CHAPTER five
CHAPTER five
The Harvest Begins: Hundreds Baptized, the Bible Completed, and Love Found Again
There is a passage in the book of Ezekiel that I returned to many times during the long years of sowing without reaping, of planting without seeing growth, of pressing forward in the dark and trusting that what I could not see was nevertheless happening somewhere beneath the surface. The prophet is given a vision of a river flowing out from the temple of God, and a man with a measuring line walks into it — first ankle deep, then knee deep, then waist deep, then so deep that he cannot touch the bottom and must swim. (Ezekiel 47:5 KJV) "Afterward he measured a thousand; and it was a river that I could not pass over: for the waters were risen, waters to swim in, a river that could not be passed over."
That is what happened in Burma. Slowly at first — one convert, then three, then a handful, then a small congregation. Then the waters began to rise. And then, in the years following the war, following the prison, following the dark valley of grief — the river began to overflow its banks, and what had been a trickle became a flood, and what I had planted in tears I began to reap in astonishment and joy.
I want to tell you about those years. Not because they erased the suffering — nothing erases suffering, and I would not want it erased even if I could, because the suffering shaped me in ways I could not have been shaped any other way. But because the harvest years are the vindication of everything the sowing years cost, and a story that ends at the graves under the hopea tree is not the full story. The full story includes the rising river. The full story includes the fruit.
Taking Stock: What Had Been Built by 1828
By the time I emerged from the dark season of grief and returned fully to the work, the mission had a foothold that the early years could never have imagined. The small church in Rangoon that had scattered during the war had been reassembled by Tha-e, the faithful convert-turned-pastor who had never stopped preaching through the chaos. The mission base at Moulmein was established and growing. Fellow missionaries — the Wades, the Boardmans — were in place and laboring effectively.
But there was still so much unfinished. The Old Testament translation was not done. The dictionary was barely begun. The Karen people in the hills had only just been touched by the gospel. The great northern regions of Burma — cities like Prome, like Ava itself — had heard almost nothing. The river was rising, yes. But there were vast territories the waters had not yet reached.
I set my face toward the work with a clarity that the grief years, for all their darkness, had actually sharpened. When you have lost everything that can be taken from you, and you discover that Jesus remains — that He is not diminished by your loss, not silenced by your pain, not absent from your darkest hour — then the work you do for Him takes on a different quality. It is no longer fueled by ambition or the desire for results or even by the good and natural satisfaction of seeing souls saved. It is fueled by something simpler and more fundamental: gratitude. Pure, uncomplicated, everything-I-have-is-Yours gratitude to a God who stayed when everything else left.
(Psalm 126:5-6 KJV) "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." Doubtless. Not possibly, not perhaps, not if circumstances are favorable. Doubtless. That is a promise. I had held it through the dark years. Now I was about to watch it be fulfilled.
The Spirit of Inquiry Spreads Across Burma
Something remarkable began happening in 1830 and 1831 that I could not fully explain then and can only partially explain now. A spirit of inquiry — a hunger, a restlessness, a turning of people's attention toward spiritual questions they had not previously been asking — spread across Burma in a way that seemed to come from somewhere beyond human strategy or missionary effort.
I wrote about it to the mission board in America in February 1831, and the words I chose to describe it reveal how surprised and how slightly frightened I was by the scale of it: 'The most prominent feature in the mission at present is the surprising spirit of enquiry that is spreading everywhere, through the whole length and breadth of the land. I sometimes feel alarmed, like a person who sees a mighty engine beginning to move, over which he knows he has no control.'
A mighty engine beginning to move, over which I had no control. That is exactly what it was. And the right response to a mighty engine over which you have no control is not to try to grab the wheel — it is to get on board and go where it is going. I got on board.
Our house in Moulmein was frequently crowded with inquirers — Burmese men and women who had heard something, read something, been told something by a neighbor or a relative, and who wanted to know more. I had to leave many of these conversations to Moung En, one of the best of my Burmese assistants, because the press of inquirers was greater than I could personally handle while still keeping up with the translation work. That is a remarkable problem to have — too many people wanting to hear the gospel to be able to personally teach them all.
