had moved beyond weeping into a place that had no sound—these are sounds I carry with me still.
I prayed. Not with eloquence. Not with theological precision. With the raw, stripped-down desperation of a man who has nothing left but God. (Psalm 34:18 KJV) "The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." Nigh. Near. The Lord was near in that room in a way I cannot explain and will not try to. He was present. Not as a feeling—feelings were unreliable in those conditions—but as a fact. An unmistakable, unshakeable fact.
A day passed. We were still alive. Then another day. We were still alive. The execution order, for reasons that were never fully explained to us, was not carried out.
I do not know why we were spared that day. I do not have a neat theological explanation for why God intervened in Ava in June of 1824 when He allowed His servants in other times and places to be martyred. What I know is that my times were in His hands then as they are now, and that He chose to leave me in that prison rather than take me through the door of death. His reasons were His own. I accepted them.
The Lion's Cage
At some point during the imprisonment, an extraordinary thing happened. A caged lion was brought to the prison compound.
The king of Burma was known for keeping exotic animals. Lions were among his favorites. But this particular lion had become politically complicated. The lion is a British symbol—the emblem of the British Empire. And in the paranoid atmosphere of a nation at war with Britain, even a lion could become suspect. The king, so the story went, decided that if this lion was on the side of the British, it should be imprisoned like the other British sympathizers. And so the lion arrived at our compound, in its cage.
The lion was starved. Dogs were thrown in to test it, and it was too weak from hunger to kill them. Eventually it died. And when it died, its cage sat empty.
I asked permission to use the lion's cage as my quarters. My appeal was denied. But Ann's was not. Ann petitioned on my behalf, and through her persistence, the lion's empty cage was converted into a room where I could be on my own—apart from the crowded, suffocating mass of the main prison room.
I want to tell you what that meant. Not the physical reality of it—a cage is still a cage. But the symbolic weight of it, which I did not miss. I was living in the place that had been prepared for a lion. I was the man they expected to be consumed by the beast—by war, by disease, by execution, by despair. But the God of Daniel, who shut the mouths of lions in Babylon, was present in Ava as well. (Daniel 6:22 KJV) "My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions' mouths, that they have not hurt me." That verse was not ancient history to me. It was my present experience.
The March to Oung-Penla: The Pakan Woon
Just when conditions seemed to have settled into a terrible but survivable routine, they suddenly became much worse.
The Pakan Woon had taken command. His appointment terrified every foreigner in Ava. This man was not merely harsh or indifferent—he was, in the assessment of those who knew him, genuinely devilish. He ruled through terror, moved by whim, and had absolutely no reason to show mercy to foreign prisoners whom he regarded as enemies. Left unchecked, he would kill us all.
His first major act regarding the prisoners was to order us force-marched to a remote location called Oung-Penla, approximately nine miles north of Ava. The march was to be immediate, with no preparation, no provisions, and no mercy for those who could not keep up.
I was in poor physical condition. Nineteen months of chains, inadequate food, tropical disease, and confinement had left my body badly weakened. The march in the brutal heat, with iron fetters on my feet that cut into the skin with every step, was agonizing. The road to Oung-Penla was not a road in any comfortable sense—it was rough, uneven ground under a merciless sun. One of the prisoners died during the march. I survived only because the other prisoners helped me—supporting me, taking some of my weight when my legs gave out beneath me.
That moment—being carried by fellow sufferers, kept alive by the mercy of men who were themselves barely surviving—is one I return to often when I am tempted toward self-sufficiency. The Christian life is not a solo endeavor. We were made for community, for mutual bearing of burdens. (Galatians 6:2 KJV) "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." In Oung-Penla, I understood that verse with my body.
Ann followed us to Oung-Penla immediately. Of course she did. She rented a small room from one of the jailers, set up her station, and resumed her daily work of keeping us alive. But she was exhausted—more exhausted than I had ever seen her. The months of fighting, bribing, petitioning, and nursing without adequate food or rest had taken an enormous toll on her. And now little Maria, who should have been growing fat and healthy, was growing thin.
Ann could not produce enough milk to feed Maria. The combination of exhaustion, malnutrition, and constant stress had robbed her of that. And so a man who was himself chained and barely alive became Maria's nurse. Ann obtained permission, by making gifts to the jailers, for me to carry my emaciated infant daughter through the surrounding village, begging milk from mothers who were nursing their own children. I—Adoniram Judson, prisoner, missionary, man of chains—walked from house to house in a Burmese village holding a starving baby, asking strangers for milk.
