Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Man the Fire Made: Character, Habits, and the Inner Life of Adoniram Judson
I want to step back from the chronology of events — the arrivals and departures, the baptisms and the graves, the translations and the imprisonments — and tell you something about the person inside all of those events. Because biography can become a list of things that happened without ever answering the more important question: What kind of man was this? What was he like to know? What did the fire of thirty-seven years in Burma actually produce in the person who endured it?
My biographer Francis Wayland, who knew me well and observed me with both admiration and honest critical distance, gave the most careful external description of my character. He was not a man who flattered. He was a man who saw clearly and wrote accurately. And so I want to use his observations — and my own honest reflection — to give you a picture of the man that Burma made, for better and for worse.
Because it was for better and for worse. I was not a simple person. I had genuine strengths — some of them remarkable, some of them ordinary, most of them forged in suffering. I also had genuine weaknesses — some of them overcome over time, some of them never fully resolved, all of them honest. A biography that presents only the strengths is not a biography. It is a legend. And legends, however inspiring, do not help ordinary people become better disciples of Jesus Christ. Honest portraits do.
(2 Corinthians 12:9-10 KJV) "And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong." That is not modesty. It is theology. The power of Christ rests most visibly on the person whose own weakness is most visible. I was a weak man strengthened by a strong God, and the story of my life is more about His strength than mine.
The Physical Man: What People Saw
Let me begin with the physical, because character is lived in a body and the body shapes the experience of everything.
I was of medium height, slenderly built. My hair was chestnut, touched with grey as I advanced in age. Those who met me consistently noted two things: that I possessed an unusual physical stamina that did not match my slight frame, and that I was immaculately groomed and dressed regardless of circumstances. Both of those observations are accurate and both of them tell you something.
The stamina was not natural. It was cultivated. From my earliest years at Andover, when I had worried about my tendency toward consumption — the same disease that would eventually claim me — I had developed deliberate physical habits designed to maintain a constitution that was not particularly robust by nature. Regular walking. Daily cold-water sponging of the body. Controlled breathing exercises. Fasting at regular intervals, which paradoxically seemed to strengthen rather than weaken my physical resilience over time. I was not a naturally strong man. I was a disciplined man, and discipline over decades produced a durability that nature had not provided.
The neatness of dress was something different — it was an expression of character rather than physical discipline. I was, by temperament, a man who found disorder deeply uncomfortable. My natural inclination toward precision and order — the same inclination that made me a meticulous translator — expressed itself in how I maintained my appearance and my living space. This made the prison years a particular kind of torment beyond the obvious physical suffering. The filth of the death prison — the accumulated dirt and human waste and vermin — was not merely unpleasant to me. It was a sustained assault on a fundamental aspect of who I was. I endured it because I had no choice. But I want to be honest that it cost something beyond what the chains alone cost.
When I returned to America in 1845, people who had imagined me as a weathered, rough-edged frontiersman of the spirit were surprised to find a slender, neatly dressed, quietly spoken man who was not at all what the heroic narrative had led them to expect. I was amused by this. The heroism, such as it was, had been mostly invisible — carried out in translation rooms and prison cells and jungle huts, not in the kind of dramatic public settings that produce the image of heroism.
The Intellectual Man: A Mind Like a Precision Instrument
My mind was, from the beginning, my most defining characteristic. I was not falsely modest about this — false modesty is its own form of dishonesty, and I had enough genuine things to be humble about without pretending to a mediocrity I did not possess. I was exceptionally intelligent. I knew it. The danger, which nearly destroyed me at college, was that exceptional intelligence can easily become exceptional pride, and exceptional pride can build a wall between a man and the God he needs.
Wayland wrote that I possessed, from the earliest days, 'an exceptional intellect' and that I was 'meticulous by nature, and admirably suited for the work of Bible translation.' Both observations are accurate. The meticulousness — the drive for precision, for getting the exact right word rather than an approximately correct one, for checking the source languages again and again to ensure that nothing had been missed or muddled — this was the quality that made the Burmese Bible what it became. A translation is only as good as the translator's willingness to be dissatisfied with the second-best option, and I was constitutionally incapable of accepting the second-best option when the first-best was still undiscovered.