The numbers tell the story with a clarity that my words cannot match. In 1830, forty-seven people were baptized across the mission's various stations: twelve at Moulmein, seven at Rangoon, and twenty-eight at Tavoy where the Boardmans were working among the Karen people. Five of the forty-seven were Europeans. The rest were Burmese and Karen.
Then in 1832, the waters rose dramatically: two hundred and seventeen people were baptized as believers in a single year. I read that number back to myself sometimes and still feel the same thing I felt when I first counted it — a mixture of profound joy and profound humility. This was not my doing. I was a man with a translation manuscript and a Burmese grammar and a willingness to sit in a zayat and talk to anyone who came. The Holy Spirit of God was the one doing the converting. I was just trying to be in the right place when He moved. (1 Corinthians 3:6-7 KJV) "I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase."
The Karen Awakening: Ko Tha-Byu and the People Who Were Waiting
I must tell you about the Karen people, because their story is one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of Christian missions, and it was unfolding just at the edges of my own story during these years.
The Karen were a hill people — distinct from the Burmese in language, culture, and social position. The Burmese had tended to look down on them. They lived in the forested highlands, organized in villages, practicing their own traditions. They were, by any external measure, an unlikely candidate for rapid mass conversion to Christianity.
Except for one thing. Many Karen groups carried, in their oral traditions, a story about a lost book. The details varied from group to group, but the core was consistent: their ancestors had once possessed a sacred text — a book given to them by the Creator God, whom they called Y'wa — and this book had been lost or taken from them. With the loss of the book had come spiritual decline, confusion, and suffering. And the tradition said that one day, a man from a distant land would come and return the book to them.
I cannot tell you with certainty whether this tradition was exactly as it has been described, or how much it was shaped by later retellings that knew the outcome. What I can tell you is that when George Boardman and his wife Sarah arrived among the Karen with the Word of God, the reception was unlike anything we had experienced among the Burmese. People did not simply listen. They recognized. Something in them responded to the gospel with a resonance that went beyond intellectual assent to something that felt like remembering.
The key human figure in the Karen awakening was a man named Ko Tha-Byu — a remarkable, rough-edged, passionate man whose early life had included violence and banditry. He came to faith in Christ in 1828 under George Boardman's ministry, and what happened next was extraordinary. Ko Tha-Byu became a preacher to his own people with an effectiveness that no Western missionary could have matched. He spoke their language. He understood their fears and their hopes. He knew their traditions from the inside. And when he told them that the book had been found — that the Creator God had sent His Son, that the lost sacred text was real and was being translated into their own tongue — the Karen villages erupted in response.
By the mid-1830s, the Karen churches were among the fastest-growing Christian communities in all of Asia. Village after village was sending representatives to be taught, to be baptized, to return and teach their own families and neighbors. The work among the Karen eventually produced a church that would number in the hundreds of thousands — a church that has maintained its faith through generations of suffering and persecution that makes even my own story look mild by comparison.
I watched this with a joy that was almost too large to contain. (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 was giving Burma — Burmese and Karen alike — to His Son. The promise was being fulfilled before my eyes. The river was rising.
Upriver to Prome: The Gospel in Ancient Cities
The harvest around Moulmein and Tavoy was rich, but my eyes were always on the places the gospel had not yet reached. The great cities of Upper Burma — ancient places full of temples and priests and populations that had been Buddhist for a thousand years — these were not the easy ground. The Karen villages had something that prepared them for the gospel. The ancient Burmese cities had centuries of entrenched religious tradition standing between their people and Jesus Christ.
I went anyway. I traveled up the Irrawaddy to the ancient city of Prome, and there I labored for more than three months. I was aware, in a way that never quite left me, that I was the first person who had ever proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ in that city. The first herald. The first voice carrying that name into streets that had heard every other name but His for a thousand years.
I wrote about this awareness in my diary in words that still move me: 'Thousands have never heard of God, nor their ancestors before them... how the preacher has preached, and how the hearers have heard, the Day of Judgment will show.'
