CHAPTER six
CHAPTER six
The Doctrine That Held Everything: Faith, the Body Breaking Down, and the Journey Home
A man's theology is not truly tested until his circumstances give it something real to carry. Any theology will do when the sun is shining and the work is bearing fruit and the people you love are alive and well. But when the body begins to fail, when the losses accumulate past what seems survivable, when the work is not finished and the years are running out — that is when you discover whether what you believe is simply a set of ideas you have arranged to your satisfaction, or whether it is a foundation that will hold the full weight of a human life pressed down upon it.
From 1839 onward, my body began to make its limitations known in ways I could no longer ignore. The nineteen months of chains had done damage that never fully healed. The tropical diseases that had swept through Burma had taken their toll on a constitution that had been strong in youth but had been tested almost beyond recovery. Consumption — what we now know as tuberculosis — had claimed so many of my colleagues, and the same shadow that had fallen on them was beginning to fall on me.
I want to tell you about these final chapters not as a story of decline — though there was decline — but as a story of what a man discovers about his God when everything external is being stripped away. The harvest years had shown me what Jesus could do through a faithful servant. These years would show me what Jesus was to a faithful servant when the serving was nearly done. And what I found was this: He was enough. He was more than enough. He was everything.
(2 Corinthians 4:16-17 KJV) "For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all." The outward man perishing and the inward man renewed — I knew that sequence in theory. I was about to know it in practice.
The Body Begins to Speak: 1839 and the Declining Years
The doctors of that era had only one real prescription for consumption: sea air. Fresh, clean ocean air, they believed, could halt the progress of the disease in ways that nothing else available could. And so from 1839 onward, a pattern developed in my life that was both humbling and frustrating in equal measure — a pattern of sea voyages undertaken not for mission but for survival, brief recoveries, returns to work, further deterioration, and further voyages.
I sailed for Calcutta in 1839. At that time Calcutta was regarded as one of the finest cities in the British Empire — a city of genuine grandeur and considerable Christian witness, home to the Serampore mission that William Carey had built. I visited Serampore with feelings that I find difficult to describe. Carey had died in 1834, five years before my visit. But his work remained — the translation of the Scriptures into dozens of Indian languages, the schools, the printing press, the churches. Standing in Serampore was standing in the long shadow of a man who had done what I had tried to do: spent everything for the gospel in a land that was not his own, and left behind a legacy that would outlast every difficulty of his lifetime.
I thought of Carey often in those declining years. We had never met in person — by the time I arrived in India he was already at Serampore, and our paths did not cross directly. But we had corresponded. He had read my sermon on baptism and published it. He had welcomed me and Ann into the fellowship of Baptist missionaries when everyone else had turned us away. In the economy of the Kingdom, he was one of my fathers in the faith, and I felt that kinship standing in the place he had built.
The voyage helped, temporarily. I returned to Burma with enough restored health to work. And work I did — the translation revision was still demanding attention, the dictionary was advancing, the churches needed correspondence and care and the occasional visit from the old man who had planted them. I was not ready to stop. Not remotely ready. (Ecclesiastes 9:10 KJV) "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest." I intended to work until I could not work any longer. That was my plan. My plan and God's plan would eventually converge at a point I could not yet see.
Sarah's Illness: The Pattern Repeats
In 1841, Sarah became desperately ill. The same Burma that had taken Ann, the same tropical fevers and the same relentless climate, was now pressing its claims against the second woman who had given herself to this mission. Sarah sailed for Calcutta seeking the relief that the sea voyage had given me. The results were mixed — she improved enough to be persuaded, upon arrival at Mauritius on the return journey, that she was sufficiently recovered to send me back to Burma while she continued to convalesce.
I prepared to return. But it was not to be. Sarah relapsed badly. Her improvement had been temporary, the kind of false dawn that consumption specializes in — a brief lifting of the clouds that makes everyone believe the crisis has passed, followed by a return of the darkness that is worse than before. When I reached Mauritius, I found her failing rapidly. We continued together toward the island of St. Helena — that remote volcanic outcrop in the South Atlantic, famous then as the place of Napoleon's final exile — and it was there, on St. Helena, that Sarah died.