This same quality manifested in everything I undertook. The Burmese grammar of 1816 was not a rough working draft. It was a finished, carefully organized scholarly tool. The dictionary was not a list of words with approximate definitions. It was a comprehensive, precise, cross-referenced reference work that stood the test of scholarly scrutiny for over a century. Even my letters — and I wrote thousands of letters over thirty-seven years — were composed with a care for language that went beyond mere communication into something closer to craft.
The meticulous mind also made me a demanding teacher. The Burmese pastors and evangelists I trained were held to high standards — standards of doctrinal accuracy, of textual fidelity in preaching, of personal conduct that matched the message they proclaimed. Some of them found me exacting. I was exacting. I believed that the people of Burma deserved the best teaching we could give them, and that mediocrity in the service of God — however well-intentioned — was a form of disrespect for both God and the people He had called us to serve.
(Colossians 3:23 KJV) "And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men." Heartily. With the whole heart, with the whole mind, with everything that can be brought to bear on the task. Not adequately. Not sufficiently. Heartily. That was the standard. It was demanding. But it was also the only standard that made sense when the task was translating the eternal Word of God into a language that had never contained it before.
The Will: The Most Remarkable of His Endowments
Wayland, in his biography, identified what he called my will as 'one of the rarest endowments' he had ever observed in a human being. He wrote that it was 'capable of controlling his physical nature, so that his body would do or suffer whatever it was commanded. It subjected the material to the spiritual in a degree rarely attained.'
I want to think carefully about this observation, because I think it is both accurate and potentially misleading, and the distinction matters.
It is accurate that I possessed an unusual degree of will — the capacity to decide something and then do it, to set a course and maintain it through obstacles that would divert most people, to endure physical suffering without allowing the suffering to redirect the mission. The six years of no converts did not stop the preaching. The nineteen months of chains did not stop the praying. The grief of Ann's death did not stop the translation. The declining health of the final years did not stop the dictionary. In every case, the will held when the feelings argued for stopping.
But here is what I want to be careful about: this will was not a natural virtue. It was not something I was born with in its fully developed form and that I simply applied to successive challenges. It was something that was formed — slowly, painfully, through exactly the kinds of experiences I have described in this book. Every time I chose faithfulness over comfort, the will became slightly stronger. Every time I held the course when the feelings said to abandon it, the capacity for sustained obedience deepened. The will that carried me through the prison was built in the six silent years before it. The will that carried me through the grief was built in the prison. Character is accumulated, not inherited.
(James 1:3-4 KJV) "Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing." The trying of faith works patience. Not immediately — works it, over time, through the sustained application of difficulty to the raw material of a human life. The patience that could endure six years of silence in Rangoon was the same patience that had been worked into me, day by day, choice by choice, through every smaller trial that preceded it. God does not give us the endurance we will need for the great trials. He builds it in us through the small ones.
The Social Man: A Surprising Warmth
Here is something that surprises people when they read about me carefully: I was not a dour, severe, joyless ascetic. The image of a man who fasted regularly and dug graves in jungle huts and wore chains for nineteen months does not obviously suggest warmth and social ease. But those who knew me well consistently described a person who took great pleasure in company, who could contribute on a wide range of subjects with genuine enthusiasm, and who had a particular gift for making people of low social station feel genuinely seen and valued.
Wayland noted that I was 'intensely spiritual and humbled himself to men of low estate, being able to communicate with the poorest people.' That is an important observation. The intellectual precision that made me an exacting teacher did not translate into social condescension. I genuinely liked people — not in an abstract, missionary-obligation way, but concretely, individually. I was curious about them. I wanted to know their stories, their concerns, their ways of understanding the world. That curiosity was part of what made me an effective linguist — you cannot master a language without genuinely wanting to understand the people who speak it — and it was also part of what made me, I believe, an effective evangelist.
