Adoniram Judson

This year, I have been sharing about the different missionaries or saints or heroes of faith. I want to take you back to my own childhood and bedtime routine memories. Imagine being a little girl in the middle of the city of St. Louis. You are lying there in your converted sunroom to the bedroom that you share with your sister. Every night your mother reads stories of different people all over the world. Many of these stories are true.

Growing up, one of our favorite authors to read were Dave and Neta Jackson with the Trailblazer series. We would read stories of heroes across the world. Learn about how people found Jesus because a family chose to travel there. It paralleled so closely to the real life stories of the many missionaries my family shared dinner with in RVs and our home throughout my growing up years! One special story, to me, is the story of Adoniram Judson.

Adoniram chose, in the early 1800s, to go to a place called Burma and reach people for Jesus. He was warned not to go there because there were no Christians - and they weren’t open to Christianity. Adoniram had an ear for languages and already spoke several, so he set out to learn the language of the Burmese. He and his wife spent four years learning the culture and finding ways to follow customs without being perceived as part of the Buddhist religion (the primary religion of the time in Burma). In twelve years, he led eighteen people to Christ. He also translated the New Testament to the Burmese language.

Those numbers of eighteen people in twelve years sound small. However, sometimes legacy happens way after death. Today - Burma is known as the nation of Myanmar. It has the third largest Baptist (a denomination of Christianity that Adoniram came from) population in the world. Adoniram converted eighteen (and more by the time he passed away), but the results still show today.

This story is special to me because I had the privilege of traveling to Thailand to do some missions work with my best friend and a team. While there, we were invited on a day of exploring the Golden triangle. This is an area where Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand are all next to each other, connected by the Mekong River. We travelled to each place.

As I traveled to each of these places, I saw the same thing. A history steeped in long traditions of Buddha - not Christ. I learned the sacrifices a person made when they gave up their Buddhist traditions to love Jesus. Stood in places centuries old where Buddha had been worshipped. It’s incredible to understand the sacrifice each person who converted to Christianity made when they gave up their Burmese traditions. Adoniram truly did incredible work for Christ.