The Day of Judgment will show. I did not know in Prome what was planted. I did not know how many of those conversations, those tract distributions, those public debates with Buddhist monks, were sending roots down into soil that would not flower for years or decades. But the Day of Judgment will show. Everything that was done for Jesus in every city and village and jungle clearing — the Day will show it all, and nothing will be lost.
The work in Prome was eventually challenged by the old Buddhist power structure, defended by the local Burmese authorities, and I was obliged to withdraw. But not before the gospel had been proclaimed, not before some had heard, not before seeds had been scattered into soil that belonged to God. Withdrawal is not defeat. It is sometimes simply the movement from one part of the field to another. (Matthew 10:23 KJV) "But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another." Jesus did not say that persecution was the end. He said it was the signal to move to the next city.
The Numbers Keep Rising: A Review of the Harvest
Let me give you the full picture of what happened in those extraordinary harvest years, because the numbers are themselves a testimony to the faithfulness of God.
From 1819 to 1822 — the first years of genuine breakthrough — eighteen people were baptized. That was the entire fruit of the first years of the mission, the years that cost so much and produced so little by human measurement. Eighteen. I held each of those names like jewels.
During the war years — 1823 to 1825 — the count was essentially zero. War scatters churches. Imprisonment prevents baptisms. Those years produced different fruit: the manuscript hidden in the pillow, the faith tested and refined in the fire, the church scattered but not destroyed.
From 1826 to 1827, just four baptisms — the raw, vulnerable first fruits of the post-war reconstruction.
Then from 1828 onward, the river began to rise in earnest. Three hundred and fifty-three baptisms from 1828 to 1831. Two hundred and seventeen in the single year of 1832. And then, in 1836 — a number that still takes my breath away — one thousand one hundred and forty-four baptisms in a single year. One thousand, one hundred, and forty-four. Moulmein: fifty-four. Tavoy: ninety-one. Rangoon: two hundred and six. Ava: seven. And hundreds more at Karen stations throughout the hills.
That is Ezekiel's river. Ankle deep, then knee deep, then waist deep, then a river that could not be passed over. God kept His promise. The tears of the sowing years were not wasted. They were simply the necessary preparation for a harvest that no human strategy could have produced and no human strength could have sustained.
The Translation: The Work That Outlasted Everything
While all of this was happening — the growing churches, the Karen awakening, the journeys to unreached cities — I was also doing the work that I had committed to from the very first day I arrived in Burma: translating the complete Bible into Burmese.
I want to try to help you understand what this work actually was, because I think it is easy to read the phrase 'Bible translation' and not feel the weight of it. Bible translation is not typing. It is not even writing. It is an act of simultaneous scholarship in three directions at once: complete fluency and precision in the source languages — Hebrew and Greek — complete fluency and idiomatic mastery of the receptor language, and theological accuracy that does not sacrifice one for the other.
Burmese presented particular challenges. The script was circular and complex, without punctuation or word divisions — a flowing stream of characters that required the translator to impose structure that the original script did not provide. Burmese had concepts and idioms that had no direct equivalent in the biblical languages, and the biblical languages had concepts — grace, redemption, atonement, righteousness — that had no direct equivalent in Burmese. Every significant theological term required either a loan-word carefully explained or a new Burmese construction carefully built. The wrong choice, made thousands of times across the entire Bible, could produce a translation that was technically accurate and spiritually misleading.
I worked on the translation for twenty-two years from first to last, including six years of revision after the initial completion. I finished the New Testament in 1823 — the manuscript that Ann hid in the pillow, that Moung Ing rescued from the abandoned prison, that survived the war and the imprisonment and the march to Oung-Penla. That survival was its own testimony. God was not going to let His Word be destroyed.
The complete Bible was finished in October 1840. Twenty-seven years after I arrived in Burma. Twenty-two years of work on the translation itself. In the months leading up to the final completion, I wrote to the mission board: 'I consider it the work of a man's whole life to procure a really good translation of the New Testament in an untried language.' Note my own italics. A man's whole life. That is what it required. And I gave it.
A missionary who knew the work well, writing years later, described Judson's Burmese Bible as possessing 'such all-round qualities as to make it the best translation of all among languages of the East.' I do not record that as a boast. I record it as evidence that God equips what He calls. He called me to this translation. He equipped me for it through Brown University's language training, through Andover's theological formation, through twenty-seven years of living inside the Burmese language and culture. Nothing was wasted. Not one year of preparation, not one year of suffering, not one year of apparent delay. All of it was formation.