The social ease was not uniform. In large public settings — the organized meetings in America in 1845, the formal gatherings of dignitaries and church officials — I was uncomfortable. Wayland noted that when I returned to America and discovered I was famous, I 'shrank absolutely from fame and craved solitude and quiet.' That is accurate. Public celebrity was a form of attention I did not know how to receive and did not want. It felt like a category error — the man being celebrated was a construction, a story, not the person I actually was.
But in small settings — around a table with a handful of trusted friends, in a zayat with a few curious Burmese inquirers, in the evening with fellow missionaries after the day's work was done — I was genuinely at ease. I could be funny. I could be playful. The intensity that drove the work did not follow me into every moment of every day. There was a version of me that Ann and Sarah and Emily knew, and that the Burmese converts knew, that the public biography tends to miss: a man who laughed, who enjoyed a good conversation, who found genuine pleasure in the small and ordinary graces of daily life.
The Domestic Man: A Husband Who Was Completely Devoted
A senior lady missionary who had observed me closely across many years — a woman well qualified to make assessments of this kind — said something that I find both moving and humbling. She said that she had 'seen something of married life, and I never saw a husband so entirely devoted to a wife as dear Judson.'
Entirely. That is the word she chose, and she meant it with the emphasis she placed on it.
I want to think about what that devotion actually looked like in practice, because devotion is a word that can mean very little without the concrete content that fills it.
With Ann, the devotion looked like this: pursuing her with a letter to her father that no reasonable man would have written, because the love and the calling were both so strong that reasonable calculation was simply not available to me. It looked like the shared decision to change our views on baptism together, even when the cost of that change was everything we had. It looked like — though this is a small thing set against the large ones — sitting up with her through the nights of illness on the voyage, managing the practicalities of mission life so that she had the time and the space for her own language study and her own writing and her own ministry to Burmese women. And it looked like the fact that her death undid me more completely than anything else in thirty-seven years of things that tried to undo me.
With Sarah, the devotion looked like recognizing and honoring a woman who had been widowed in Burma and had chosen to stay rather than retreat to safety. It looked like the eight years I waited — eight years of respecting her grief and her independence and her own calling — before I asked her to share my life. It looked like the sadness of watching her illness progress on the voyage to St. Helena, and the particular grief of burying a second wife on a remote island in the South Atlantic, knowing she had given everything and received so little of the quiet domestic contentment that a woman of her quality deserved.
With Emily, the devotion looked like genuine wonder. Here was a young woman of thirty, a well-known writer with a literary career ahead of her, choosing to follow a fifty-seven-year-old man with broken health and three dead wives back to a posting under a bloodthirsty vice-governor in a malarial city. That choice humbled me every day. I tried to honor it by being present to her, by being honest with her about the realities of what we were living in, by never pretending that the work we were doing was anything other than exactly what it was.
(Ephesians 5:25 KJV) "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it." That standard — the self-giving love of Christ for His church — is the standard against which all husbandly devotion is measured. I fell short of it in ways I am aware of and in ways I am not. No man lives up to that standard perfectly. But the direction of the devotion — the orientation of the heart toward self-giving rather than self-serving — that I can claim, and the three women who bore the Judson name would, I hope, confirm it.
The Pastoral Man: Tender with the Suffering
You might expect that a man of my intellectual intensity and demanding standards would be a cold pastor — efficient in doctrine, exacting in discipline, but lacking the warmth that makes pastoral care genuinely comforting to people in pain. That expectation would be wrong.