I buried her there. A third wife — a third grave. Not in Burma this time, not under a hopea tree in Amherst, but on a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, far from everything she had given her life to reach. The graves of the people I loved were scattered across the face of the earth. That, too, is a kind of testimony: that the gospel is worth dying for anywhere, not just in the easy places, not just in the places where the story makes dramatic sense. Sarah died on St. Helena and was buried there, and her grave on that remote island says as plainly as any grave can say: this woman gave everything.
I continued on to America with three of our children. Three younger ones were left in the care of the missionaries at Moulmein — an arrangement that broke my heart but reflected the simple, brutal mathematics of a situation in which I could not care for all six surviving children by myself while also trying to recover my own health. The mission family, imperfect and overstretched as it always was, stepped in to do what I could not.
(Psalm 68:5 KJV) "A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation." God does not abandon children whose parents have given themselves to His service. He did not abandon my children. He does not abandon any child left in His care by parents who loved and served Him. That is not a sentiment. It is a promise.
America: A World That Had Moved On Without Me
I arrived in America in 1845. I had left in 1812. Thirty-three years. A man goes away for thirty-three years and returns to find that everything familiar has shifted. The country was larger, louder, faster, and considerably more prosperous than the one I had left as a young missionary with nothing but a calling and a new wife and a determination to reach the nations.
I was not ready for what America had done with my name. I had been gone for thirty-three years, living in obscurity by the world's standards — chained in a Burmese prison, sitting in a jungle hut beside a self-dug grave, bent over a translation manuscript in the predawn hours before the heat made concentration impossible. I had not thought of myself as a public figure. I had thought of myself as a servant doing a job.
But America had heard stories. Ann's journals and letters had been published and widely read. Reports of the imprisonment had circulated through Baptist churches across the country. The remarkable growth of the Burmese and Karen churches had become a staple of missionary prayer meetings from Boston to Georgia. By the time I arrived, I was — to my complete bewilderment and considerable distress — famous.
I shrank from it absolutely. Fame was not something I had ever wanted, and the discovery that I had acquired it during my absence felt less like a compliment and more like a misunderstanding. The man they were celebrating was a figure in stories — heroic, stalwart, larger than life. The man who had actually lived those stories was simply a flawed, tired, grief-worn missionary who had tried to be faithful and had needed the grace of God at every step to prevent his own limitations from destroying everything he attempted.
My throat was so inflamed upon arrival that I could not preach. I had to be assisted by a speaker who would convey my message like an interpreter — the man famous for his command of Burmese unable to speak English without pain. There is a particular kind of humility in that situation that I did not choose but that was, I think, exactly appropriate. God was not going to let me arrive in America and become a celebrity. He was going to make sure that whatever I communicated, it was not the greatness of Adoniram Judson.
I attended the meetings organized for me. I let others speak on my behalf when I could not speak myself. I answered questions about Burma when my voice permitted. And through all of it, I felt the persistent, quiet pull of the work waiting for me on the other side of the world. America was not my home anymore. Burma was my home. I wanted to go back.
Emily Chubbuck: The Third Great Surprise
But God, who is endlessly creative in the ways He meets the needs of His servants, had one more surprise for me in America. Her name was Emily Chubbuck.
Emily was a writer — not a missionary, not someone who had grown up dreaming of foreign fields and the kind of life Ann and Sarah had lived. She was a well-known secular author, successful by the standards of American literary culture in the 1840s, with a gift for storytelling that had earned her a real readership and a measure of literary reputation. She was also, beneath the literary success and the social ease, a serious and committed Christian whose faith was not decorative.
We were introduced through mutual acquaintances. She had been asked to write a memoir of Ann Judson — a project that brought her into contact with the Judson story and, through the story, into contact with me. What happened between us surprised everyone who knew us both, and perhaps surprised us most of all.