I do not tell you this for sympathy. I tell you this because I want you to understand how completely God strips a man of dignity, of status, of every human resource, before He shows him what is left when everything else is gone. What was left was Jesus. Just Jesus. And Jesus was enough.
The Pillow: Ann Saves the New Testament
Throughout the imprisonment, one terror haunted me above almost all the others—not for my own sake, but for the sake of the work. The Burmese New Testament, which I had completed in 1823 after years of painstaking translation, existed in a single manuscript. There was no second copy. If that manuscript were destroyed—seized by guards, lost in a flood, burned by officials suspicious of foreign documents—years of work and a gift meant for an entire nation would be gone forever.
Ann understood this. And Ann—remarkable, resourceful Ann—devised a solution so simple and so brilliant that I marvel at it still. She took the manuscript and sewed it inside a pillow. A pillow. She brought it to me in the prison, and I slept on it. The guards who searched our possessions, looking for contraband and documents, never thought to examine a lumpy pillow. The word of God was hidden in plain sight, cushioning the head of a chained prisoner in a Burmese death prison.
When the sudden forced march to Oung-Penla was ordered, however, the pillow was left behind in the confusion. I cannot describe the anguish of realizing that. The translation—the years of work, the single manuscript, the New Testament in Burmese—abandoned on the floor of a vacated prison room. I prayed with an urgency that bordered on desperation. God, please. Not the translation. Not the thing that exists for Your people who have not yet been born.
God heard that prayer. Some hours after the move, a faithful Burmese disciple named Moung Ing went back to the abandoned prison site. He found the pillow. He preserved it. He brought it to safety. The Burmese New Testament survived the prison—survived the war—survived everything—and went on to be printed and distributed to a people who are reading it to this day.
(Isaiah 55:11 KJV) "So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." God's Word will not be stopped. Not by armies. Not by kings. Not by careless guards or chaotic prison evacuations. His Word goes where He sends it, and nothing in heaven or earth can prevent it from arriving.
The Pakan Woon's End: Providence in Politics
The Pakan Woon's reign of terror ended as suddenly as it had begun, and in the most dramatic fashion possible. It emerged that this man who had moved us to Oung-Penla specifically so that he could execute us there in person had stolen ten percent of the advance pay of fifty thousand soldiers raised to fight the British. Ten percent of a massive military payroll—embezzled, pocketed, used for his own purposes while the soldiers went underpaid.
He was found guilty of treason and executed immediately. The very man who had intended to be our executioner was executed himself before he could carry out his intentions. I am not a man who takes pleasure in the death of anyone. But I am a man who believes in the sovereignty of God, and in that moment, the sovereignty of God was unmistakable. He had positioned the Pakan Woon's own greed as the instrument of our deliverance.
(Proverbs 21:1 KJV) "The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will." Not just kings. Generals. Corrupt officials. Evil men in positions of power. God can turn the heart of any of them, and when He chooses not to turn them, He can use their own wickedness to accomplish His purposes. I had read that verse many times. I had preached it. In Oung-Penla, I watched it happen.
Ann's Illness: Cerebral Meningitis
As the British army advanced toward the Burmese capital, the political situation began to shift. Adoniram Judson and Dr. Price—the two men who spoke fluent Burmese and could serve as translators and interpreters between the British and Burmese governments—became suddenly, unexpectedly valuable. Negotiations required men who could speak both languages with precision. Gradually, pressure built for our release.
But before that release came, Ann collapsed.
It was cerebral meningitis—though we did not have that name for it then. What I knew was that my wife, who had spent nineteen months fighting for my survival with superhuman energy, had finally reached the end of her physical reserves. The illness struck with terrifying speed and ferocity. Ann lost consciousness. She lost her reason. She lost the ability to take food. The Burmese neighbors who came in to observe her condition said flatly: 'She is dead. And if the king of angels should come in, he could not recover her.'
Dr. Price, released briefly from prison when the military situation demanded his medical expertise, came to examine Ann. He told me afterward that her condition was the most distressing he had ever witnessed, and that he had not believed she would survive more hours when he arrived. Her head had been shaved. Blisters had been applied to her feet and head in a desperate attempt to draw out the fever. A Bengali servant was trying to persuade her to take a little wine and water—she had refused nourishment for several days.
I was still in chains. I could not go to her. I could not hold her hand or speak to her or pray over her in person. I was a prisoner in a cage, and my wife was dying a few hundred feet away, and there was nothing I could do except what I could always do: pray. I prayed with everything I had. I bargained with nothing—I had nothing to bargain with. I simply cast myself and Ann before the throne of God and asked for mercy.