When the wife of Mr. Bennett — a fellow missionary specializing in the mission's printing work — was weeping alone in her room after her husband had sailed for America with their children, I sent her a note. Not a theological treatise. Not an exhortation to faith. A note. Let me share it with you, because I think it reveals something about the person behind the translator and the theologian and the prison survivor:
'Sovereign love appoints the measure and the number of our pains, and is pleased when we take pleasure in the trials he ordains. Infinite love, my dear sister, in the person of the Lord Jesus, is even now looking down upon you, and will smile if you offer Him your bleeding, breaking heart. All created excellence and all ardour of affection proceed from Him. He loves you far more than you love your children: and He loves them also when presented in the arms of faith.'
Read that again. 'Will smile if you offer Him your bleeding, breaking heart.' That is not cold theology. That is a man who understood grief from the inside — who had carried his own bleeding, breaking heart before the throne of God many times — and who knew that the God who receives such offerings does not receive them with indifference or with a lecture about proper theological responses to suffering. He receives them with love. He smiles. He is, in the person of Jesus Christ, the Man of Sorrows who is acquainted with grief — who knows from the inside what it costs to love and to lose, and who receives the grief of His people with the particular tenderness of One who has been there.
(Isaiah 53:3 KJV) "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not." Acquainted with grief. Not a distant observer of it. Acquainted — familiar, intimate, personally experienced. When I sat with grieving people in Burma, I was not simply fulfilling a pastoral function. I was pointing them to the One who had been in the same place they were in, who had wept at a grave, who had cried from the cross, who knew what it felt like to be abandoned and misunderstood and crushed. That is the pastoral gift that suffering uniquely provides: the ability to point people not just toward comfort but toward the Comforter.
The Disciplined Man: The Rules He Kept
I have already shared, in an earlier chapter, the rules I set for myself during the ministry years. But I want to return to them here and look at them more carefully, because they reveal the architecture of a disciplined inner life in ways that a simple chronological account cannot.
The eight rules I set for the period 1819 to 1826 — the decade of the first converts and the imprisonment — were not arbitrary. Each one addressed a specific vulnerability that I had identified in myself through experience and honest self-examination.
The first rule — diligence in secret prayer every morning and evening — addressed what I had learned about the relationship between the inner life and the outer work. Missionary work done without prayer is not missionary work. It is humanitarian activity with religious language. The power that opens hearts and changes lives is not the power of a persuasive argument or an impressive personality. It is the power of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not recruited by eloquence. He is invited by prayer. I needed to keep that invitation fresh every morning and every evening, because the work would quickly outrun the prayer if I allowed it to.
The second rule — never spending a moment in mere idleness — addressed the particular temptation of a man with a vast unfinished task and an ample supply of reasons to rest. There was always a reason to rest in Burma. The heat alone justified it. The accumulated physical toll of the prison years justified it. The grief justified it. But rest without purpose is not rest — it is the beginning of a slide toward the kind of lethargic passivity that mission work cannot survive. I needed to fill the hours intentionally, to always have the next task defined, to not allow the formlessness of unscheduled time to become an opportunity for the enemy's discouragement.
The fifth rule — undertaking nothing from motives of ambition or love of fame — addressed what I knew was a genuine temptation for a man of my abilities and background. I had been ambitious before my conversion. The ambition had been redirected by grace, but it had not been eliminated. The desire to be recognized, to be celebrated, to have my work acknowledged as significant — these were real and persistent temptations, and I needed the rule as a guard against them. When the opportunity to become Dr. Griffin's colleague in Boston arose, this rule was what I applied to it. When the honorary doctorate came from Brown, this rule was why I eventually rejected it. Not because these things were evil in themselves, but because the motives they appealed to were ones I needed to watch.
The seventh rule — seeking opportunities to make some sacrifice for the good of others, especially believers — addressed what I understood to be the fundamental logic of the Christian life: that love expresses itself in sacrifice, and that a Christian who is not regularly looking for opportunities to give up something for the benefit of someone else is a Christian whose love has grown cold. I tried to keep the sacrificial instinct alive by making it a deliberate practice rather than waiting for the impulse to arise naturally.