I fell in love with her. Not slowly, not reluctantly, not with the careful caution of a man who had been twice widowed and knew exactly what love could cost. With something closer to wonder. Here was a woman whose mind I admired immediately, whose faith impressed me deeply, and whose presence — vivid, warm, and entirely her own — made me aware that I was not, in fact, as finished with the living of life as I had sometimes believed.
The engagement caused something of a stir in Baptist circles. Emily Chubbuck was known as a writer of popular fiction — not the usual profile for a missionary wife. Some people questioned the match. Some questioned whether she was prepared for what she was stepping into. The woman who was soon to become Emily Judson addressed those questions in her own way, which was with a clear-eyed directness that reminded me, more than once, of Ann.
We married in 1846. She was twenty-eight years old. I was fifty-seven. I had two years left in Burma. She did not know that. Neither did I.
(Proverbs 19:14 KJV) "House and riches are the inheritance of fathers: and a prudent wife is from the LORD." Three times the Lord had given me a prudent wife. Three times He had known what I needed before I knew it myself. Three times His provision had exceeded my expectation. I do not take that for granted. I did not take it for granted then.
Emily: A Different Kind of Partnership
Emily and I returned to Burma together in 1846, settling in Rangoon rather than Moulmein because the work force at Moulmein was adequate and Rangoon still needed strengthening. Emily proved an excellent partner — not in the same ways Ann and Sarah had been, but in ways that were entirely her own and entirely suited to the particular needs of that final season.
Her writing gift was immediately put to use. Emily documented the Burma mission with a vividness and literary quality that none of us had managed before. She wrote letters home that were read by thousands, accounts of the Burmese church that stirred prayer and giving, descriptions of the people and the land that made distant Christians feel connected to a mission they would never personally visit. She was also working on the memoir of Ann that had brought us together — a project she continued and completed after my death, giving Ann's story the careful, literary treatment it deserved.
She also faced the hardships of Burma with a courage that her literary reputation had not particularly prepared her for. Rangoon in the late 1840s was not a comfortable posting. The vice-governor of the region was, in my description to the mission board, 'the most ferocious, bloodthirsty monster I have ever known in Burma.' His house and courtyard, I wrote, 'resound day and night with the screams of people under torture. Even foreigners are not beyond his grasp.' Emily lived with that reality. She kept working. She kept writing. She kept loving the Burmese people with the same committed, open-hearted affection she had brought to everything else.
They had a child together — a son, born in Burma during those final years. The child's birth was complicated, and the health of both mother and child was a source of serious concern. Emily, like Ann before her and Sarah before her, was pouring her physical resources into a country that took everything and gave nothing back in worldly terms. The same Burma that had claimed Ann and Sarah was pressing its claims on Emily. She would outlive me — but not by many years. Emily Judson died of tuberculosis in 1854, four years after my death. She was thirty-six years old.
Three wives. Three remarkable women. Three women who gave everything. The graves of the Burma mission are spread across the face of the earth — Amherst, St. Helena, Hamilton, New York. Each one a testimony. Each one a corn of wheat that fell into the ground.
The Doctrine of the Gospel: What I Believed and Why It Mattered
I want to use this chapter to speak plainly about what I believed — the theology that drove everything, the doctrine that sustained me through the prison and the grief and the declining years and that I expect to sustain me through whatever lies ahead. I do this not because I think doctrine is the point of a biography, but because I think a biography that separates a man's life from his beliefs is not telling the whole truth. Everything I did was rooted in what I believed. You cannot understand the one without the other.
The center of everything was the gospel. Not a social program. Not cultural uplift. Not even education, though education was a tool I valued. The gospel: the announcement that God, who created human beings in His image for fellowship with Himself, had watched those human beings rebel against Him, turn away from Him, choose their own way over His, and in doing so had brought upon themselves a judgment they could not escape and a separation from God they could not bridge. The announcement that God, in His extraordinary mercy and love, had sent His own Son — Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man — into the world to live the life human beings should have lived and to die the death human beings deserved to die. The announcement that through faith in Jesus Christ — not through moral effort, not through religious observance, not through cultural compliance, but through faith, freely given and freely received — any human being could be forgiven, reconciled to God, and given the gift of eternal life.