(2 Timothy 2:15 KJV) "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." Rightly dividing. That phrase captures the responsibility of Bible translation with precision. Every choice matters. Every word matters. The people of Burma deserved the Word of God in their own language, accurately rendered, faithfully translated, worthy of the God whose Word it is. That is what I attempted to give them. God's grace made up for every deficiency in my attempt.
The Grammar and the Dictionary: Tools for Those Who Would Follow
The translation was the great work. But it could not stand alone. If the Burmese Bible was going to be read, taught, and preached by Burmese pastors and Western missionaries for generations to come, those people would need tools. They would need to understand the language at a level that went beyond casual conversation. They would need the kind of systematic, scholarly resource that could equip a man to preach accurately from a text he was still learning to read.
I had completed the Burmese grammar in 1816 — a compact, thorough guide of seventy-six pages that became the standard resource for every missionary who came to Burma after me. It was the tool I wished I had possessed when I arrived, and so I made it for the people who would follow. Missionary work is always partly about laying foundations that others will build on. You never know which of your tools will still be in use a hundred years after you are gone.
The dictionary was a larger undertaking. A complete Burmese-English dictionary — the first of its kind, organized with the precision and comprehensiveness that the language deserved — was the work of years. I labored at it constantly, alongside the translation and the church work and everything else that demanded my attention. The first English-Burmese dictionary appeared in 1826. The revised and expanded edition that I worked on through the 1840s was completed enough by the time of my death to be taken up and finished by those who came after me. It was published in 1852, two years after I died.
These tools — the grammar, the dictionary, the translation — are my real legacy. Not the churches I planted, though I thank God for every one of them. Not the converts I baptized, though I hold every name like a treasure. The tools are the legacy because the tools multiplied my impact across time in ways my physical presence never could have. Every missionary who used my grammar to learn Burmese, every pastor who used my dictionary to prepare a sermon, every Burmese Christian who read the Bible in their own language and met Jesus in those pages — they are the harvest of the tools. And that harvest is still being gathered today.
Sarah Boardman: The Love I Did Not Expect
I must now tell you about Sarah Boardman, because her entrance into my life is a chapter of the story I did not see coming and could not have written for myself.
Sarah Hall had come to Burma with her husband George Boardman, one of the first reinforcement missionaries to join our work. She was a woman of unusual gifts — a linguist, a teacher, a writer, a person of deep and stable faith who had chosen the mission field with the same clear-eyed deliberateness that Ann had shown. When George Boardman died in 1831, worn out by the jungle expeditions among the Karen people that had produced such remarkable fruit, Sarah was left a widow in Burma with a young son and the unfinished work of a Karen mission that was just beginning to explode into harvest.
She did not go home. That is the first thing you need to understand about Sarah Boardman. She did not go home. She stayed. She continued the work among the Karen. She continued the girls' school. She continued sending out evangelists and receiving inquirers and baptizing believers and doing everything that George had done, and doing it as a widow with a child and no institutional safety net, in a foreign country whose language she had mastered and whose people she had come to genuinely love.
I watched this from a respectful distance for several years. I admired it. I was moved by it. And gradually — slowly, carefully, with all the caution of a man who had loved deeply and lost deeply and was not certain his heart was capable of surviving a second great loss — I began to recognize that what I felt for Sarah Boardman was more than admiration.
In 1834 — eight years after Ann's death, long enough that the grief had become a scar rather than an open wound, long enough that I could contemplate the future without feeling that contemplating it was a betrayal — I asked Sarah to marry me.
She said yes. And in saying yes, she was not saying yes to a comfortable life with a distinguished missionary. She was saying yes to a man whose health had been permanently damaged by nineteen months of chains. A man who would keep translating and keep preaching and keep traveling to unreached cities until his body gave out. A man who carried four graves in his memory and would carry them always. Sarah knew all of this. She said yes anyway.