The eighth rule — endeavoring to rejoice in every loss and suffering incurred for Christ's sake — was the most demanding of all, and the one I failed at most consistently. Rejoicing in suffering is not the same as pretending suffering does not hurt. It is a decision — made in full awareness of the pain — to interpret the suffering through the lens of what it is producing rather than through the lens of what it is costing. (Romans 5:3-4 KJV) "And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope." Glory in tribulations. Not after them, not in retrospect, not when the outcome is visible — in them. That is the eighth rule lived out in the moment, and it is genuinely hard, and I did not always do it well.
The Prayerful Man: The Engine Room of Everything
Everything I have told you about my work in Burma — the translation, the church planting, the training of indigenous leaders, the journeys to unreached cities, the endurance of the prison and the grief — all of it was powered by prayer. Not my prayer alone. The prayers of thousands of believers in America and England who carried Burma before God in their weekly prayer meetings. But also, specifically and essentially, my own daily prayer.
I was not a naturally contemplative person. My temperament ran toward activity, toward the next task, toward forward motion. Sitting still in the presence of God did not come easily to me the way it seemed to come easily to some of the more naturally mystical souls I encountered in the course of my life. For me, prayer was a discipline before it was a delight — something I did because I knew it was necessary and because I had learned from experience what happened when I neglected it, not because it was my natural default mode.
But over thirty-seven years, the discipline deepened into something more than discipline. The morning prayer sessions — early, before the heat of the Burmese day made concentration difficult — became the anchor of the day. The evening prayers became the place where the day's events were processed and interpreted and handed back to God. The spontaneous prayers that arose throughout the work — in the middle of a translation passage that refused to resolve, at the bedside of a sick convert, walking along a Burmese road — these became as natural as breathing.
I kept a diary of spiritual observations and prayer commitments that ran to thousands of entries over the years. That diary was among the papers I had destroyed after Ann's death — a decision I later regretted, because those pages contained the most honest record of what God had done in my inner life, and their destruction was an act of the grief-driven self-abnegation that I have already described as excessive and unwise. What I can tell you from memory is that the diary was overwhelmingly a record of dependence — of needs brought before God, of confessions of failure and inadequacy, of pleadings for the conversion of specific Burmese men and women by name, of thanksgivings for answered prayer that came at unexpected moments and in unexpected forms.
(1 Thessalonians 5:17 KJV) "Pray without ceasing." Without ceasing. I did not achieve that in its absolute sense — no one does in this life, I think. But I understood what it pointed toward: a life in which the awareness of God's presence and the posture of conversation with Him were so constant that the formal prayer times were simply the most concentrated expressions of something that was always present. I aspired to that. I worked toward it. On the best days, I came close to it.
The Humble Man: How Fame and Honor Affected Him
When I returned to America in 1845, I was met with a level of public recognition that I found genuinely bewildering and somewhat distressing. I had been gone for thirty-three years. In my absence, my story had been told and retold until it had taken on the quality of legend. People had prayed for me by name for decades. Churches had organized their missionary giving around the Burma mission. Young people had gone to the field inspired by what they had read about Rangoon and the death prison and the hopea tree.
I understood, intellectually, why this was. The Burma mission had been one of the first great stories of American Protestant foreign missions. Ann's journals had given the mission a human face. The prison account had given it drama. The harvest years had given it triumph. From the outside, it was a compelling narrative arc, and compelling narrative arcs inspire people and build movements.
From the inside, it was thirty-seven years of ordinary faithfulness, one day at a time, in a climate that tried to kill you and a language that took years to master and a culture that took decades to begin to understand. The gap between the story people told about me and the experience of actually living it was enormous. And the celebrity that the story generated felt, to me, like a case of mistaken identity — as though people were celebrating a character in a book who happened to share my name, rather than the actual imperfect human being who had simply tried to be faithful to a call he was sure of even when everything else was uncertain.
