Mike Routt

Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) stepped onto Burmese soil not with applause but with anguish. For seven long years, he preached without a single convert, digging into the language like a miner seeking gold beneath stone. He buried his first child in foreign soil, watched his beloved wife Ann waste away from disease, and endured nearly two years of brutal imprisonment—chained, starved, and suspended by his feet in a filthy Burmese death camp. Yet even in the darkness of the dungeon, he whispered prayers in Burmese and hid scraps of translated Scripture under his thin mat, knowing that someday, someone would read them. When Judson died in 1850, after nearly four decades of toil, there were over 7,000 baptized Burmese believers, more than 60 churches, and a fully translated Bible in their native tongue. His body was committed to the sea, but his legacy lives on in the hearts of a people who once knew nothing of Christ. What Judson sowed in sorrow, heaven reaped in joy. He once wrote, “If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings.” Such words were not poetry—they were scars made into praise.