(John 3:16 KJV) "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." That verse is not a Sunday school memory verse to me. It is the reason I went to Burma. It is the reason Ann died under a hopea tree. It is the reason Maria and Roger are in graves in Rangoon and Amherst. It is the reason I wore chains for nineteen months and sat by a grave in a tiger jungle and gave away everything I had earned. Whosoever believeth. The Burmese are included in whosoever. The Karen are included in whosoever. Every people, every tongue, every nation — included. The gospel is not for some. It is for all.
The Sovereignty of God: The Foundation That Did Not Move
The doctrine that sustained me through everything — through the years of no fruit, through the prison, through the graves, through the declining years — was the sovereignty of God. Not merely the sovereignty of God in a vague, general sense, but the specific, particular, Reformed conviction that God is absolutely sovereign in salvation: that He chose His people before the foundation of the world, that He calls them effectually by His Spirit, that He keeps them through every trial, and that His purposes cannot be frustrated by any power in heaven or earth.
Some people, when they hear this doctrine stated plainly, object that it removes the urgency from missions. Why preach if God has already decided who will be saved? I faced this objection in Burma and I will answer it the way I answered it there.
The sovereignty of God is not the enemy of missionary urgency. It is the only solid foundation for missionary confidence. If salvation depended on the persuasiveness of my preaching, I would have stopped after year three in Burma with no converts and no prospects. If the success of the mission rested on my ability to overcome the resistance of the human will, I would have surrendered at the first encounter with a Buddhist priest who out-argued me with centuries of tradition on his side.
But if God has chosen a people for Himself from among the Burmese — and I believed He had, I believe it still — then my job was simply to get the gospel to them. Not to save them. Salvation is God's work. My job was to be faithful, to be present, to preach accurately and live honestly and trust the Holy Spirit to do what the Holy Spirit alone can do: open blind eyes, soften hard hearts, draw unwilling sinners to a Savior they did not know they needed. (John 6:44 KJV) "No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him." No man can come — except the Father draw him. That is both a limitation and a promise. The limitation: human beings cannot save themselves by their own choice and effort. The promise: when the Father draws, they come. When the Father draws, they always come.
The sovereignty of God was not abstract theology in Burma. It was the thing that got me out of bed on the mornings when everything in me wanted to stay down. Because if God was sovereign, then the six years of silence were not wasted — they were preparation. The imprisonment was not a mistake — it was a school. The graves were not defeat — they were seeds. Everything was under His control, moving according to His purposes, tending toward the outcome He had determined before the world was made. My job was not to understand it all. My job was to trust it and to work.
Believer's Baptism and the Shape of the Church
The change in my views on baptism during the 1812 voyage — a change that cost us everything in terms of institutional support and forced us to start over with nothing — proved to be one of the most practically important theological decisions of my missionary life. And I want to explain why, because I think it goes beyond the question of mode and recipient and touches something essential about the nature of the church itself.
When I was a Congregationalist, infant baptism meant that the church's membership was theoretically coextensive with the community — everyone born into a Christian family was baptized, and the visible church and the surrounding society were largely the same thing. That model works tolerably well in a nominally Christian society. It is a catastrophe in Burma.
In Burma, baptizing infants would have meant creating a class of people who were technically members of the church by birth but who had never personally, consciously, at personal cost decided to follow Jesus Christ. In a country where following Jesus could cost you your life, that was not merely theologically imprecise — it was dangerous. It would have created a church full of people who had not counted the cost, who had not made the deliberate, eyes-open decision to follow Jesus in full knowledge of what that meant in the Burmese context.
Believer's baptism, by contrast, ensured that every person who entered the Burmese church entered it through the door of personal, conscious, costly faith. Every baptism in Burma was a declaration — not a routine religious ceremony administered to an infant who could not consent, but a public, irreversible statement by an adult who understood exactly what they were doing and what it might cost them. That gave the Burmese church a quality of conviction and commitment that infant baptism simply could not have produced.