(Proverbs 18:22 KJV) "Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the LORD." God's favor came to me twice in that form. First in Ann — the fierce, brilliant guardian angel who built the mission with her bare hands. Then in Sarah — the steady, faithful, gifted woman who walked into my second chapter with eyes open and love freely given.
Sarah: A Different Partnership, an Equal Grace
I want to be careful not to make Sarah simply a replacement for Ann, because she was not that and would not have wanted to be described that way. Ann and Sarah were different women with different gifts and different ways of being in the world, and my relationship with each of them was shaped by the different seasons of life they inhabited.
Ann had been the partner of the pioneering years — the years of first arrival, first language learning, first converts, first suffering. She had been there when everything was new and uncertain and the costs were not yet fully known. Her courage was the courage of a pioneer, stepping into darkness she could not see through because she trusted the God who had gone before her.
Sarah came into a mission that had been established, a church that had been planted, a translation that was well advanced. Her gifts were different from Ann's in some respects — she had a particular genius for the Karen work, for the education of women and girls, for the patient, sustained labor of building institutions that would outlast any individual's presence. She was also a gifted writer who helped maintain the connection between the Burma mission and the supporting churches in America, telling the story of what God was doing in ways that moved people to pray and give and send.
Together, Sarah and I had eight children. Six of them survived — a statistic that tells you something about the mortality rate of Burma in those years, and something about the particular kind of courage it takes to raise a family in a mission field. We also shared the care of the one surviving child from Sarah's marriage to George Boardman. In a country of four graves — in a life that had been defined for years by loss — there was suddenly, improbably, abundantly, new life. The house that had been empty was full.
(Job 42:12 KJV) "So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning." I thought of Job often in those years. Thought of him with a gratitude that I could not have felt before the losses, because you cannot fully appreciate restoration unless you have fully known desolation. The latter end was being blessed. Not in the same way as the beginning — Ann was not given back, Maria was not given back, the graves under the hopea tree were still there. But new blessings, genuine blessings, the blessings of a God who does not abandon His servants in their grief but walks with them through it and out the other side.
Sending Men Two by Two: The Method That Multiplied the Work
One of the most important strategic decisions of those harvest years was not one I made in a flash of inspiration. It was a practice I adopted early and maintained consistently: sending men out two by two into the villages and forests I could not personally reach.
I could not be everywhere. Burma is a vast country, and I was one man with limited mobility, limited health, and an enormous translation project that required my concentrated attention for long stretches at a time. The question was how to extend the reach of the mission beyond what I could personally do.
The answer was the same answer Jesus had given His disciples: go two by two. (Mark 6:7 KJV) "And he called unto him the twelve, and began to send them forth by two and two." I trained Burmese evangelists — men who had come to faith, been discipled, proven their character and their grasp of the gospel — and sent them out in pairs into the surrounding regions. They would go for weeks or months, return with reports of what they had found, receive further teaching and encouragement, and go out again.
This method proved extraordinarily effective for several reasons. First, Burmese evangelists could go places I could not — into village life, into family circles, into social situations that a foreign missionary was excluded from by culture and language barriers. Second, the two-by-two structure provided accountability and mutual support in situations where a lone evangelist might be vulnerable to discouragement or error. Third, it developed indigenous leadership at exactly the pace the mission needed — not importing Western models of church governance, but growing local leaders who understood their own people.
By the mid-1830s, there were dozens of Burmese and Karen men going out in this fashion, carrying the gospel into regions I had never visited and establishing small communities of believers that would eventually become churches. Some of those churches were in places whose names I never knew. The Day of Judgment will show what was planted in those nameless villages by those faithful Burmese evangelists whose names history has mostly not recorded. God has not forgotten their names.
The Schools: Planting Faith in the Next Generation
Alongside the preaching, the translation, and the evangelism, the mission was building schools. Sarah, Mrs. Wade, and the other missionary women were doing indispensable work in the education of Burmese and Karen girls — work that I supported wholeheartedly but that I could not personally lead. The education of women and girls is not peripheral to the mission of the church. It is central to it, because the formation of a Christian family depends on parents who can read the Bible, and in a culture where women's literacy was almost nonexistent, that meant building schools.
