Before crossing the world for Christ, Adoniram Judson nearly lost his faith. A brilliant young man who graduated with honors in Rhode Island, he spent years in doubt, influenced by a skeptical classmate. Few imagine that the missionary remembered for decades of suffering began as a young man unsure of what he truly believed.
Born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1788, the son of a Congregational pastor, Judson grew up surrounded by faith but abandoned it for a time in college. A sermon on the need for missionaries in the East reached him and brought him back, and he decided to devote his life to peoples who had never heard the gospel.
In 1812, he married Ann Hasseltine and set out as a missionary to India. During the long sea voyage, while studying the subject of baptism, the couple changed their convictions and became Baptists, breaking with the agency that had sent them. They had to start over alone, with no guaranteed support.
They settled in Rangoon, Burma, in 1813. Judson devoted years to studying Burmese, a language no one from the West had yet systematized for the gospel. Only after six years of labor did he baptize the first Burmese convert, in 1819, a result that demanded extraordinary patience.
In 1824, during the war between the Burmese Empire and England, Judson was imprisoned as a suspected spy. He spent about seventeen months chained in prisons, including the dreaded Ava, under hunger, disease, and mistreatment, while Ann fought on the outside to keep him alive.
Shortly after his release, Ann died, and Judson sank into a deep grief that lasted about a year. He even spent forty days alone in a jungle hut, dug his own grave, and adopted severe austerities inspired by Catholic mystics, tormented by doubts about his own motives as a missionary.
Judson recovered, resumed his work, and in 1834 completed the translation of the entire Bible into Burmese, the fruit of more than twenty years of effort. He married twice more after being widowed again, and had thirteen children in all, of whom only seven survived childhood. Several of the surviving children were raised by relatives in the United States, far from their father, a personal cost that biographers point to as part of the price of his dedication to the mission.
He died in 1850, aboard a ship, and was buried at sea. He left behind a complete Bible in Burmese, a dictionary, and a church of thousands of believers. His life reminds us that faith can pass through doubt, imprisonment, and loss without ceasing to trust in God’s promises.