The honorary doctorate from Brown University — I sent it back. The letters of congratulation from British officials for my work as translator in the peace negotiations — I destroyed them. The significant sum of money I had accumulated through years of careful saving and generous gifts from supporters — I gave it all to the mission. These were not gestures of false modesty. They were the application of my fifth rule: undertaking nothing from motives of ambition or love of fame. If I could not accept recognition without it feeding the pride that I knew was a constant danger in my character, then I would not accept it.
Wayland described this aspect of my character with admirable precision: I was 'intensely spiritual and humbled himself to men of low estate.' The intensity and the humility coexisted. The brilliant mind and the willingness to sit at the feet of Burmese teachers learning to pronounce words correctly coexisted. The man who had once been too proud to accept the authority of the gospel was the same man who spent thirty-seven years gladly accepting the authority of the God who had made him and called him and sustained him through everything.
(Micah 6:8 KJV) "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" Walk humbly. Not occasionally humble. Not humble when humility is easy. Walk — constantly, consistently, day by day — with the God who made you, in the awareness that the gap between who He is and who you are is so vast that humility is not a virtue to be cultivated but a simple acknowledgment of reality.
The Struggling Man: The Weaknesses He Carried
I have said that this would be an honest portrait, which means I must also tell you about the weaknesses. Not to diminish the story — the weaknesses do not diminish what God did through a weak vessel. But because I think the weaknesses are, in their own way, as instructive as the strengths.
The most significant weakness I have already described: the excessive introspection and self-mortification that followed Ann's death. The jungle hut. The grave I dug beside it. The giving away of everything I had earned. The rejection of honors. The withdrawal from fellowship. These were not the marks of a healthy soul processing grief in the way that grief should be processed. They were the marks of a man who had allowed grief to become a form of spiritual self-destruction, who had confused mortification of pride with mortification of the self, who had taken the legitimate impulse toward humility and pushed it past its proper limit into something that was, at its extreme, a form of despair dressed in religious clothing.
The theological error I fell into during that period — the pursuit of perfect sanctification attainable in this life — was connected to this same tendency. I was looking for an experience of God that would be so complete, so settled, so beyond the fluctuations of feeling and circumstance, that suffering could not touch it. That is not a sinful desire. It is a deeply human one, and in some forms it is a genuinely spiritual one. But in the form I was seeking it, it was a search for something that is not available in this life and that led me away from the simpler, harder, more available truth: that faith in the promises of God, maintained in the midst of suffering without the comfort of felt experience, is exactly what God is asking of us in the difficult seasons. Not perfect peace of feeling. The continuing choice of trust.
There was also a severity in my standards — for myself and for others — that was not always tempered with the kind of grace that the gospel announces. I could be exacting in ways that went beyond the healthy demand for excellence and into something that left little room for the inevitable imperfections of growing disciples. The discipline I brought to my own life was appropriate; the same level of discipline applied to new Burmese believers who were just finding their footing in a faith that had cost them everything was not always calibrated to where they actually were. Not all of them found me easy to follow. I was aware of this, and I worked at it, but I did not fully overcome it.
(Romans 15:1 KJV) "We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves." Bear the infirmities of the weak. Not demand that the weak perform at the level of the strong. Bear. Carry alongside. Make room for the slower pace, the imperfect understanding, the faith that is genuine but not yet deep. That is a grace I was still learning when I died.
The Legacy of Character: What the Fire Left
What does Burma's fire leave in a man? Let me try to give you the full accounting.
It leaves a man who has been thoroughly disabused of the idea that he is the hero of his own story. Thirty-seven years of being insufficient — of arriving at situations that required more than I had, and discovering that God provided what was lacking — had a cumulative effect that no single dramatic experience could have produced. I came out of it knowing, at a level below conscious thought, that whatever had been accomplished in Burma had been accomplished by God using a man who was often barely adequate to the task.