The schools also served the Burmese converts' children — the next generation, the children who were being born into Christian families because their parents had risked everything to follow Jesus. These children had grown up hearing the gospel from their earliest years. They had the advantage that I had never had — a childhood formation in the faith, a mother who prayed and a father who knew the Scriptures. The schools reinforced that formation and gave it a structure that could be built upon.
We also ran a small printing press to produce Burmese Christian literature — tracts, catechisms, portions of Scripture before the full translation was complete. The printing press was, in the nineteenth century, what digital media is today: the technology that allowed one message to reach thousands of people simultaneously. Every page that came off that press was a seed, and seeds go where the wind takes them. I could not follow each page to its destination. God could.
The Doctrine That Drove the Harvest
I want to say something about the theological convictions that drove this mission, because I think they mattered enormously and because I see, in the history of missions since my time, what happens when those convictions are softened or abandoned.
I believed, without qualification or apology, that every human being who dies outside of faith in Jesus Christ faces eternal separation from God. This was not a peripheral opinion of mine. It was the foundational conviction that made everything else make sense. If there is no hell — if all people eventually reach God regardless of whether they hear and respond to the gospel — then missions are a kind of cultural imperialism, an imposition of Western religious preferences on people who were perfectly fine without them. But if the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation for every human being, then carrying it to those who have not heard is the most urgent and most loving thing any Christian can do.
I preached the doctrines of grace — the sovereignty of God in salvation, the election of those who would be saved, the effectual call of the Holy Spirit, the particular redemption accomplished by Jesus Christ at Calvary. I believed that the Burmese believers who were baptized by the dozens and then the hundreds were not responding to my persuasion or Ann's charm or Sarah's schools. They were responding to the sovereign, irresistible work of the Holy Spirit of God in their hearts. I was the instrument. He was the cause.
This conviction did not make me passive. If anything, it made me more urgent. Because if God had chosen a people for Himself from among the Burmese — if there were men and women in those villages and cities who were, in the language of Acts, 'ordained to eternal life' — then my job was to get the gospel to them so the Holy Spirit could do His work. Their election was the guarantee of the harvest. My faithfulness was the channel through which the guarantee would be fulfilled. (Acts 13:48 KJV) "And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed." As many as were ordained — believed. Not might believe, not could believe if they tried hard enough. Believed. The sovereignty of God in salvation was not a reason for missionary passivity. It was the only solid foundation for missionary confidence.
A Letter That Shook America: The Call for Devoted-for-Life Missionaries
In January 1833, I wrote a letter to the mission secretary in America that caused a stir I did not entirely anticipate. Several short-term missionaries had been sent to Burma — men who came for a few years with a view, as I put it rather bluntly, of 'acquiring a stock of credit on which they may vegetate the rest of their days in the congenial climate of their native land.'
I was not kind about this practice. I was not trying to be unkind — I was trying to be honest. Short-term missionaries in Burma were, I argued, essentially useless to the actual work of the mission. They arrived without the language. They left before they could acquire it. They produced no translation work, established no ongoing relationships, built no churches. They consumed resources — time, money, housing, the attention of experienced missionaries who had to orient them and care for them — that could have been used for the actual work.
'They are all good for nothing,' I wrote, which was perhaps more direct than was diplomatically wise. 'The motto of every missionary — whether preacher, printer, or schoolmaster — ought to be Devoted for Life.'
Devoted for life. That was the standard I had set when I left Salem in 1812, and it was the standard I believed the work required. A missionary who arrives in a foreign country with a return ticket in his pocket is not truly surrendered to the work. He is visiting. And visitors, however well-intentioned, cannot plant churches that will last.
I added a story about a fellow missionary named Kincaid, who had been asked by a Burmese government official how long he intended to stay. His answer became one of my favorite quotations of any man I have ever known: 'Until all Burma worships the eternal God.' That is the spirit of devoted-for-life. Not a contract. Not a term of service. A commitment as long as the task requires, which is to say, a lifetime.
(Luke 9:62 KJV) "And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." I had put my hand to the plough in February 1812. I had no intention of looking back. Burma would worship the eternal God. I was devoted for life to that end.