God showed mercy. Slowly—impossibly, against all expectation—Ann began to recover. The fever broke. Her mind returned. She was able to take food. She lived. The woman the Burmese neighbors had declared dead opened her eyes and came back to me.
I wept. I am not ashamed to tell you that. I wept with a gratitude so complete it had no words. (Psalm 116:1-2 KJV) "I love the LORD, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications. Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long as I live."
Release: January 1826
The release, when it finally came, was not a moment of triumph. It was quiet, exhausted, and overshadowed by the weight of everything that had happened.
On December 31, 1825—nineteen months after my arrest—I was released from the death prison of Ava. The British and Burmese governments needed me to serve as a translator and interpreter in the peace negotiations. My value was linguistic, not personal. No one in the Burmese government felt guilty about what had been done to me. No one apologized. I was simply released because I had become useful again.
I walked out of that prison a changed man. Not broken—I want to be clear about that. Jesus does not break His servants. He refines them. He burns away what is false and what is weak, and He leaves what is real and what is His. I was thinner. I was damaged in body in ways that would never fully heal. My feet were scarred from the fetters. My health was compromised in ways that would trouble me for the rest of my life. But my faith—my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, in His Word, in His purposes, in His faithfulness—was not weaker. It was stronger. Forged in fire, tested to its limits, and found to hold.
(Job 23:10 KJV) "But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold." Gold. Not ash. Not rubble. Gold. That is what the fire of suffering produces in a life that belongs to Jesus.
The Peace Treaty and a Bitter Disappointment
The Treaty of Yandabo ended the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826. I served as interpreter and translator in those negotiations—the same tongue that had proclaimed the gospel in the zayat of Rangoon now helping to forge the diplomatic language of a peace agreement between two nations. It was strange work for a missionary. But I accepted it because I had a hope attached to it.
My hope was this: that the new constitution, the new arrangement between Burma and Britain, would include a clause guaranteeing religious freedom. That Burmese citizens would be permitted to convert to Christianity without fear of legal penalty. That the sword that had hung over every Burmese believer since the mission began would finally be sheathed.
I worked toward that goal with everything I had during the negotiations. I argued the case. I pressed wherever pressing was possible. I appealed to the principles of liberty and justice that the British side nominally championed.
The clause was not included.
I cannot fully describe how that felt. I had endured nineteen months of chains in part for this—for the hope that suffering might purchase freedom for the Burmese church. And the freedom was not granted. The political process produced what political processes so often produce: something that served the interests of the powerful and left the vulnerable unprotected.
I was bitterly disappointed. And then I remembered who was actually in charge of Burma. Not the British negotiators. Not the Burmese king. (Psalm 2:8 KJV) "Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." God had not abandoned Burma. He had not changed His mind about the Burmese people. A missing clause in a human treaty could not prevent Him from what He intended to do. I held onto that. It was all I had. It was enough.
After the Prison: What the Fire Revealed
When we think of what those nineteen months accomplished—not in human terms, but in the economy of God—the accounting is remarkable. The translation manuscript that Ann preserved in a pillow became the foundation of the entire Burmese Bible. The faith that Moung Nau and the other early converts displayed during the imprisonment—their refusal to renounce Christ even while their teacher was chained and their meeting places were scattered—became the bedrock of the Burmese church's character. They had been tested before the watching world, and they had held.
During the seven years that the British had soldiers stationed in Burma following the war, no fewer than fifteen thousand of those forty thousand men died—not in battle, but from disease. Only about six hundred died in combat. The same diseases that ravaged an army also claimed missionary after missionary. That Ann and I survived at all was, by any reasonable calculation, a miracle.
I am often asked, by those who have read accounts of the imprisonment, how I kept my faith during those months. I want to answer that question honestly, because I think a dishonest answer would be dangerous.
The truth is that faith in that prison was not always a feeling of closeness to God. There were days—dark, cold days inside that heat—when God felt absent. When the prayers felt like they were going nowhere. When the chains were just chains and the darkness was just darkness and Jesus felt very far away. I will not pretend otherwise.
But faith is not the feeling of God's presence. Faith is the decision to trust His Word when the feelings say something different. (Hebrews 11:1 KJV) "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Evidence. Not feeling. Not certainty of a comfortable kind. Evidence—the kind you stake your life on even when you cannot see the outcome. That is what I had in that prison. And it was sufficient. Not pleasant, not easy, not comfortable—but sufficient. Jesus was sufficient.