I was also careful — sometimes controversially so — about who I admitted to baptism. I kept back those who were not ready. I maintained church discipline when members fell into sin, restoring them when they showed genuine repentance. The records of the Burma mission show that, across the years of my ministry, we rarely failed to receive into membership true converts and rarely admitted those who were not genuinely believing. That standard of care is what gave the Burmese church its character — not large and nominal, but smaller and genuine. (Matthew 7:14 KJV) "Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." The narrow way produces genuine disciples. Genuine disciples build genuine churches. Genuine churches survive persecution. The Burmese church survived everything that came at it. The narrow gate had something to do with that.
Preaching: The Primary Means
My method of mission was straightforward and I make no apology for its simplicity: preach the gospel, gather the converts, plant the church, train the leaders, send them out. Repeat. That is it. That is the whole strategy.
I did not look to wonders and signs to validate the message. I did not build elaborate social institutions as the primary means of attracting converts — though schools and medical work had their place as expressions of genuine love for the people we served. The primary means, the irreducible core, was the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ in words that the hearers could understand, followed by the call to repentance and faith.
A missionary who knew me well wrote that he feared no one at home would be able to do justice to my pulpit eloquence. Another visitor described the effect of my preaching on a Burmese audience: they were totally absorbed, gripped from first to last, unable to look away. I do not know if that description is accurate — I was not watching myself from the outside. What I know is that when I stood to preach in Burma, I was not performing. I was declaring. Declaring the truth about God, about human sinfulness, about the cross of Jesus Christ, about the resurrection, about the judgment to come. And when those things are declared with conviction by a man who actually believes them, the Holy Spirit uses the declaring. Not always. Not in the ways or at the times we predict. But He uses it.
(Romans 10:14-15 KJV) "How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?" The chain is unbreakable. Sending produces preaching. Preaching produces hearing. Hearing produces believing. Believing produces calling. And calling — the call on the name of Jesus Christ for salvation — produces a Christian. That chain ran from the prayer meetings of Andover Seminary to the zayats of Rangoon to the Karen villages in the hills to the two million believers in Myanmar today. One unbroken chain.
The Post-Millennial Hope: Confident About the Future
I believed that the gospel would ultimately triumph — not eventually in some vague, distant eschatological future, but in actual human history, through the actual mission of the actual church, until every nation on earth had been discipled and the kingdoms of this world had become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.
When I was asked in Boston in 1846 whether the prospects were bright for the conversion of the nations, my answer was immediate and unhedged: 'As bright as the promises of God.'
That answer came from a man who had spent thirty-four years watching the promises of God be fulfilled in Burma. Not quickly. Not cheaply. Not without cost that makes the mind reel when you total it. But fulfilled. The seed that went into the ground produced a harvest. The Word that went out did not return void. The river that started at ankle depth rose to swimming depth. The promises were kept.
I looked at Burma and I saw what God had done in one generation, in one country, starting from zero — from a city with no known Christians to a movement with thousands of believers and dozens of churches — and I extrapolated. If God did this in Burma in my lifetime, what would He do in all the nations over all the generations? Speaking in America in 1846, I said: 'The world is yet in its infancy; the gracious designs of God are yet hardly developed. Glorious things are spoken of Zion, the city of our God. She is yet to triumph, and become the joy and glory of the whole earth.'
The world in its infancy. The designs of God hardly developed. Glorious things yet to come. That is not the voice of a man who had seen the worst and concluded that the worst was winning. That is the voice of a man who had seen the worst and concluded that the worst was not strong enough to stop the purposes of God. (Isaiah 46:10 KJV) "Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure." His counsel stands. His pleasure will be done. Burma is the evidence. The whole history of the church is the evidence. The promises are as bright as the God who made them.
The Confession of Faith: Doctrine for the Burmese Church
In 1829, I wrote a Confession of Faith for the Burmese church. It was designed not as an academic exercise but as a practical tool — a statement of what the Burmese believers actually believed, in language they could understand and own, that could serve as a foundation for church life and as a test for those seeking baptism.