The Harvest in Numbers: Looking Back From 1836
By 1836, the full accounting of what God had done through the Burma mission in the years since the first Burmese convert was baptized in 1819 was staggering by any comparison with what had gone before.
The church at Moulmein was strong and self-sustaining. The Karen churches were multiplying faster than we could count them. Rangoon had a growing congregation under faithful Burmese leadership. Stations had been established at Tavoy, at Amherst, and at outposts throughout Lower Burma. Indigenous pastors — men like Tha-e, men trained in the mission's schools, men sent out two by two — were leading congregations I had never personally visited.
In that single year of 1836, one thousand one hundred and forty-four baptisms. Across the life of the mission to that point, the total number of baptized believers numbered in the thousands. By the time of my death in 1850, that number would reach approximately seven thousand — seven thousand men and women who had publicly confessed faith in Jesus Christ in a country that had, when I arrived, not a single known Burmese believer.
Seven thousand. And the river was still rising. The churches those seven thousand belonged to would continue to grow after my death. The Bible I translated would continue to be read. The Karen church would multiply through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and beyond, eventually surviving a persecution that makes everything I endured look mild, and emerging from it with a faith that is among the most tested and most vital on the face of the earth.
Today — and I say this with tears of gratitude that I cannot adequately express — there are more than two million Christians in Myanmar. Every one of them, in some line of spiritual descent, traces their heritage to the men and women who risked their lives to follow Jesus in those first years of the Burma mission. To Ann, who died under a hopea tree. To Moung Nau, who was the first. To Tha-e, who never stopped preaching. To the unnamed Karen evangelists who carried the news from village to village in the hills. To Ko Dwah, who built a seat in a jungle hut for a grief-stricken missionary who had lost his mind a little. To all of them — the river keeps rising.
(Habakkuk 2:14 KJV) "For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea." Cover the sea. Not a trickle. Not a stream. As the waters cover the sea — completely, totally, without remainder. That is the promise. Burma is part of its fulfillment. And the fulfillment is not yet finished.
The Translation Completed: October 1840
On October 24, 1840 — exactly fourteen years to the day after Ann died — the last sheet of the revised Burmese Bible came off the press.
I do not know whether God intended that date or whether it is the kind of coincidence that only God can arrange. But I noticed it. How could I not notice it? On the day that Ann had died, the harvest had seemed impossibly far away, the darkness had been total, and the translation had been just a manuscript in a pillow waiting to be printed. On that same date fourteen years later, the complete Word of God existed in the Burmese language, printed and bound and ready to be placed in the hands of every Burmese believer who wanted to read it.
Ann had believed in this translation. She had hidden it in a pillow to save it from destruction. She had given her life in the country for which it was made. And on October 24, 1840, the translation was complete.
I held the finished Bible in my hands and thought of her. I thought of Roger under his marker in Rangoon. I thought of Maria beside her mother in Amherst. I thought of the death prison and the forced march and the jungle hut and the grave I had dug by its door. And then I thought of the God who had been present in every one of those places — not as a feeling, not as a comfort, but as a fact, unshakeable and permanent — and I thanked Him.
Not with eloquence. Just with a full heart and the only words that were adequate: Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.
(Psalm 30:5 KJV) "For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." The night had been very long. The morning had come. Joy had come. Not the joy of easy circumstances — Burma was never easy. But the joy of a completed work, a kept promise, a God who had never once abandoned the thing He had begun.
* * *
Chapter Six will take us into the final season — the declining years, the voyage to America, the unexpected meeting with a young writer named Emily Chubbuck, and the last great chapter of love and labor before the end. It will also take us into the depths of what I believed — the doctrine that sustained everything, the theology that sent me to Burma and kept me there and will keep men and women like me going to the ends of the earth until Jesus returns.
The river is still rising. The story is not over. The mission of God in the world did not end with my death any more than it ended with Ann's. Every generation receives the story from the one before it and carries it forward. You have received it now. What you do with it is between you and the God who sent His Son to die for every people and every tongue and every nation — including the people and tongue and nation that He has already placed in your path.
(Matthew 9:37-38 KJV) "Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest." The harvest is still plenteous. The labourers are still few. The prayer is still needed. Will you pray it?