When Seven Out of Eight British Prisoners Died
Here is a statistic that I have turned over in my mind many times since those days. During the period of the Anglo-Burmese War, seven out of every eight British prisoners held in Burmese captivity died from the conditions of their imprisonment. Maltreatment, starvation, disease, execution—these claimed seven of eight.
I am the one. The one who survived when seven died. Why? I do not have a full answer. I have Ann—her tireless work, her daily provision, her advocacy. I have the mercy of God, who was not finished with me yet. I have the prayers of thousands of believers in America and England who were praying for the missionaries in Burma every week. I have, perhaps, a constitution that was stronger than it appeared.
But mostly I have this: the conviction that God had a purpose for my remaining life that required my remaining alive. He preserved me not for my own sake but for Burma's. For the translation that was still unfinished. For the churches that were still un-planted. For the Burmese believers who would one day number not in the dozens but in the millions.
(Philippians 1:21 KJV) "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." I meant that before the prison. After the prison, I meant it at a depth I had not previously possessed. To live was Christ—not comfort, not safety, not reputation, not the approval of powerful men. Christ. To live was Christ. And if I was still alive, it was because Christ still had work for me to do.
The Work That Remained
Even while I was navigating the peace negotiations, even while Ann was still recovering from her illness, even while the physical damage of nineteen months of imprisonment was still acute in my body, I was thinking about the mission. Not obsessively—I was not blind to my physical condition or to Ann's need for rest and recovery. But the missionary call that had sent me to Burma did not go into hibernation because circumstances were difficult.
The church in Rangoon had been scattered by the war. The eighteen baptized members we had left behind had been dispersed—some fled to safety, some gone into hiding, some we had no news of at all. The question was whether they were still believing. Whether the faith that had led them to accept baptism in the shadow of the king's disapproval had survived the additional trauma of war.
The answer, when news reached us, was deeply moving. They were still believing. One of the early converts—a man named Tha-e—had not stopped preaching during the entire period of his wandering. He had preached in every place the war's chaos had driven him. He had maintained his testimony, shared the gospel, and by the time peace returned, he had already begun the work of re-gathering the scattered church.
That is what the Holy Spirit does. He does not wait for the missionary to arrive before He works. He is already moving in the hearts of His people, sustaining them through circumstances that would destroy mere human commitment. The church is not a missionary institution. It is a living organism, and its life comes from Christ Himself. (John 15:5 KJV) "I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing." Even in the years of my imprisonment, the Vine was nourishing the branches.
Looking Back From the Far Side of the Fire
I am going to close this chapter the way I began it—with honesty. Because I think some who read accounts of Christian suffering are tempted to believe that the men and women who endured it were somehow different from ordinary human beings. That they had a special grade of faith unavailable to regular people. That their stories are inspiring but not applicable—beautiful, like great paintings, to be admired but not imitated.
That is not true. And it is a dangerous untruth, because it allows the reader to marvel without being moved. To admire without being challenged. To say, 'What a remarkable man,' and then go back to the ordinary comfortable life, unchanged.
I was not remarkable. I was frightened. I was lonely. I was in pain for nineteen months. I wept. I doubted. I wondered whether God had forgotten Burma—whether He had forgotten me. There was nothing heroic about the feelings I felt in that prison. The only thing that was not ordinary was the object of my faith: the Lord Jesus Christ, who had never abandoned anyone He had ever called, and who was not going to start with me.
If you are in a prison today—not necessarily one with iron chains, but a prison of circumstances, of illness, of disappointment, of a calling that seems to have gone silent—then I want to speak to you directly. Jesus has not forgotten you. The same God who heard my prayers in Ava and sent Ann Judson as a ministering angel and preserved a New Testament in a lumpy pillow and stopped the Pakan Woon's hand and broke the fever that was killing my wife—that God is your God too. He has not changed. He is not less attentive. He is not less faithful. (Lamentations 3:22-23 KJV) "It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness."
Every morning. New. In the death prison of Ava, there were mornings that did not feel like mercy. But the mercy was there anyway, whether I felt it or not. And so it is for every child of God in every prison of every kind, in every generation, until the day Jesus returns and makes all things new.
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In Chapter Four, we will follow what happened after the prison doors opened. Because the cruelest blow of all was not inside the walls of the death prison. It was waiting for me outside them. Ann—the guardian angel, the woman who had held the whole mission together with her bare hands—was moving toward a death that would shake me to my foundations and send me into a darkness more profound than any prison cell. And in that darkness, God would do something in me that the prison alone could never have accomplished.
The lion's den was behind me. The valley of the shadow lay ahead. But Jesus Christ—the same yesterday, today, and forever—would walk with me through both.