The Confession stated the doctrines of grace explicitly. It declared, in terms the Burmese church would carry forward, that 'God sends the Holy Spirit to enable those to become disciples who were chosen before the world was.' Election. Effectual calling. The priority of divine grace in salvation. These were not peripheral points that I added out of theological preference. They were the center of everything, the explanation of why the Burmese church existed at all — not because Adoniram Judson was persuasive, but because God had chosen a people for Himself and sent His Spirit to bring them in.
I also wrote rules for my own personal conduct during the ministry years — eight governing principles that I tried to live by from 1819 to 1826, and five additional habits that I added to them. Let me share them here, not as a model of perfection — I failed at them more than I succeeded — but as an honest picture of what I was attempting:
The eight: to be diligent in secret prayer every morning and evening; to never spend a moment in mere idleness; to restrain natural appetites within the bounds of temperance and purity; to suppress every emotion of anger and ill will; to undertake nothing from motives of ambition or love of fame; to never do that which at the moment appeared displeasing to God; to seek opportunities of making some sacrifice for the good of others; and to endeavor to rejoice in every loss and suffering incurred for Christ's sake and the gospel's.
The five additional habits: to rise with the sun; to read a certain portion of Burmese every day; to have the Scriptures and some devotional book in constant reading; to read no book in English that did not have a devotional tendency; and to suppress every unclean thought and look.
These rules reflect a man who understood that the inner life produces the outer life — that the quality of a missionary's public work is inseparable from the quality of his private walk with God. You cannot pour out what you have not received. You cannot sustain in others a faith you are not cultivating in yourself. The translation, the preaching, the baptizing, the church-planting — all of it flows from the secret place, from the morning prayers, from the Scripture reading in the predawn hours before anyone else was awake. (Matthew 6:6 KJV) "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." The open reward comes from the secret place. That is not a formula. It is a principle, and it held in Burma as it has held everywhere and always.
The Means of Grace: How the Church is Built
I believed in the ordinary means of grace — not in spectacular signs and wonders, not in dreams and visions as the primary tools of mission, but in the steady, patient, Spirit-empowered use of the Word preached, the sacraments administered, and the fellowship of believers maintained. These are the tools God has appointed for building His church, and I used them with everything I had.
Prayer was first among the means. Not perfunctory prayer, not the kind of prayer that is really just talking to yourself in a religious voice, but the real thing — extended, earnest, specific intercession before a God who hears and who responds. The prayer meeting at Moulmein was not an optional addition to the mission program. It was the engine room. Everything else was powered by what happened when the missionaries and the Burmese believers got on their knees together and asked God to do what none of them could do themselves.
The Lord's Supper was administered with care and reverence. The table was not open to all comers — it was for those who had been baptized as believers, who were walking in fellowship with Christ and with the church, and who came with a genuine understanding of what they were doing. I maintained that standard even when it meant keeping people back who wanted to participate but were not yet ready. (1 Corinthians 11:28 KJV) "But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup." Self-examination is not a ceremony. It is a discipline. A church that practices it honestly produces members who know what they believe and why. A church that abandons it produces members who have religious habits without genuine faith. Burma needed the former.
Church discipline was exercised consistently. When members fell into serious sin, they were excluded from the fellowship — not permanently, not as punishment, but as a call to repentance and a protection of the community's integrity. When they repented, they were received back with genuine joy. The goal was never to mark people as failures. The goal was always restoration — the prodigal brought back to the father, the wandering sheep returned to the fold. But restoration requires that there be a standard to be restored to, and maintaining that standard was part of what the church's leadership was responsible for.
The Dictionary: The Final Gift
In the years following the completion of the Bible translation, I threw myself into the dictionary project with the same concentrated energy I had given to everything else. A Burmese-English dictionary — comprehensive, accurate, organized with scholarly precision — was the last great gift I could give to the Burmese church and to the missionaries who would follow me.