It leaves a man whose confidence is entirely in God and consequently immovable. Not confidence in outcomes — I had learned not to demand specific outcomes from God. Not confidence in my own abilities — the limitations of those were too well documented to pretend otherwise. Confidence in God. In His character, His promises, His purposes, His faithfulness. That confidence had been tested in every possible way, and it had held, and the holding had made it unassailable in a way that untested confidence can never be.
It leaves a man whose love for the people he served has become inseparable from his love for the God who sent him to them. The Burmese people were not, by the end, a mission field to me. They were people I loved. Moung Nau, the first convert — I loved him. Tha-e, the faithful pastor who had never stopped preaching — I loved him. Ko Dwah, who built a seat in a jungle hut for a man who had temporarily lost his mind — I loved him with a specific, personal, grateful love that had nothing to do with missionary categories and everything to do with the fact that he had been my brother in Christ through the worst season of my life.
And it leaves a man who faces his own death with something that is neither fearlessness nor indifference but something more honest and more profound: readiness. Readiness born not from certainty about what the next moment holds but from certainty about Who holds the next moment. (Isaiah 41:10 KJV) "Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness." Uphold. Not merely accompany. Uphold — actively sustaining, actively supporting, the weight of a human life and a human death borne in the right hand of the God who had made that life and who was now receiving it back.
What His Character Says to Us
I want to close this chapter with a word about what this portrait of character means for those who read it.
It would be easy — and it would be a mistake — to read the description of my character and conclude that what is being described is a type of person rare enough to be admired from a safe distance but not actually relevant to the ordinary Christian life. A man with an exceptional intellect, unusual physical stamina, iron will, and extraordinary capacity for suffering — surely this is a description of someone who was constitutionally equipped for the extreme demands of the Burma mission in ways that most people are simply not.
I want to challenge that reading directly. Because the character I have described was not born in me. It was built in me. The will that endured the prison was built through six years of preaching to near-empty zayats. The humility that rejected the Boston pulpit was built through the humiliation of being a language student again in my mid-twenties, sitting at the feet of Burmese teachers who were patiently correcting my pronunciation. The love for the Burmese people that was genuine and individual and deep was built through thirty-seven years of deliberate, sustained, costly attention to people I had initially known nothing about.
Character is built. It is built through the accumulation of small, unglamorous choices. Through the morning prayer held to even when nothing is felt. Through the translation passage worked at even when the right word will not come. Through the discipline maintained even when the circumstances argue for an exception. Through the grace extended to a struggling new believer even when the standards of excellence are calling for something more.
The life I lived was extreme. The character it produced was forged in extreme conditions. But the process by which it was produced — the daily choice of faithfulness, the sustained practice of discipline, the consistent return to God in prayer, the deliberate cultivation of love for specific people — that process is available to every Christian in every circumstance. Not in Burma. In your house. In your workplace. In your church. In the ordinary Tuesday of your ordinary life.
(Hebrews 12:1-2 KJV) "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God." The cloud of witnesses includes everyone who has run faithfully before us — Ann and Sarah and Emily, Moung Nau and Tha-e and Ko Dwah, the Karen evangelists whose names we do not know. They ran their race. They laid aside the weights. They looked to Jesus. And they finished.
You can finish yours.
* * *
Chapter Nine will take us into the missionary call itself — what it is, how it comes, how to know if you have received it, and what to do with it once you know. We will look at the stages that led me from a Massachusetts inn where a deist friend died, to a theological seminary where the vision took shape, to a ship sailing out of Salem harbor toward the unknown. And we will ask the question that the whole of this biography has been building toward: What does the life of Adoniram Judson say to you, specifically, about the call of Jesus Christ on your specific life?
Because every life is a Burma. Every person reading this has been sent somewhere, called to something, equipped by suffering and shaped by grace for a purpose that is irreducibly their own. The lion's den has a different address for each of us. But the God who walks into it with us is always the same. (Hebrews 13:8 KJV) "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever." Yesterday in Rangoon. Today wherever you are. Forever — that is the promise that outlasts every prison and every grave and every ocean that has ever claimed a body devoted to His service.