The work was painstaking. A dictionary is not a creative work in the way that a translation is — it does not have the same moments of linguistic breakthrough or the same satisfaction of rendering a profound theological concept into a new language with accuracy and beauty. A dictionary is patient, methodical work: cataloguing, defining, organizing, revising, adding, cross-referencing. Day by day, column by column, the edifice goes up. You cannot see the whole of it while you are building any particular part of it. You simply have to trust that the parts will add up to something useful.
The dictionary was advanced far enough by the time of my death to be taken up and completed by those who came after me. It was published in 1852, two years after I died. Like the Bible translation before it, the dictionary was a tool designed to multiply impact across time — to equip people I would never meet to do work I would never see. That is the nature of all good missionary work. You plant for a harvest you may not live to reap. You build foundations that others will build upon. You give tools to the next generation and trust the God of the next generation to use them well.
(1 Corinthians 3:10 KJV) "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon." I laid foundations. I built tools. I trained leaders. The building that went on top of those foundations, the work done with those tools, the ministry of those leaders — that was not mine to control. It was mine to begin faithfully and trust to God to continue faithfully. He has continued faithfully. The evidence is two million believers in Myanmar.
Preparing to Return: The Pull of Burma
As 1845 stretched into 1846 and my time in America continued longer than I had intended, the pull of Burma grew stronger by the week. I had not come to America to stay. I had come to accompany Sarah in her illness, to recover some of my own health, to fulfill the unavoidable obligation of being present with my children who had come with me. But Burma was home. Burma was the work. Burma was where the river was still rising and the translation needed revising and the dictionary needed building and the churches needed — not me, specifically, but the kind of experienced, committed, devoted-for-life presence that I was still, God willing, capable of providing.
The return was complicated by Emily's pregnancy, by the ongoing fragility of my own health, by the practical difficulties of transporting a family back across the world to a mission field that had not become less demanding simply because I had been away for a year. But complicated things can still be the right things. Difficult obedience is still obedience.
I was fifty-seven years old. I was not well. I had three graves already behind me. I had a young wife and a new baby and children scattered between America and Burma. And I was going back, because Jesus had sent me to Burma and Burma was where Jesus had sent me and I did not know how to be anywhere else.
(Romans 1:14-15 KJV) "I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also." Debtor. That is the word. I was a debtor to Burma. Indebted by calling, by love, by the memories of everyone who had given their lives to plant the gospel there, by the faces of the Burmese believers who had counted the cost and paid it and were still standing. You cannot walk away from a debt like that simply because the creditor is far away and the currency being demanded is the last of your years.
I went back. We all go back to the thing God has called us to, if we are His. The pull is too strong. The love is too deep. The promise is too real. He who began the good work in Burma would complete it. He who called the foolish things of the world to confound the wise — a young man from Malden, Massachusetts, with too much intelligence and not enough sense — would use even the broken, diminished, grief-scarred version of that young man to serve His purposes until the very last day.
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Chapter Seven will bring us to the final years in Burma — the return to Rangoon under a brutal vice-governor, the last fierce push on the dictionary, the body's final resistance, and the journey that ended not on land but at sea, buried in the ocean that had carried me to Burma in the first place. It will also bring us face to face with the question that the whole of this story has been building toward: what does a life like this mean? What does it say to us — ordinary people in ordinary circumstances — about the God we serve and the call He places on every life that truly belongs to Him?
The answer is simpler and more demanding than we might wish. It does not require a prison or a grave or a jungle hut or a death march. It requires only this: the surrender of a life, fully given, held back in nothing, devoted to the God who gave His Son for us and who asks us — gently, persistently, with all the authority of the cross behind the asking — to give ourselves in return.
(Luke 9:23 KJV) "And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me." Daily. Not once, in a dramatic moment of crisis. Daily. The ordinary obedience of ordinary days, accumulated over a lifetime, becoming something extraordinary in the hands of an extraordinary God. That is the whole of the Christian life. That is the whole of the missionary calling. That is everything.